Batman

Robert Joustra, the senior editor of Comment magazine and a contributor to this book, emailed me this morning in response to my review of The Dark Knight Rises. Here are his thoughts...

This weekend I read a lot of reviews of The Dark Knight Rises to see how other people were taking it. Two pieces in particular were especially damning, pretty much nailing the coffin shut on Christopher Nolan's Batman... and maybe on Nolan's ouvre as a whole, for this moviegoer.

Inevitably, answering the summons of the summertime box office, The Dark Knight Rises. And so does the sun. Thus, we finally get to see Batman duking it out with bad guys in broad daylight. But the daylight reveals other things as well, like the vastness of the city, which gives us that much more trepidation about the prospect of seeing it all go up in a mushroom cloud. Oh, did I mention there’s a new threat in Gotham—a gang of terrorists led by a musclebound brute who wants to nuke the city?