The Dark Knight Rises movie (spoilers)

[vor_lord]

I found the following article on the trilogy interesting:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8180...an-trilogy

While I thought the author tries a bit too hard, I enjoyed his viewpoints. As someone who does not read comic books (my only exposure to Batman is through the various movies and the excellent TV cartoon of the 90s), this trilogy is by far my favorite of the glut of superhero movies out there.

An excerpt.

One interesting byproduct of the superhero film becoming the default blockbuster format of this century is that we've now seen directors do these films pretty much every way they can be done. We've watched generic blow-'em-up blockbusters camouflaged in capes and camp B-movies that used their source material as an excuse to light Nic Cage's head on fire. Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man was basically a romantic comedy. Joss Whedon's The Avengers was a Joss Whedon film wearing a brand-extension fright mask. Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class was a sleek period adventure — a spy movie without the spies. Martin Campbell's Green Lantern was a failed effects carnival. Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City was an attempt to bring the actual frame-by-frame noir aesthetics of Miller's comic books to the screen. Zack Snyder's Watchmen was a disastrous exercise in giving hard-core devotees of the medium exactly the kind of grim, slavish fidelity they said they wanted. Somewhere in there, Warner Bros. even let Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry make one, which is how we found out that Seth Rogen in a Zorro mask is the exact point past which audiences Just Will Not Go.

Christopher Nolan's Batman movies are different. They are not genre exercises disguised as superhero films. They are not even really "about" the exploits of the well-known international brand that is Batman. Nolan makes superhero films that think hard about what superheroes actually are: symbols, mostly; moral quandaries come to life; fallible individuals in masks and suits who police certain arbitrary codes of behavior and who are regularly called upon to debate those codes with villains who have alternate, and perhaps equally valid, codes.