"The Dark Knight Rises" Review by Owen Ward [No Spoilers]

I was lucky enough to get the chance to see an early screening of this film today, so I thought I'd give you guys a rough review. I'm still not entirely sure what I think of it, so I'll probably do a follow-up once I've seen it again.

First of all, I'll start with a little personal history of me and Batman. I've always been a fan of the Batman mythos since I was a kid - but I didn't get into the comics until my early teens. In high school, the drama department put on a musical version of Batman which sort of reignited my love of the character and prompted me to delve into the comics, starting with Frank Miller's 'Batman: Year One' which I absolutely adored. So by the time Nolan's series began with 'Batman Begins', I was enamoured - this was how Batman was meant to be portrayed onscreen. I walked out of both BB and TDK thinking 'that was awesome!', but what about TDKR?

Well, my reaction upon leaving the cinema was different this time. When asked what I thought, all I could think of were three words - 'I don't know'. Now that a little bit of time has passed, I've started to comprehend my thoughts into something that makes some sort of sense...I hope.

To (finally) get to the point - it's a bit of a mess structure-wise. There is simply too much going on at once and it could have done with a lot more breathing room. There are plenty of secondary characters which don't really have much of an impact and this ultimately just leaves us with less time with the characters that do matter. There are also a few plot-points and character decisions which I found questionable, but I won't go into any further detail or else we'd be in spoiler territory.

The performances from the cast are great. The series regulars are fantastic as usual (although Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman were underused) and I was particularly fond of Joseph Gordon Levitt. However, I was mightily impressed by Anne Hathaway's portrayal of Selina Kyle/Catwoman. I had my reservations about her, but she delivers! I have mixed feelings about Tom Hardy as Bane, but it's more down to how he was handled as opposed to his performance. His voice is higher in the mix than it should be and it feels quite blatantly ADR'd. I heard that Bane's voice was altered slightly to make him more decipherable (as people has issues understanding him when the prologue was previewed), but I still found him a bit hard to understand. I didn't see the prologue though, so I can't say how it differs.

Nolan shot a good portion of this using the IMAX format and it delivers. Although I only saw this flick in 'fake IMAX', the parts of the film which were shot on IMAX looked astounding and added to the overall epic scope of the piece. The action set pieces, whilst not as thrilling as those in the previous instalments are still great and it is awesome to see a film that makes use of practical effects and ton's of extras who were actually on there location.

All in all, it is a decent film - but it's not nearly as good as the previous two. I'm seeing it again at a trilogy marathon, so maybe I'll feel a bit differently when seeing it in context with the other two. If you've got any questions about the film, I'll answer 'em and if they include spoilers - I shall mark 'em.