I really don’t have a lot to say about The Dark Knight Returns.  It was a good movie and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as good as The Dark Knight, and wasn’t even close to the level of The Avengers.

Spoilers ahead.

Most of the “twists” in this movie are, if not completely obvious, at least not at all unexpected once they happen, so it lacks any real surprises.

A number of elements of the story seem ridiculous (even within the scope of a superhero movie).  For example, if you’re going to take a city hostage only to blow it up, why wait months?  (Other than to give the hero the chance to become a hero again and stop you.)  Why trap the entire police department underground when you can just kill them?  There was really no clear explanation why Bane wears that mask.  (The explanation given in the movie is unclear at best.)  It certainly seems that this movie Bane has little in common with the comic character (though I just skimmed the bio, so I may be missing things).  I think they just wrote the character and then decided which existing Batman villain could be shoehorned into the role.

There were quite a few funny moments, mostly with Selina and Alfred, but with others too.  This was my favorite.

“I’ve seen worse cartilage in knees.” – Doctor
“Its good.” – Bruce Wayne
“No, that’s because there is NO cartilage in your knee.” – Doctor

The end of the movie does leave it open to a sequel, as we know Bruce survives and Blake (whose first name is revealed to be Robin) finds the Bat Cave.

I really hope they don’t do a sequel.  There is a lot of talk that DC is doing a Justice League movie.  Rumors are (or were) that Ben Affleck was asked to direct.  DC is never going to be able to really compete with the Marvel movie universe unless they start to do movies other than Superman and Batman (let’s try to forget Green Lantern) and put them all in a shared movie universe.  They can’t continue in Nolan’s Batman universe and do that.  It just won’t work.  Green Lantern had seemed to be the beginning of doing that, and the movie fell flat on it’s face, as opposed to Marvel whose first foray into their shared Universe was Iron Man, which gave birth to an empire.  I’ve always enjoyed DC movies, even though I only read Marvel comics, but it seems unlikely to me they can ever pull together everything to get a unified DC movie universe to work.

On the other hand, if they are giving up of a shared universe (which will lead to a Justice League disaster in my opinion) then I wouldn’t mind seeing another Batman movie in Nolan’s Universe.

Thanks for reading!