The Dark Knight Rises

I thought so as well.

I thought Bane's voice made the villain, because the rest was rather ordinary.

I didn't like that they didn't address the Venom angle in ANY way. Even if you want to avoid to comicy inflation of the muscles and so forth, you could have still made it something along the lines of a "mega-PCP" type drug that radically increased stamina and drive and so forth.

Well if he was underwater he would have been well shielded from a shockwave. And the city was miles away by that point and so safe enough.

And *puts geek hat on* we don't know what the radiation fallout would have been. It was a fusion reactor and so presumably a fusion bomb which is less radioactive depending on how it is built. Although I vaguely recall someone calling it a neutron bomb which would have been VERY radioactive. In which case... BAT SHIELDING!

RADIATION REPELLENT

Venom was out of the story altogether.
The mask gave him some kind of pain numbing gas to dull the agony of his prison injuries, and mutilated surgeries, and the muscles were all his, augmented slightly by the lack of pain.
Kind of like Lisbeth Salander's evil brother, except his lack of pain was a mutation.

Or--knowing Nolan's fondness for the Bond movies--like the terrorist Renard from The World is Not Enough, who had a bullet in his brain that was slowly killing him but also turning off his ability to feel pain, so that he could push himself longer and harder than an ordinary man.

Edit:

...aaaaaaaand...

...it also occurs to me that Renard is BALD, in love with the REAL VILLAIN (a woman who seems to be on the hero's side) and acting out of affection for her, and plans to use a NUCLEAR REACTOR perverted into a weapon to destroy a city.

Hmmm. I think the Nolans' inspirations are showing.

But Bond 19 was awful!

"Remember the time Gotham City was plunged into anarchy? Petridge Farms remembers."

I finally saw it this weekend. I liked it, but a lot of the plot machinations bugged me. Characters show up in places exactly when and where they need to be, people know things they couldn't possibly know, the villains do things because the story demands they do things and the timeline doesn't hold up to any kind of examination. It reminded me of Prometheus in the way that plot elements just kind of happen because they have to, and characters never stop to ask each other simple questions.

But the action scenes were cool, and I get a kick out of Christian Bale's Batman voice.

Sounds like a comic book to me.

I thought it was an excellent way to end the Nolan series. Warner Brothers will have a hard time topping the last three movies.

Finally saw it. Liked it. Liked it better than "The Dark Knight." Didn't like it as much as "Avengers". Agreed with the critics assessment of the Bane mask--it really made it rough for Hardy to give any kind of performance. Nolan really is the master of the big urban chase scene. They did a good job of taking things from the Batman mythos and adapting them for this film. And it was interesting to see the elements of "The Dark Knight Returns" that showed up throughout the film.

Finally saw it too. Damn that was good! Much better than the previous two. And yes, I think TDK is vastly overrated because of Ledger's performance.

One thing I noted: Did Hans Zimmer reuse music from INCEPTION? The score sounds exactly the same.

He's probably plagiarizing himself, lol

I finally saw this last night--DVR'd it from cable. My thoughts:

The Good
- Good effects, very believeable (BatWing, BatCycle, 'splositions, etc...)
- Plot Twist with Talia
- Hathaway as Catwoman
- Blake's character
- Was that Teal'c as one of Bane's henchmen?

The Bad
- WAY too fuckin' long. At 2.5 hrs it literally took me all night to watch it with dinner and couple other interruptions. Not enough plot/action to hold together such a long-ass flick. Poor pacing.
- Not enough Anne Hathaway in a catsuit. Ok, she may have been in it in a bunch of scenes, but the shots were SO tight that there was precious little screen time to...appreciate...her physical attributes.
- Saw the direction they were heading with the Blake character pretty early on.
- Poor motivation (or poorly explained) for the--eventually duped--initial bad guys who brought Bane into the picture in the first place.

The Ugly
- the SOUND was awful! Much too up & down. There were times when I had the volume up to 37 on my TV (average is 20-25) in order to be able to not miss some dialogue, and then things would shift and I'd be blasted out of my chair! Way too variable! A very bad mix. Couldn't understand Bane more than half the time, and other characters weren't much better.