Dark Knight Rises and Dark Knight

I was hoping that Dark Knight Rises would be a return to the classy film making Christopher Nolan is capable of, as seen in the first instalment, Batman Begins, however like Dark Knight, which I thought was the worst action film he has made so far, Dark Knight Rises is a let down, with only a slight improvement and I am being generous!

The main problem, I feel, with the last two films of the Batman Trilogy is very lazy film making, and ultimately responsibility for a film has to come down on the directors head afterall he has the final word, right or wrong.

In Batman Begins Nolan successfully created a dark world of Gotham in which a ‘man with a cape’ makes sense, with a mono-rail system showing us a futuristic city and at the heart of Gotham stood Wayne Towers. In my opinion Christopher Nolan became lazy in the second movie by filming it an ordinary city like New York, which gave the impression it could have been set anywhere and based on any city for that matter, he lost the dark world which he meticulously created in the first film to the extent that Wayne Towers just looked like a building from the 1970's. Taking out such a key element has taken the soul out of Batman films, how can you have a dark hero without his dark world which we have all grown up knowing?

Christopher Nolan's second crime is, by his own admission, his fondness of director Michael Mann and his film the HEAT. The opening shots of Dark Knight are taken straight from Heat - the bank robbery sequences with masked robbers and ensuing action all follows in similar style. Also, like most of Michael Mann films, which I find to be very cold and not engaging in any emotional sense, Dark Knight falls down the same cold path.

Although the Joker is well acted, you have zero empathy for the character unlike in Tim Burton’s version of the Joker where the story gives you a reason for his misfortunes and you get far more character building. Nolan’s Joker lacks character building, even though it is briefly explained in one scene reasons for the Jokers behaviour you have zero connection with his rage and anger.

Dark knight Rises is a much better effort however, as with Dark Knight, being directly set in New York (as a Gotham stand-in) it just doesn’t work, the city scape looks too big and loses the dark dingy world created in the first film.

Some people have said they liked the return to the Ra's al ghul story line from the first film, however I disagree I think its just being a bit lazy with the story, so much more could have been done with a fresh story to conclude the Batman triology, however this is a relatively minor point. As with the Joker story line I found that Bane's story line again created zero empathy for the character and I had no emotional connection with the character so I didn’t really care what happened to him.

Catwomen's story line is much better and well created.

Overall the Dark Knight Rises was a better film than Dark Knight however they don't come close to the superiority of the original instalment.

I would give :

Dark knight 4/10 

Dark Knight Rises 5.5/10 

Batman Begins 9.5/10