Maybe too cute by half. After contemplating the midnight (non-bullet flying) showing, I have come to the the conclusion that Christopher Nolan is what George Lucas should have been: Consistent, long term thinking, and immune to public pressure. Granted, Nolan can be deeper than the Marianas Trench sometimes, and Lucas could not dialog his way out of a one man play. But, they both have remade a genre of films. Nolan takes the anti-hero that is at the roots of the Batman persona, and kicks the story into a movie that succeeds. Until recently, comics have struggled to transition to the movie screen. Nolan (like [Joss] Weadon) takes the source material seriously and the results show.
It is a big movie and its running time does not drag it down. The movie has a lot of ground to cover and it does that well. There are hints and threads that connect all three movies and one wonders what the death of Heath Ledger did to change the third installment.
It is a great finale to the series. The nice thing is that each theme is distinct within each movie and that the third movie has echoes of the first, but from a different angle.
It ends well. It will be interesting to see if WB / DC build on wih what Nolan left them, or they reboot the whole thing ala Spider-man.
Nolan has moved on with Zach Snyder to reboot Superman. I have high hopes for that.
{AB}
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