[Spoiler Alert] The Dark Knight Rises (not a review)

SPOILER ALERT!

I'm a little late, so I'm not going to write a review for the movie, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it. With that said, there has never been another movie I've been more anticipated for than The Dark Knight Rises. I thought it would be fun to look back on some of my previous posts [1] [2] on my speculation on the movie.

Granted my second post on the subject was intended to be a parody of Spider-man 3, but it was still funny how some elements did bleed into the last Nolan Batman movie.

The Plot

Everyone knew that The Dark Knight was bound to have a sequel, so I wrote my first blog post just because I was so excited about how you could follow up such a spectacular movie. Now I still wish my movie title would've been used, but considering that a lot of people still don't know that Batman Begins is the prequel to The Dark Knight, I can see why they chose a similar sounding name. Regardless, I was still amazed how close I was to the actual plot before the movie was even named.

Obviously, the plot was different, but Nolan did draw a lot of inspiration from the comic Knightfall and even included Talia Al Ghul and her reveal was even a twist. Scarecrow did have a cameo appearance like I predicted, but in the actual movie, he was used as a kangaroo judge versus his scarecrow persona. Even more amazing was that there was a cop (not a politician) that wanted to hunt down Batman. Details were clearly off, but I clearly called Nolan's inspirations. Granted I think I would've been a little disappointed if the League of Shadows didn't play some kind of role in the final installment of the trilogy.

A fun little story about Talia Al Ghul. I think I posted about this theory on Digg.com back when Digg was one of the most popular websites on the internet. I commented about how cool it would be if Natalie Portman would play her. Easily my highest rated post ever. I don't know why Natalie Portman, but it probably had to do with her popularity at the time. However, imagine my surprise when I was watching Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and he actually asked Natalie Portman this very question on his talk show. I cannot confirm that I was the instigator of this rumor, but I know I didn't get it from anyone else.

Catwoman

Again, my second post was a parody. There was endless speculation on what the last Nolan Batman movie was going to be about, and the fan theory about the Riddler just annoyed me to no end. I specifically wrote that blog post for a forum on Spill.com which hosts podcasts that I highly recommend. The theory was that in The Dark Knight there was a character who figured out Batman's secret identity and was trying to blackmail him. Well the gentleman's name happened to be Mr. Reese which sounds a bit like "mysteries". Regardless, this theory annoyed me, so I wrote what I thought would be the worst possible version of the sequel. Of course the worst third movie in recent memory was Spider-man 3.

Batman has very few love interests, so I used the most well known which is Catwoman. Now Nolan did everything to avoid having her be called Catwoman, but he had his little Easter eggs in the movie such as a newspaper with the headline "cat burglar" and her goggles looking like cat ears when she lifts them up (see the image). Again, I was mirroring Spider-man 3, but I thought it was a nice little coincidence that the movie did end with Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle together.

Final Thoughts

The Nolan Batman trilogy was certainly a fun time to be a Batman fan. Reading all of the Batman fan theories were surprisingly enjoyable even though I found some of them annoying. After listening to the Spill review for this movie, they said something which I think is very true and especially relates to this post. No matter what your theory was for the third Batman movie even if they contradicted each other, they made it into it. Fortunately, the ridiculousness of Clayface and forcing too many villains didn't happen. The biggest question among fans was whether Robin was going to be in it. Well he was and he wasn't. I don't know if Nolan read any of these fan theories, but it's still fun to speculate.