Great way of putting it, HB. Everything the Joker (and Wayne) did was believable, while we are left wondering how they did some things in DRK.
I think part of the problem was too many characters and storylines to balance in a 2:30 movie. They could have left some out, like that random coward police chief, Holly, etc. I would have loved to see more Alfred after he left too. It didn't seem like is character to just go completely missing until the end, altough he did evoke a lot of emotion.
Did anyone else have trouble keeping track of time as well? It didn't seem at all like months had passed. It was all hard to follow in that regard.
It's almost like they could have split this into Part 1 and a Part 2 in six or eight months. They could have stopped at Batman getting his back "broken" by Bane and left it as a cliffhanger and had Part 2 later on. Instead, we saw less Alfred and they had more trouble showing how time passed to keep the movie at a reasonable length.
Yeah I was having the same issue with time. It went from being normal weather, then all of a sudden its snowing and oh yeah, the water freezes over. And lets be fairly up front about this, it would take insane cold to get the water to freeze up enough where you could walk on it out a good distance. Gotham is in America, and I'm telling you in Canada you need to go North to find that happening. I have water all around me, and sure our little ponds freeze up, but major water ways with bridges and that don't even come close to that amount of ice.
Honestly looking back at this movie, I feel that Heath Ledger dying fucked the franchise. It just seems like it was put out because people wanted an ending and to wrap things up. If Ledger was still around to play the Joker we probably would have got some more movies, but once he died, just seems like the air went out of the tires. And the reason I think of this is because of the timeline of the movies. BB starts it off, and TDK is right after, no break in time basically. Then DKR is 8 years later. So you are telling me that in the say 9 years in the Batman Universe, the only people who showed up were Ras, Joker and Bane (scarecrow I guess)? No Riddler, Penguin, Mr. Freeze, or the slew of other villians in the Batman world?
It just to me seemed to perfect. End of the Dark Knight, Batman runs off to take the blame, the Dent Law comes in and the streets are cleaned up. Sorry, that just seems to easy. Like I said, it just seems like they came up with every easy way possible to tie up everything. And as JR said, the first couple of movies had that some what believeable factor to it. But now a nuclear bomb that will blow up everything, the President getting involved. Seems like Nolan had Bay on speed dial for this.