Directed by Christopher Nolan / Written by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer, based on the characters by Bob Kane
What I found most thought-provoking in this film was the fact that even though through words it promotes that "anyone can be a hero" (as said by Batman himself, when he states what his original purpose for creating the masked vigilante was), through actions it still tells a story of a single hero who saves everyone else at his own expense. Never do the citizens of Gotham actually act for themselves, nor does anyone expect them to; the arch-evil Bane does tell them to riot and to "take the power back to the people", but he never actually means it, and they never actually do anything about it. The quiet mass of people is still either on the mercy of the evil leader being blindly lead into chaos, or they're waiting for their external savior to come and save them. The police forces did act, though, and they were the only visible mass of relatable people in the movie, but even they are not relatable enough: a police officer is still an authority from the perspective of a common viewer, and thus not "on their level".
If the point of all this was to wake the viewer up to the imbalance of this mindset through the emotions that may occur when Batman supposedly dies, it didn't really get there, so I'm assuming the point was perhaps originally there but then smash boom bang Hollywood and its producers and we have a movie trying to be insightful but not having the balls to do it properly.
This movie is very clearly a product of its time, as it occasionally lingered in the spirit of the Occupy movement. The excessive realism through which the scene at the stock market was portrayed was perhaps a tad too underlining, yet that part of the plot itself managed to show the power hidden in the obscure numbers of stock sales and the influence that part of the financial world altogether may have on a single person. Though again, it was just the hero who suffered the visible consequences.
Also, the line Selina says in the dance scene paints out all the bitterness that dwelled in the hearts of those who went to the streets a year ago, and that of all those who have ever considered themselves poor and/or life to be unfair: "You think this can last? There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."
Overall this movie had a delicious pile of elements to build upon, and it managed to do it just fine irregardless of the dizzying pace it rampaged forth - it could've done it better, though, and had some of the explosions and chases been cut off, it might have become a spectacle of its own kind. In The Dark Knight Nolan gave the viewers something to care about by giving the characters enough time to grow, but now it seems he trusted everyone in the audience to already know the characters and love them just the same. I wonder if it occurred to him how much a character can change in an 8-year gap.
