Yeah, had been looking forward to seeing this film for a month or two. Saw it this afternoon. Expectations were high.
I suppose the chances were high that after Dark Knight any third film was going to be a toughie, still, I lived in hope.
What did I like…? Quite liked the laterally spinning tires on the batbike to explain how it would ever go round a corner on those big fat rubbery lumps it has. And I’m racking my brain now… Nope, nothing else springs to mind - so much for my attempts to be positive.
What didn’t I like…? Unfortunately lots of things. In no particular order:
Casting for catwoman. I hate that woman - she’s about as sexy as cold puke in a bus stop, and should have been left to rot in those teenage angsty princess movies she usually makes. What were they thinking…? She even made skin-tight black latex look boring. No build-up to her character, and as others have said - I didn’t care about her.
Bane. Big guy with a silly lamprey mask and a kinda surprise Mike Tyson voice. No real back-story beyond what’s been mentioned. “Hi, I’m the bad guy, I must be, look at my lamprey mask. Ooh. Brrr.” Kinda anarchistic maybe. Hmm. Trendy.
That Bat-gyrocopter thing. With those big, oh-so-vunerable naked blades underneath. A kid could disable it with a well-thrown brick.
The fact that the damn film was nearly three hours long, and still seemed rushed, jumpy and I dunno, attention-span-deficit target audienced. Was there a scene over a couple of minutes long…? The dialogue was symbolistic and preachy, particularly Alfred - I mean for fuck’s sake, he was a walking set of Aesop’s fables and morality plays throughout the film.
As someone else mentioned - all through the film there was a sense of inevitability. Wasn’t a case of “Is he gonna win…?” but just “Well, how’s he gonna win…?” and after 2 hours “Jesus Christ, when’s he gonna win…?” But to be fair, that was always going to be the trouble. It would have been better - as it was in the Dark Knight - if they’d played the “Okay - he’s going to win, of course he is… But at what cost to his soul…?”
This time there were very few moral dilemas, or even moral hiccups - everything was black and white. Catwoman’s a thief for fuck’s sake, Batman should have punched her in the face within minutes of the film starting - and she nicked his mother’s pearls - those same pearls that were blasted off his mother’s throat by the guy with the gun when he was a kid - a symbol right at the heart of the whole batman creation myth. And Bruce doesn’t bat (ha-ha) a single fucking eyelash. That’s like I dunno, someone stealing the turin shroud, with the Pope in the room, and the Pope just sitting back and going “Hey man, like, er that doesn’t really belong to you but… Ah fuck it, just wash it before you give it back k…?”
He should have gone apeshit, beaten her to death with his cane - and I dunno, had a few flashbacks over her corpse or something.
Endless list.
Pity. Prometheus, and now this. 2012 - disappointment so far film-wise.