Some hopes and dreams for The Dark Knight Rises.

I'm a little concerned that I'm not going to like this movie. Christopher Nolan's Batman films make great action-thrillers but they're not exactly fun. In fact, it occasionally seems like Christopher Nolan actively avoids fun. Good luck with your franchise of Serious Grown-Up Movies that attempt to legitimise a billionaire's decision to fight crime in a bat costume, dude.

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. But the first one came out when I was fifteen and far less critical than the hardened nerd you see before you today, and the second one is 37 hours long (that's about 30 hours of car chases, 5 hours of Christian Bale growling angrily, 1 hour of Heath Ledger, and 1 hour of "other") so I've never managed to rewatch it all the way through. There's no denying that Heath Ledger's Joker is one of the best movie psychos of all time, but my main memories of The Dark Knight are of extended sequences where cars and bits of rubble crash into each other while Christian Bale howls his manpain at the moon. So I'm kinda trepidatious when it comes to The Dark Knight Rises. Without the helpful cushion of fannish delusion (Christopher Nolan's neverending quest to tell a "serious" superhero story has resulted in some of the most sterile and humourless comicbook movies ever, which isn't exactly conducive to geeking out), I'm unlikely to ever be as enthused about TDKR as I was about the Avengers.