Rewatchability

[Grissom]

Personally I thoroughly enjoyed TDKR and I recently real is ed that I have been watching it more than BB or TDK.  I find myself quoting Bane a bit more than  Ledger's  Joker, although the character of the Joker is my favorite villain.

I think it's about how the story escalates from TDK, it really is Bruce's story and the x rippling of Gotham. Great performances,  action, scale and scope really has me coming back.

It ranks reasonably high on my rewatchability scale.

[Slash Man]

Personally, I still place The Dark Knight on top for rewatchability due to pacing. A tough feat with such a long movie, but The Dark Knight carried the audience all the way through. Now, Dark Knight Rises may have even exceeded it in action sequences, but off the top of my head, I can recall a few prolonged sequences that made you feel the runtime. The beginning and after Bane breaks Batman, for instance.

[The Laughing Fish]

As someone who is really not a fan of Nolan's Batman, I find myself enjoying TDKR better out of the whole three - as long as I treat it as a comedy. And it is a comedy. For example, Talia goes through a plan to get her revenge over Bruce...which includes going to bed with him, and putting him in an underground prison that could be easily escaped from while she sits by in the background together with Batman's allies who are sabotaging her whole plot to destroy Gotham? 

I don't think any of these films are very well paced, especially between the second and third acts in the second film, and yes, I'll admit that the third takes a long time to watch for me. But at least the third had a comical goofy performance delivered by Tom Hardy as Bane (I suppose if you've got an unfunny Joker, you might as well go for a funny Bane), a likable performance by Anne Hathaway and I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the only character in the movie worth giving a damn about.

[Travesty]

I can watch BB any time. I like that movie a lot, even though there are some dialogue issues littered throughout it. TDK I can watch, but I'm almost always in a bummed out mood by the end of it, so I rarely watch it. With TDKR, I have no intentions of ever watching it again. I may look at some clips here and there, but I think it's a terrible movie, with little to no redeeming qualities to it, at all. It's still the only Batman movie that I've never bought, and I never plan to, either.

[Edd Grayson]

I can watch BB from start to finish but I don't like it nearly as much as the Burton films. I've watched TDK a few times since it came out but it's not one I like to watch often because it feels incomplete and it is flawed. I've only seen TDKR once and I might want to see it again sometime. I wasn't really impressed the first time though.

[The Dark Knight]

Believe me, I want to like TDK Rises.

But I just can't get on board with it, and I've felt that way since my first screening. I saw the movie again a few days later in 2012 and tried to convince myself it wasn't as bad as I first thought. But that didn't work.

I don't like the narrative structure. Bruce is retired, then he comes back to crimefighting. He's defeated by Bane, and comes back to Gotham - in a way we're never shown. He then fakes his death and retires again.

I actually think the first half of the movie is okay. I'm talking about the segments up to Bane breaking Batman's back - which is later magically fixed in the underground prison with a punch. But the second half of the movie is particularly droning. There's zero sense of fun or rewatch value. It's just Bane making speeches.

I hate how they built up and up the threat level of Bane's occupation only for the final battle to be severely underwhelming and not worthy of the lengthy screen time they devoted to the situation earlier.

Having Bruce stuck in the prison for so long was a stupid plot decision on Nolan's part. Bale was underused and could have done so much more in his final outing.

I'd say with confidence that TDK Rises is the least watchable Batman product in existence.

[thecolorsblend]

TDKRises is the one where Nolan bought into his own hype. Several parts of it are just way too self-indulgent. I speak of the bloated second act, where Gotham falls to Bane's Occupy group.

But the first act is pretty interesting. For some reason the story of a hero getting beaten down by life and then ultimately clawing his way back to the top before continuing/dying/retiring/whatever on his own terms is a very powerful concept for me. I don't even know why either.

Nolan takes his jolly sweet time getting to the point. The pacing serves the movie well at this juncture. It's our last chance to hang out with this version of Bruce before the you-know-what hits the fan again. In fact, all the characters benefit from having a chance to breath here in the first act.

The third act relies completely on the audience's investment in Batman after all these years movies and all these years. It's why you can convince yourself that Bruce can somehow evade guided missiles in Batwhatchamacallit in spite of never having any real training as a pilot that we've ever seen or it's how you can believe somehow he escaped a nuclear blast.

But man, that second act is a real slog. Nolan is still taking his time with the plot but it just doesn't work here. Gotham is screwed. It's leadership has mostly been assassinated, the exits have been blocked, the cops have been trapped and Occupy are having their merry way with everything. Meanwhile Bruce is trapped in prison. Those minor issues are worth, what, 10 or 15 minutes of screen time? But, as per my copy of the movie, what I define as the second act runs from 01:16:00 (fade to black on Catwoman after Bane drops Batman's mask) to 01:57:10 (whatsisname getting dragged off to the sentencing hearing before Crane).

It's funny that the second act is the shortest of the film but it feels the longest somehow.

[riddler]

I've seen the dark knight rises 3 times;
once in theatres
once online in 2013
once while tabulating screen time per character last year.

I honestly don't have any plans to ever see it again. IMO it is the worst batman film for rewatchability and I just watched Batman and robin last week; at least that one tried to be entertaining and had fun. This one moved at a snails pace, took forever to develop and the ending wasn't a big pay off. Add in the fact that Nolan seemed to forget to put Batman in the film and I can honestly say if there was a Batman film I had to choose to never see again this one would be it.

Batman begins was okay but it also suffers from pacing issues in the first act. The dark knight is an excellent film on it's own but it's hard to enjoy it now that the dark knight rises exposed Nolans flaws as a film maker (poor action shooting and horrid editing).

The Burton films and Batman Forever had the right blend of camp.

[The Dark Knight]

What colors posted above is right. There's a good film in there, but that whole occupation section is a real slog to get through. If sections of that were trimmed or altered in execution, I'd probably be more favourable to the whole. Even if we had one or two more scenes of Bruce in prison and escaping the place sooner.

[thecolorsblend]

I rewatched BB recently and it's strange how it emerges as arguably the strongest of the whole trilogy.

The crew wanted to tell this story, the cast were mostly 100% invested in each of their characters, the mostly original story had enough riffs on various popular comics to be interesting to the core fanbase, it legitimately did show stuff that was completely new to Batman cinema (even if the comics had been doing it for decades), the action scenes were innovative to Batman films at the time, the film took itself seriously but not too seriously and it ended on a note that suggested, well, escalation. And yeah, I guess the sequels did escalate but not really in ways that anybody had been looking forward to and I think many cast members were on auto-pilot after BB.

I admit that Nolan's Batman isn't "my Batman" as they say on some other forum I forget the name of but I still think the above has some validity to it.