Review:

While it's not too far from the Nolan trilogy, this one trades the over the top action for a much slower story with flashes of detective work. The cinematography is great and I loved the use of lighting, but this really needed to be rated R. To make a big deal about Batman pounding some dude's face into soup and having there be zero blood really undercuts what they're trying to say. It's not as violent as the Nolan movies, but it's darker and it really needed some realism in the fight scenes at least. Pattinson does great with what he's given, but most of the characters feel under-written. I don't know how we can have a nearly three hour movie and do so little for the characters. We get a lot of plot and I liked watching it unfold, but they take some real liberties with the source material that raise a lot of questions that they don't address. There were some bad effects (mainly during Batman's "flight") but they were mostly alright. This was a solid first entry, but if we're going to do "dark and gritty" Batman again, it needs to stand out more from the Nolan movies. Make the violence violent and spend more time developing the detective work, this time it felt like we saw the steps, but little of the process.