As expected, the new Batman was awesome!!

Edit: What a sick trailer

The finale of the Batman trilogy begins with one of the coolest action scenes I’ve seen this summer – a mid-air kidnapping led by the film’s solid follow-up to The Joker, Bane. Bane’s appearance, along with Selina Kyle/Catwoman’s raid of Bruce Wayne’s private safe, brings a secluded Batman out of hiding to defend Gotham one last time.

The film is nearly 3 hours long, taking time to develop several different plot lines: Batman’s reclusive life since taking the fall for Harvey Dent’s death, Selina Kyle’s role (a different but better take on Catwoman than in the old Batman), Bane’s plot for a Fascist uprising in Gotham, Batman’s Rocky training montage after a near-death defeat, and a frantic quest to save Gotham from a pretty cheesy nuclear time-bomb. There are lots of other plot elements that can be hard to keep track of, especially when it is 2:00 AM at the midnight premiere, but the film did a pretty good job of tying them together.

While there were still plenty of cool special effects and futuristic Wayne Enterprise inventions (including “The Bat” and a motorcycle that didn’t have to make turns), I actually liked that many of the fight scenes were just solid hand to hand combat. The final fight between Bane and Batman looked awesome.

Batman’s voice was hard to understand as always, but nothing compared to Bane’s Darth Vader voice. Plus he had an English accent. Any conversation between the two was pretty much impossible to understand. Other than that, Tom Hardy made for a pretty bad-ass villain. Not as good as Heath Ledger, but I think those are pretty big shoes to fill.

Alfred, Officer Gordon, and Lucius Fox all return but play smaller roles in this new Batman. Instead, Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake have significant and really well-done parts. Anne Hathaway did a way better job as Catwoman than I thought she would have, and I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt was good as always.

As a whole, the new Batman is a great end to an already awesome series. And other than the anti-climatic and terrible mushroom cloud explosion, the ending of the movie was super and left a perfect opening for a sequel. If Christopher Nolan wants to make one, that is. Please?

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