First of all,
DiFabio: you have done an excelent job of making your points.
But I do have a couple brief responses. I've heavily edited your posts to highlight what I would like to address. I'll leave a point-by-point response to others.
…The 8 year/retirement element is due and part to that. That's WHY I'm opposed to it. Yeah you can say, "that's how it is, what if it worked", but after TDK can you honestly say that is satisfying?
...I'd love if TDKR was completely different. The reasoning they came up for everything is convoluted and awful. As a fan of Begins and TDK, TDKR feels like a huge cop out in terms of story telling. 8 years of peace shouldn't even work. Not within the realms of the world that's been created. Not with Joker, Ramirez and other key players out there that come in direct conflict with any chance of peace.
Why does it have to result in an 8 year peace? Ask yourself that. The only reason it does is because that's what Goyer and the Nolan's came up with…
…TDKR just smashes Begins and TDK together and creates a huge clunky mess…
There are two different ways of looking at this.
On a first viewing (although I loved TDKR on a first viewing), I had nagging feelings of how TDK felt diminished, which seemed a reason to like TDKR less. After a second viewing I realized that TDK felt diminished because I like this film better.
The Joker talked a lot of trash (and didn't "stand for" anything), and Gordon and Bruce could have handled it better.
TDK is an incredibly well crafted movie, but has much less meaning than either Begins or Rises. There are so many powerful messages in Rises.
Also, although I understand how TDK is diminished in certain ways, I don't see Begins as diminished at all.
I need to watch them all back-to-back, but right now Rises and Begins are equally ranked in my eyes, with TDK coming in a close second.
So how his this story any good if you have to "let loose" and just accept the fact that it's something completely different? I see a lot of this, even K07 mentions it. "Just learn to love it".
Why? We didn't have this problem or do this with Begins or TDK? Why here? Why now?
To put it simply, I was deeply moved by TDKR -
more than either of its predecessors. That's enough reason to invest time into "learning to love it". For me, that's a much happier place to live than being forever stuck on 'I wish it had been different'. When will we ever see Batman done in such an intense and moving way. We wont in our life time. I'd rather invest my time into seeing how well it completes the trilogy then picking it apart.
Most importantly, how can you consider the STORY (not Bruce Wayne's arc from film to film) a nicely done, coherent "TRILOGY"?
You see, that's the thing that matters to me the most though.
The Bruce Wayne story is what matters, not some sub plot about escalation.
But as a third part of a three part story? The events in TDK are just not compatible with what happens in TDKR. Unless you twist and warp the end of TDK to fit the story of TDKR. Which it does. That's called a retcon. That means the feelings you felt in 2008 with TDK don't matter. How can this be when TDK came before TDKR?
To a small extent, this is true. Thankfully I feel so much more from this movie.
they all average out. It's like when a crowd sings at a concert, you don't really hear the people who are completely out of key, you hear one big voice which is more or less in time and key
