Saw it on the IMAX last night. I enjoyed the movie, but there were some fairly enormous plot holes that struck me as lazy writing and kept it out of the pantheon of greatness that The Dark Knight belongs to.
Miranda's plot seems needlessly complex. Stalk Bruce Wayne for years upon years, finally convince him to turn over control of the company that he doesn't even control (after she's already liquidated all his stock through Bane's genius plan of "brute force the stock exchange on crotch rockets"), steal all his shit, throw him in an "inescapable" prison (which she herself already goddamn escaped as a CHILD), wait for him to return to Gotham and beat the shit out of her bodyguard just so she can very literally stab him in the back? That is the most heinously retarded act of villainy since Zorg tried to blow up the Universe in The Fifth Element. Attention bad guys: if you give the good guy a chance to beat you and they fail, shame on them. If you give them 2 chances to beat you and they fail, shame on them twice. If you repeatedly give them chance after chance to beat you, eventually they're going to do it, and you're going to look fucking retarded for not shooting that prick in the back 8 years ago when he had no idea who the fuck you were.
Catwoman: Yes. That is all.
Bane: Also yes. I thought he'd be retarded, but honestly, I liked the character alot, especially the fact that he was so difficult to understand. But why didn't Bane get a mask where the tubes and filters that keep him mobile are, I don't know, COVERED, and not easily dislodged from a fisfight with the armored superhero he has been intentionally baiting into fighting him? And how was Bane trained by Ra's Al Ghul if he was immediately excommunicated upon discovery that he was a hideous freak which takes all of a sidelong glance to fully appreciate? Something about that doesn't add up. Was it Miranda who actually trained Bane? She's obviously not as good a teacher as Liam fucking Neeson; he trained Batman AND Obi Wan, and look how well that worked out for all but a few hundred thousand people.
I thought that the escalation of scale was very good from film to film; attempt to blow up Gotham in Batman Begins, actually blow some shit up in The Dark Knight, fuck it, blow everything up, and blow up a nuke for good measure in The Dark Knight Rises. It's a good way to raise the stakes, though at this rate the next Batman movie is going to be like the bastard child of 24 and Call of Duty. Mowing down policemen with gunfire in the streets was also a good way to raise the stakes, and also hard to watch given the tragedy in Aurora associated with the film. But it really does drive home the gravity of the idea that this is truly hell on Earth. The Dark Knight was better about dealing with death on the level of individuals to personalize it; The Dark Knight Rises was better about making the body count so big you could only fathom it as a statistic.
Another questionable plot point: how was Batman able to get the Batwing to fly ~20 miles offshore in less than a minute? Can his plane really accelerate to Mach 2 in the space of a few seconds? Wouldn't the g-force generated by that kill the pilot (even if you assume he wasn't in the plane, why include a rate of acceleration that would be fatal unless you specifically anticipated flying the plane with no pilot)? I'm basing that 20 miles off how small the mushroom cloud looked from the point of view of the onlookers... It just seemed a little ridiculous.
The ending was pretty predictable. Oh, Alfred's going off to Florence again, I wonder who he's possibly going to run into there. Could it be Alfonso, the gay pool boy he's been secretly hooking up with for the last 30 years? No, it's Bruce motherfucking Wayne. I'm shocked. Good thing there wasn't ample foreshadowing for this eventuality.
I was really hoping that when the woman told Blake he should use his real name of "Robin" he'd respond, "Are you calling me a queer?" and then threaten to attack her. That whole exchange was a bit hamfisted, so it needed something to liven it up, and it would have given his character a great turn from heroic to dangerous psychotic homophobe, which is an arc that NO ONE would see coming. Way to drop the ball Nolan.
Overall, good movie. I liked the character development, even though I'm pretty sure Blake had more screen time than Batman. It was no Dark Knight, and I'm putting it below The Avengers as well, but it was still a fine summer action film and an appropriate close to the trilogy.