Last week, withThe Dark Knight Rises, director Christopher Nolan brought his Batman trilogy to a close.
Batman Begins was released in 2005, with Nolan setting a new bar for what can be done with a superhero film as he got elbow-deep in the meat of the Batman origin story. The operative word for Batman Begins is “fear.”
The sequel The Dark Knight, hit the streets in 2008 to rapturous praise on the way to the then-second biggest box office grosses of all time. The Dark Knight explores much more fully the criminal underworld of Gotham, particularly menacing new figure the Joker (Heath Ledger). Likened to Michael Mann’s epic crime saga Heat by this publication, The Dark Knight is much more than a superhero movie. If Batman Begins was a great comic book movie, The Dark Knight was simply a great movie: bigger and more complex, with greater performances than its predecessor. The operative word for The Dark Knight is “chaos.”
The Dark Knight Rises — read Herrington’s review here — begins eight years after The Dark Knight. The operative word for The Dark Knight Rises is “pain.”
In many ways, it’s the movie of the year, and here at Sing All Kinds we seem to have a disagreement on our hands. Chris Herrington thinks The Dark Knight is the best film in the trilogy. Greg Akers finds The Dark Knight Rises to be the superior film. (Note: No one thinks Batman Begins is the best of the bunch.) And for the next couple of days we’re going to hash it out here. In the interest of brevity (yeah, right), Batman Begins is henceforth BB, The Dark Knight is DK, and The Dark Knight Rises is DKR. (NOTE/WARNING: Spoilers are likely.)
We’ll let Herrington start with why he prefers DK to DKR: