Seeing as how I won't be seeing The Dark Knight Rises until next Tuesday it's too early to know if I'm totally off base here, what can I say biased speculation on the unknown is a hallmark of us internet nerds.
There's a pretty good chance that Rises will disappoint a lot of fans while still being a great movie, this all really depends on the supporting cast/characters. Let's make something very clear right now, Batman is the most uninteresting and least fun to watch of all the Nolan Batman films. Batman Begins was awesome because 95% of the time Christian Bale was Bruce Wayne. The Dark Knight belonged solely to Heath Ledger's Joker. Don't kid yourself, if you don't believe me go back and watch only the scenes with Batman, they seem like a spoof of what they look like when viewed with the rest of the film. This and, as it was pointed out to me yesterday, the third movie of a trilogy will always be less than the second. It's simple story structure at that point, the middle is where the meat of the story is.
So why is Bane the wrong choice in my mind? He simply won't bring out the Batman that would be the best fit for Nolan's reality based comic epic. While he's not the mindless brute movie-goers saw in Batman & Robin he's also not the criminal that would elicit great investigation. This story should close on seeing Batman become "The World's Greatest Detective", after all that is what makes him more than a billionaire with cool toys. This movie could have been an amazing cat and mouse noir if they had gone with what most people saw as the obvious choice for the next villain, The Riddler. Yes, the 60's show and Jim Carrey's performance in Batman Forever would have you believe he wouldn't fit but you would have said the same thing about the Joker based on Ceasar Romero or even Jack Nicholson. Darken The Riddler up a bit and what you have is a brutally sadistic serial killer. Think John Doe in Se7en. The series needed this, all we've seen of Batman's skill is a quick line about "lightly irradiated bills" and a cool scene of him getting fingerprints off of a fired bullet, even these were drowned out by the amazing Joker performance.
I don't want to see CSI: Gotham, but I do think this movie series deserves a better resolution than a knock-down fist fight. I hope that I'm wrong, thankfully I often am.
