The Last Story Review

Japanese RPGs are currently experiencing something of a crisis. It’s been many years since the likes of Final Fantasy VII, games which featured turn-based battles and largely linear narratives, were among the most popular video games around. Their successors have arguably been less influential than Western role-players like the Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls games, which sport real-time combat and tell more open-ended tales. The Last Story, which comes courtesy of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and his Mistwalker development studio, draws from both traditions and is one of the most satisfying Japanese RPGs I’ve played in a very long time.

IT’S NOT THE SIZE THAT COUNTS… 

One of the best things about The Last Story is that it’s small. By that I don’t mean that it’s boring or lacking in content. I mean that it’s focused; it knows its strengths and sticks to them. Take the setting, a verdant seaborne fiefdom called Lazulis Island. It is here that we’re introduced to Zael, a sword-wielding mercenary with a kind heart and a predictably stupid haircut. Although the story takes Zael and his band of merry mercs to some faraway places, most of their time is spent tromping round the island working for the local nobility in hopes of improving their social status.

The main storyline, which involves a power-hungry despot, an exiled race of blood-eyed humanoids, and a lady most fair, is a good one, but what really makes it sing are the grace notes, the in-between chapters that explore the far corners of Lazulis Island in often delightful detail. In one excursion, Zael and company help a local shopkeeper rescue his wife from a haunted mansion. In another, Zael does battle in the local coliseum only to find that the kingdom’s knights are throwing fights to him due to his favor with the ruler of the island. The Last Story tells a tale as exciting as anything in the genre, but we’ve played through too many of those to care without something more. It’s the little things, like the way Zael can smack his head against a low-hanging signpost or overhear conversations between pairs of people talking in the street, that give meaning the bigger ones, and The Last Story is a game that cares about the little things.

This fine shading extends to the cast of characters, who by most metrics lack distinction. Zael is an even-tempered nice guy of a leading man. The leader of the group, Dagran, is a stern patriarch. We’ve also got the bawdy, duel-wielding Syrenne, petulant mage Yurick, and soft-spoken healer Mirania. We’ve seen this group before, but as with the story, they’re brought to life by the little moments. The group talks to each other as they leap into battle, and the things they say are usually diverting enough to be worth having said. The voice cast of British actors is excellent, and the script gives them enough different tones to work with that they needn’t feel embarrassed by the credit. The Last Story is a character-driven game, so it’s fortunate that the characters are worthy of it.

Despite these accolades, the The Last Story’s story is far from perfect. It has its share of RPG clichés, plot-holes, and at least one baffling character about-face, but it’s filled out with just the right details in just the right places that it makes one want to think well of it. The musical score by Nobuo Uematsu is lovely; the main theme summons the kind of elegiac mood once reserved for the better Final Fantasy games. The art team provides a visual style to match it, bathing the game world in a lazy late afternoon haze. I even came around to the obtrusive narrator, who fills in details of the story we only occasionally need to know in a way that started off as annoying and at some point became charmingly dopey. The Last Story is a very easy game to like, and for that reason I found myself willing to look past some of its shortcomings.

…IT’S HOW YOU USE IT. 

This quality was helpful when it came to the battle mechanics, since the game’s ambitious combat system sometimes falls short of its lofty goals. Like most modern RPGs, combat in The Last Story unfolds in real-time, but the game avoids one of the most ridiculous images of modern gaming, that of a group of characters standing immobile around an enemy and whacking it while little numbers pop up over its head. Combat in The Last Story is dynamic, with a lot of running and climbing and aiming involved. It has its faults, but it’s still the best attempt I’ve seen by a Japanese RPG to use real-time combat, and is frequently a lot of fun.

When it comes to fighting, one of the game’s best innovations is to eliminate random, and even semi-random, battles entirely. There are no fights in this game that you cannot fight. Each one is planned out ahead of time, meaning that the developers can set up the geography, enemy formation, and available implements to ensure that each encounter is as interesting as possible. Players take control of Zael, who has a variety of techniques he can use to defeat his foes. Running up to an enemy will make Zael auto-attack. He can also manually aim his crossbow, take cover behind conveniently placed debris, command his allies to use their specialty abilities, diffuse magic circles left by spells to cause a wide variety of effects, and quite a bit more. The game introduces new techniques gradually right up until the end, so there’s usually something new to play around with.

What’s better is that the game actually makes you use the techniques it so generously provides, often in rather creative ways. I remember the moment I realized I was actually going to enjoy the fights in this game. My party was battling a doppleganger monster who fought us from the other side of a mirror, replicating my every move. Auto-attacking did nothing, since the monster would just copy me and our swords would meet in mid-swing. I had to order Yurick, my mage, to cast a fire spell on the floor near the monster, which left a heat residue that distracted it long enough for me to land a blow. I was very, very happy to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to win every fight in the game by thwacking the enemy to death.

Although there are times when that’s the case, particularly when the fights have large numbers of combatants and there’s too much going on to focus on strategy. In these moments, the battles can become frustrating and chaotic, but most of the time they’re intelligently laid out and, at their best, play more like miniature puzzles where someone dies at the end. If RPGs must have real-time combat, I strongly endorse this game as the model to build upon.

Buying weapons and armor outside of combat is a straight-forward affair, not so simple that there’s no strategy involved but not so complex that you’ll weep openly whenever you have to upgrade your equipment. Money is available but not absurdly plentiful, so you’ll actually have to prioritize what you want to buy and when you want to buy it. Plus, shopping will give you the opportunity to wander around Lazulis City, the game’s central hub and a memorable medieval metropolis packed with side-quests, collectibles, and a bustling torrent of NPCs. It feels lived-in and alive, vast in size but really residing in the sun-touched corners and windy side-streets. It’s a vibrant place with a surprise around the corner, and somewhere I’d love to see the industry return.

Cosmopolis Review

There’s a scene toward the end of Cosmopolis where Robert Pattinson walks up a flight of stairs. Pattinson, who plays a sinfully wealthy 28-year-old asset manager named Eric Packer, is looking to confront a man who for unknown reasons has been planning to kill him all day. The scene is terrifically directed. Packer ascends the stairs slowly, the camera floating along behind him and the soundtrack bubbling with impending menace. It’s tense, exciting, and completely unlike anything else in the movie.

That’s because Cosmopolis, the latest from indie director David Cronenberg, is a hard-core art film, very concerned with big ideas and very unconcerned with whether or not you’re entertained. Based on a 2003 novel of the same name, it follows the inscrutable Packer over the course of a very long day spent rolling across Manhatten in a tricked-out limousine on a quest to get a haircut. Along the way, Packer converses with a variety of associates, family members, and passersby who have all manner of opinions on the subjects of death, sex, and money.

People talk in this movie. They talk a lot, and much of what they have to say is very interesting. Take Packer’s chief of theory (Samatha Morton), who stops by his cavernous limo to tell him that “money has taken a turn.” Wealth, she posits, is now collected for its own sake. It’s lost the narrative quality it had in days past and is effectively “talking to itself.” Cosmopolis takes place in a near future when the divide beneath the haves and the have-nots has become so pronounced that the have-nots are starting to revolt. As Packer and his advisor calmly talk economic theory, a band of occupy-ish protesters spray-paint his limo and jostle it from side to side. The scene is finely textured satire, deftly directed and eloquently parsed, and far from the only such scene in the movie. The problem is that after it’s over, it’s over. Apart from the constant presence of the Packer character, there’s very little pulling the movie from one isolated encounter to the next.

And Eric Packer is not a character likely to hold an audience’s interest for very long. For most of the movie, he’s a cipher. Robert Pattinson puts his bland good looks to excellent use here, hiding whatever emotions Packer feels behind a set of dead blue eyes and matinee star cheekbones.

There are a couple of times when we sense a person beneath the gloss. A memorably erotic encounter with a security worker paints Packer as a man desperate for some kind of connection, even it’s not forthcoming. When Packer finally gets to the barbershop and has his hair cut by an old family friend, a man for whom money is a tangible thing rather than ephemera to be bought and sold from afar, he comes close to cracking a genuine smile. Pattinson, known mainly as a teen heart-throb, does some very subtle acting here which bodes well for his future. Packer’s personality may be as hermetically sealed as his sound-proofed limo, but Pattinson suggests the self-destructive impulses at his core in a way that prepares us for his long walk up those stairs near the end of the film. Packer has spent his day watching his fortune fall out from under his feet, the result of a bad bet he made on the international market. His last reason for bothering to get up in the morning thus removed, he goes to meet his killer so that he can be killed.

The final confrontation between Packer and his killer, a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti), boils down to a long talk about the corrupting influence of money and the consequent rot of society. It’s bold, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating, but also cold, anticlimactic, and too much a scene onto itself to complete and give meaning to what came before. As disjointed as Cosmopolis is, I can’t help but think that the material might have been better suited as a collection of essays, or hey, a novel. At the same time, it creates a mood of low rumbling dread that lingers, and may be the kind of movie that benefits from a second viewing. At the least, it’s unlike anything else currently in theaters, and for that reason alone I’m glad it’s around.

Sparkle Review

Sparkle is a new old-fashioned melodrama about a trio of Detroit-area Motown singers living in 1968. It contains very little in the way of originality. The singers, sisters, begin as nobodies, break into the local soul scene, get mixed up in the seedier side of the business, take stock of their lives, and return triumphant. It’s been done. But the movie is well-cast, with Jordin “I won a singing competition once” Sparks in the title role, and well-directed, with a lush look and solid pacing.

Every once in a while, a producer will get take a stab at re-popularizing the long-dormant movie musical genre. The last notable attempt was Rock of Ages, a jukebox musical which featured covers of 80s rock songs scrubbed free of the grit that might have made them interesting. Sparkle isn’t a great musical, but it fares much better than that middling piece of insubstantia. It features old songs from the 1976 movie on which it’s based, a few Motown standards of the day, and new songs written by R. Kelly. It’s good stuff, and it’s sung well by a cast of people who either are or at one point were professional musicians. When the story sags, audiences can always sit back and enjoy the music.

And despite the best efforts of all involved, the story does sag. Sparkle, a burgeoning songwriter, lives at home under the command of her strict, church-going mother (Whitney Houston), who disapproves of the music business. Her older sister, who depending on your point of view is either confusingly or endearingly named Sister (Carmen Ejogo), is a burned-out vixen with a sexy stage presence. She fronts the group and helps lead it to success, but her vices eventually catch up with her, and the group suffers.

There’s also a sweet romance between Sparkle and a young band manager (Derek Luke) as well as a background role for the practically minded middle sister, Dee (Tika Sumpter). So the story has a fair amount of meat on its bones, but it rarely feels anything more than superficial. The script relies too much on expository dialogue to develop the characters, and the plot twists are predictable to anyone who’s seen a movie about the rise and fall of a band, sports figure, politician, or pretty much anyone else for whom the road to success is riddled with pot holes. All these clichés go down easy thanks to the energetic cast and some visually nifty direction, but they’re still clichés and the movie doesn’t find enough ways to make them feel new again.

As Sparkle’s mother, Whitney Housten gives a performance as intermittently dull and wonderful as the movie itself. This is the last film the famous singer made before her well-publicized death earlier this year, and although it doesn’t trade on that notoriety it’s hard not to think about it when watching. Her performance is nothing spectacular. She mostly just imitates other over-protective mothers from movies past, but there’s one scene where she sings a hymn in church and we get a glimpse of the complex character, and storied actress, underneath.

Luckily, director Salim Akil knows that the movie’s greatest strength lies in its music, and he steers it back in that direction whenever possible. Even the songs played over the montages are good. He also has a fine sense of timing. For most of the film, Sparkle sings backup while the sultry, charismatic Sister takes lead, but when it comes time for Sparkle to strike out on her own, her solo debut is worth the wait and closes the film on its highest note. The movie may be made out of showbiz movie clichés, but they’re marshaled by a director who knows how to get the most out of them and played by actors committed to their roles. Sparkle is a simple song, but a decent one.

The Campaign Review

The Campaign is a timely movie that doesn’t take quite as much advantage of its subject matter as I would have liked. It tells the story of a Congressional race for a small district in North Carolina. On the Democratic ticket is Cam Brady (Will Ferrell), a smooth-talking career incumbent who expects to run unopposed. Opposing him is Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), a naïve nice guy who’s running mainly to impress his influential father (Brian Cox). As an indictment of the American political climate, the movie fights with the kid gloves on, but committed performances from the leads ensure at least a passably funny hour-and-a-half at the movies.

The Campaign was directed by Jay Roach, a man whose previous credits include Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. Here, as there, his main talent lies in getting out of the way and letting his actors have a good comic go of it. As Brady, Ferrell channels a bit of George Bush and a lot of Ricky Bobby to create a character who’s appealingly sleazy if a little familiar. It’s Will Ferrell. He yells a lot and nabs a couple of laughs with his deadpan delivery. He’s not stretching himself here, but even Will Ferrell on auto-pilot is good for a chuckle or two.

Better and slightly more surprising is Galifianakis as Marty Huggins. A small-town family man, Huggins has no idea how to play the political game. He tells an utterly inconsequential story about his dogs at a campaign event. He sits in his car trying not to cry after a particularly nasty debate. Eventually, the king-making Motch (rhymes with “Koch”) brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) dispatch a high-powered campaign manager (Dylan McDermott) to whip Huggins into shape. With his effete drawl and leisurely waddle, Galifianakis turns Huggins into a reliably funny character, especially in the early stretches before the political process begins to harden him up. Later on, as Huggins battles his conscience over whether to go along with the Motch brothers’ plans, he provides the movie with the closest thing it has to a heart.

Along the way there are more than a few laughs, but to be honest there weren’t as many as I’d hoped. The script aims pretty low, with a lot of jokes about sex, violence, and the other usual suspects. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but many of them are on the uninspired side of funny. Any screenwriter hoping to squeeze a laugh out of the line “If it’s rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’” probably needs to work a little harder. As it stands, the funniest gag in the movie involves a Chinese maid forced by her wealthy Southern employer to speak like a house slave from the 1840s, and that has nothing to do with the main plot.

Considering that it’s about a political campaign, I’m also a bit disappointed that the movie is so uninterested in talking about politics. Cam Brady is a Democrat, but this fact is only mentioned briefly at the very beginning of the movie and not brought up again. The script spends a couple of lines decrying the nation’s disinterest in hearing about “the issues” but doesn’t voice an opinion on any issues itself. It introduces one candidate, introduces another, and falls quickly into a pattern in which each tries to one-up the other with increasingly hostile attack tactics. Some of them are funny. Brady’s camp, for example, produces an attack ad that blurs the line between campaign advertisement and pornography, but nothing is treated with enough subtlety to actually say anything new about partisan politics.

As satire, The Campaign is slow-pitch soft ball. It’s a Nerf ground war. As a laugh-a-minute comedy, it’s just above water. But as a vehicle for a couple of very funny people with a good amount of chemistry, it’ll do.

Total Recall Review

Total Recall is a movie set in a dystopian future where chemical warfare has rendered most of Earth uninhabitable. In Europe, a gentrified upper class sits pretty in a city that seems inspired by the bright, bold, criss-crossing metropolis from The Fifth Element. In Australia, now called the Colony, a put-upon lower class slaves away in what looks like a slightly cleaner version of the slums from Blade Runner. Also in play are a memory-implanting machine, a secret agent who doesn’t know he’s a secret agent, a rag-tag resistance movement, and a mass transit system that shoots through the center of the planet.

There are enough elements here for the makings of a cracker-jack sci-fi movie, so why is almost everything about Total Recall instantly forgettable? We can start with the performances. Colin Farrell, rocking an American accent and a bangin’ beach bod, plays Douglas Quaid, a factory worker who is understandably unsatisfied with his life as a Colony plebe. One day after work he goes to Rekall, a business that implants customers with false memories which allow them to live out their fantasies. Quaid chooses the secret agent package, but before it gets underway he’s assaulted by a pack of federal goons. Turns out he actually IS a secret agent who’s been implanted with the memories of a workaday peasant, and the government had to step in because the Rekall process would have activated him too early, or something.

The movie isn’t particularly concerned with details and exists mostly to usher Farrell and company on to the next action scene. The role of Quaid was previously played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990 film of which this movie is a remake. Farrell is probably the better actor overall, but Schwarzenegger has more screen presence, and that’s something this movie could have really used. As Quaid, Farrell is a cipher, and very hard to root for. I will likely already have forgotten almost everything about Melina (Jessica Biel), Quaid’s partner in arms, by the time I finish writing this sentence. The only character who makes any impact is Quaid’s wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who it ends up is only working undercover as his wife to keep tabs on the government’s lapsed asset. She gives decent vampy badass.

Again, the movie seems to have the raw material to turn into something interesting, but it always comes up way short. For instance, while trying to regain his memories, it is suggested to Quaid that none of what he has experienced is real and that he is still at Rekall, living out his fantasy of being a secret agent while hooked up to a memory-implanting machine. This is an interesting angle, but the movie blows right past it in favor of more action. And the action isn’t even that bad. There’s some effective fight choreography and a lot of impressive CGI set design. But great CGI is nothing new. The best action scene in the world wouldn’t rescue the boring script.

I have not seen the original Total Recall, the one starring Schwarzenegger, but a cursory look at clips on YouTube shows what appears to be a much livelier and more imaginative movie. An example: in both films, Quaid is in possession of a memory which, if unearthed, will help the resistance movement. In the first Total Recall, a mutated conjoined fetus uses psychic powers to dig the memory out of Quaid’s brain. In the remake, Bill Nighy hooks Quaid up to a machine. In the original, Quaid tries to slip past a customs barrier by wearing a robotic helmet which makes him look like a middle-aged woman. When he throws the helmet, it explodes. In the remake, Quaid wears a holographic collar that makes him look like a different guy. The mandate for this movie seems to have been to remake the original but with less humor, less imagination, and more action but less violence. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, by all means see this movie. If it doesn’t, congratulations on salvaging two hours of your life.

Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood Review

Ah, 1993.  A time when men were men, women were women, and video games pounded players into submission until they were sobbing uncontrollably into the armrests of their easy chairs.  Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the tenth game in Konami’s venerable Castlevania franchise, is very much of this era.  The game was originally released on the TurboGrafx-16, a home gaming console popular in Japan but which never really got a foothold in the American market.  For this reason, Rondo of Blood went unplayed by American Castlevania fans for many years.  It is now available, among other places, on the Wii’s Virtual Console, and audiences everywhere have the opportunity to crumble beneath its difficulty.

Because Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is hard.  You play as Rhictor Belmont, of the Transylvania Belmonts, who needs to make his way through Dracula’s castle to rescue his kidnapped fiancé.  The game is broken up into several side-scrolling stages, and they are merciless.  Much of the difficulty comes from Rhictor’s inability to maneuver himself.  You can’t, for example, do much to control your jumps once you’re in the air, a problem for a game which requires microscopically precise platforming.  Enemies take off a lot of life per hit, and opportunities to recharge are rare.  Rhicter fights Dracula’s army of monsters armed with a bevy of sub-weapons and his trusty whip, but the whip has a limited range of movement and the sub-weapons often aren’t as powerful as they need to be.

The result: you’ll die a whole Hell of a lot before you finally conquer whatever obstacle has been giving you grief.  But once you do, you’ll feel terrific.  Rondo of Blood operates on a risk-reward system taken from an older school of game design, one which treated video gaming more as an ordeal to get through than as an experience to savor.  The game says to the player “Beat me if you can” and the player either rises to the challenge or leaves to go do something useful with their time.

For players who stick it out, the game rewards them with a flashy production and generous extras.  Rondo of Blood has a bright, clean look and a bountiful visual imagination.  The art team clearly enjoyed themselves in designing all manner of nasty monsters to throw at you, and even as they tear you to shreds for the umpteenth time you can’t help but appreciate the variety.  The elaborate boss battles are especially distinctive, not to mention especially difficult.  Many of the designs are so solid that they were reused for the game’s more famous sequel, Symphony of the Night.

The connections between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night don’t stop at the visuals.  Rondo of Blood is notable for being the first Castlevania game to not be entirely linear.  You still traverse levels one at a time, but many of those levels have more than one exit, and each of those exits lead to different stages.  Eventually, all roads take you to Dracula, but how you get there is up to you.  In Symphony of the Night, Konami famously tossed off the level-by-level format and made Dracula’s castle one giant interconnected environment.  Rondo of Blood is an important step on that path.

There’s also an additional playable character, named Maria, to whom you gain access after rescuing her in one of the game’s early stages.  Maria is much lighter on her feet that Rhicter, and her attacks are a bit more versatile.  She takes some of the crushing difficulty out of the game and is very welcome.  Rondo of Blood can be beaten fairly quickly if you know what you’re doing, but the addition of Maria and a network of alternate paths means that there’s quite a lot of game here to enjoy.  For fans of Castlevania, fans of gaming history, and fans of throwing their controllers against the wall in anger, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is a worthy investment.

The Dark Knight Rises Review

The first word I would use to describe The Dark Knight Rises is ‘dense’. For an action movie, for a superhero movie, for a movie, there’s just a lot going on. You probably don’t need to be told that The Dark Knight Rises is the third and final chapter in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and it has the responsibility first and foremost to see that the series goes out with a bang. This is does with energy and ambition, with the final third of its nearly three-hour runtime in particular upping the ante over what came before. As a standalone movie, it’s not quite as successful as its precursor The Dark Knight, but it should still provide plenty to chew on until such time as a producer gets the bright idea to reboot Batman yet again. So at least four years.

The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after the end of The Dark Knight. Batman has gone into retirement after taking the blame for the death of crusading district attorney/horribly disfigured psychopath Harvey Dent, and in his absence the Gotham City PD has cleaned up the streets with the help of the crime-fighting Dent Act. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, as if you didn’t already know) has become a Howard Hughes-ian hermit who holes up in his mansion to nurse his many, many grudges. I’ll freely admit that I love this take on the character, mainly because it allows him a number of glaring flaws in which I don’t think most superhero stories would indulge. You wouldn’t see Superman pulling this shit.

It’s that kind of expectation-busting antics that have set Nolan’s take on the Batman universe apart from others. He’s brought the Batman story as close to reality as it’s ever likely to get, and in doing so has given it a gravity that other superhero movies, even the good ones, just haven’t matched. Take the movie’s villain, Bane (Tom Hardy). Bane is a prison-born would-be freedom fighter intent on tearing down Gotham City as an act of indictment against the rotting, corrupt society he believes it to represent. To this end, he attacks the stock market, blows up a football game, and drags the wealthiest Gothamites out of their palatial estates to be beaten and publicly hanged. You don’t need to pay close attention to the headlines to know that Nolan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, is pushing some very specific buttons here. He’s made the story immediate in a way that a movie about a guy in a funny cape isn’t expected to be.

So the movie doesn’t lack for ideas, and that’s a great thing. It is not, unfortunately, quite as tight in the pacing department. For starters, the cast of the movie is one or two extras away from becoming too big to manage. Besides Batman, other returnees include faithful manservant Alfred (an effectively understated Michael Caine), gadget guru Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and the venerable Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). Fresh blood arrives in the form of conflicted cat-burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), do-gooding beat cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Wayne Enterprises board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard). Each of these players get their moment to shine, with Caine, Hathaway, and Gordon-Levitt doing the most with what’s given to them, but in the early going it’s a bit difficult to remember who’s working for who and why and when.

And it almost goes without saying that no character dominates the movie like Heath Ledger’s Joker did in the previous film. Tom Hardy is effectively implacable as Bane, but he’s not quite as terrifying as the script keeps insisting and his importance is diminished by a latter-half twist that leaves the movie without a villainous core. But maybe that’s intentional. While The Dark Knight focused on Batman’s most famous enemy, The Dark Knight Rises returns the focus to Batman himself, who spends the middle stretch of the movie doing some painful-looking soul searching before coming back stronger than ever.

Indeed, the final forty-five or so minutes of the movie are where it really takes off. Nolan’s vision of a modern city as war zone is thrilling and kind of scary, and the scenes involving giant crowds of combatants deliver something we hadn’t seen before. I’m even willing to ignore the whiff of sequel-bait given off by the ending on account of how successfully most of the threads are resolved. With these movies, Christopher Nolan and team have done a good thing for the credibility of superhero stories, and his latest sends the series off into the sunset with its head held high. Now begins the wait for the inevitable Batman reboot come 2018.