With the caveat that I have no knowledge of the Batman comics (or movies outside of The Dark Knight trilogy and Batman v Superman) I thought it was a great movie on a technical level but left a lot to be desired in the writing. There are a lot of good ideas here that really go nowhere (like Bruce Wayne as a target or the street-level cops standing up against crime in spite of their dirty desk job counterparts).
It feels like a pastiche of really great scenes without a strong thread connecting them all…for example, Batman losing his cool interrogating the Riddler is a good scene on its own (derivative of TDK as it may be), but in the context of the movie there’s really no reason for Batman to get so angry. The Riddler clues were a little simplistic too. I guess I just feel like a lot of great ideas were undermined by not feeling earned.
There were also some more obvious issues like every character’s insane invincibility and Gordon’s hammy video game-level dialog. Even the opening monologue could’ve used a rewrite or two to make it less tween angst edgy and less predictable.
With that being said, this is the best world-building of any Batman movie I’ve seen and I would gladly spend another three hours just absorbing the visuals and the music. For that reason alone, I’d still rank it second just to Dark Knight.
