Batman falls

This overlong Batman movie may be topical but it lacks drama

By Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Jul 20, 2012

~~<p>There is ambition behind "The Dark Knight Rises." Director Christopher Nolan and his collaborators distill everything that has happened in our world in the past four years — everything since "The Dark Knight" debuted in 2008 — and render it in nightmare terms. In doing so, they try, in the realm of fantasy, to tap into the fears underlying modern life.</p>
<p>In "The Dark Knight," the antecedent was 9/11: The vision of civic chaos and of the unrelenting, unremitting evil embodied by Heath Ledger's the Joker expressed, in popular art, Americans' deepest terrors in the first decade of this century. But in the final installment of Nolan's Batman trilogy, the antecedent is the financial crisis, a much more muddled and less dramatic ongoing event. And it makes for a much more muddled and less dramatic movie … that goes on and on and on.</p>
~~

There is ambition behind "The Dark Knight Rises." Director Christopher Nolan and his collaborators distill everything that has happened in our world in the past four years — everything since "The Dark Knight" debuted in 2008 — and render it in nightmare terms. In doing so, they try, in the realm of fantasy, to tap into the fears underlying modern life.

In "The Dark Knight," the antecedent was 9/11: The vision of civic chaos and of the unrelenting, unremitting evil embodied by Heath Ledger's the Joker expressed, in popular art, Americans' deepest terrors in the first decade of this century. But in the final installment of Nolan's Batman trilogy, the antecedent is the financial crisis, a much more muddled and less dramatic ongoing event. And it makes for a much more muddled and less dramatic movie … that goes on and on and on. Login for more...