We can't live in fear

I didn't find out about the Aurora shooting until after I posted my review for The Dark Knight Rises. My wife and I caught an early showing, I banged out my thoughts when we got home, and then I turned on the television. I was tempted to take the review down, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my review needed to stay up. Not because it's the greatest review in the world, but because I won't let the act of a madman stop me from living my life.

I'm not sure how many people in that early morning crowd knew about the shooting. No one was talking about it or nervously joking that it could happen there. I think we were all in the dark, but I know that by the end of the day yesterday, everyone who planned to go see The Dark Knight Rises knew about what happened. And I'm certain that some of them decided to stay home.

This Review of The Dark Knight Rises

Quick Review: A fitting end to the epic Nolan Batman trilogy. See it on Imax if you can.

Full Review: Christopher Nolan did not set out to make DC Comics' Batman. He made Christopher Nolan's Batman. If you are expecting to see the comics come to life, you might be disappointed. The Dark Knight Rises is an epic in the traditional sense, right up there with Lawrence of Arabia and even Les Misérables. I can understand why not everyone is going to enjoy it. The story is huge and ambitious, and it's more about the final journey of Bruce Wayne than it is about Batman beating up the bad guys. This is about a city under siege and the fight to reclaim it. It's about why it is Batman who matters, not the man underneath.

Of course, the best way to judge this movie is to look at how well it concludes the trilogy. Thankfully, Nolan stuck the landing and learned from the mistakes of the X-men and Spider-Man trilogies. (As did the studio execs, it seems) I'm certain many lessons were learned from the previous Batman franchise as well. Nolan kept the story simple and straightforward. Even with an expanded cast of characters, the focus was on one main villain and his plot to take over and destroy Gotham. Everything else, every subplot, every new face, served that story. Despite the nearly three hour running time, this movie never felt overwhelming or over-stuffed.

From here on in I'm going to be talking about some specific movie elements. We're entering into major SPOILER territory, so if that bothers you, stop reading now. I won't take it personally. Spoilers ahead:

Movie Third Acts That Worked

It is with scared trepidation that I await The Dark Knight Rises. It's the third movie in a thus-far fantastic franchise. The first, Batman Begins, was a mind-blowing reboot of the Batman story.  The Dark Knight was that rare sequel that was even better than the original. Naturally, we should have nothing to worry about with this third and final movie. Right?

I know you know the answer to that question. We've been down this road twice before with both the Spider-Man and X-men movie series. The first was good, the second even better, the third ruined the franchise so badly that both have since been rebooted. (And those reboots are so far pretty good.)

Even the earlier Batman movies were not immune to this phenomenon, though that time it took four films to take down Batman before Nolan had to reboot it. The question that hangs over the Caped Crusader's cowl like the Sword of Damocles is this: will history repeat itself, or will The Dark Knight Rises be one of those rare third acts that are actually good? We'll all see soon enough.

The good news is that there are some third acts that did manage to work. Sometimes they were just as good as the rest of the series, and on rare occasions they were the best ones of all. Because I prefer hope to despair, optimism to pessimism, I want to talk about the movies that worked. (And if we can all just toss the ones that didn't down the memory hole, that would be great.)