Why bother detailing the film’s routine story when Nolan can’t get beneath its surface? Demoralized Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) loses his fortune and retraces his previous torturous superhero training to protect Gotham City from another cast of overly familiar nemeses–sneak-thief Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), homicidal freak Bane (Tom Hardy) and an unlikely foe thrown in at the last half-hour.

The Dark Knight Rises only offers an economics lesson in how an entire culture gets indoctrinated into buying repackaged characters, set-pieces and hackneyed style, not a great modern myth. Instead, all the action-movie reflexes learned from James Bond films (the opening airplane stunt), Indiana Jones flicks (battles against world-historical evil) and comic book movies (innumerable, copycat origin-tales) seem for naught. Consumer amnesia rises.

When Batman was just a comic book figure, it appealed to youth and embodied an innocent sense of justice and necessary heroism. Then the graphic novel version, Frank Miller’s 1986 The Dark Knight Returns, converted the fable into casual cynicism that Nolan treats in his now over-scaled sophomoric manner. “I’m necessary evil,” Bane hisses during one of his rampages, appealing to jaded youth and tilting Nolan’s interest away from storytelling and toward trite, cynical mood.

Even I mistook the franchise’s previous mass killings and implacably malevolent adversaries for significant (sickening) ugliness because they resonated 9/11 anxiety. But as The Dark Knight Rises plods toward the three-hour point and Nolan drops-in newsy gibes, it becomes obvious that his political evocations mean nothing. There hasn’t been a trilogy this shapeless and unresonant since The Lord of the Rings–partly to ensure another Nolan sequel (Dark Robin Lays an Egg?).

The 9/11 shockwaves of Nolan’s terrorist-bomb-laden Gotham City include an explosive football stadium extravaganza no deeper than a coming-attractions trailer and offhand references to Occupy Wall Street in Catwoman’s felonious rage against the upperclass. But none of these opportunistic gimmicks (whether a law-and-order subplot or underclass rioting) relate to any character’s dramatized feelings. Bale’s bummed-out crusader lacks convincing moral resilience (see his reluctant hero in Zhang Yimou’s stirring The Flowers of War instead). Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Robin mopes in isolation. Hathaway’s one-note femme fatale never develops like Michelle Pfeiffer’s post-feminist hellcat in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. Tom Hardy’s Bane, a Hannibal Lecter/Darth Vader composite, remains muffled; his motivations masked like his face.

To read the full review at City Arts click here.

Already, The Dark Knight Rises has caused movie media to embarrass itself. Those front page headlines in both the Daily News (four stars) and New York Post (four stars) are heralds of film journalism’s decline into boosterism. It’s happened before and will happen again. Looks like the decline is here to stay.

But the most pathetic aspect of TDKR hype is the fanboy backlash via Rotten Tomatoes. It’s become the latest example of Internet mania being confused with genuine cultural response. Blogger Eric Snider posted a pretend negative review of TDKR triggering the usual fanaticism that is the source of Rotten Tomatoes prominence–name-calling, death threats and other hostility that also caused the site-crash of another critic who also posted a negative review on RT.

If this was merely the dysfunction of cellphone-texting kids who fell asleep during junior high English class (where they supposedly were introduced to the idea of art and judgment), it wouldn’t matter much. What’s troubling is the rush to non-judgment–and hype–that causes newspapers to trumpet commercial product even when it’s movies that haven’t yet opened (and so, in journalistic terms, are not actually cultural or news events). This leads to extreme reactions by fans who haven’t yet seen the product. Both camps lack the patience for reasoned response–the inhale/exhale process of a healthy cultural response. Both are missing the cultural conditions for critical thinking. That’s what Eric Snider’s stunt cleverly exposed: Both professional and amateur fanaticism have taken the place of criticism. And for his pains, Snider was banned from Rotten Tomatoes, ever vigilant to protect its harboring of fanaticism–the silly anticipation of 100% scores that is the source of the site’s income. (RT’s poobah issued an Open Letter that disingenuously evades this fact.)

Reviewers who want to get the jump on each other by abetting the marketing of film products will continue to receive special sanction from the “embargoes” that studios use to restrict some outlets. Fanboys who want their love of movie product unimpeded will continue to be defensive about it. And Rotten Tomatoes provides a platform for both.

This aggregate site phenomenon has caused basic curiosity about new films to warp into the intellectual cowardice of mob-mentality and group think. This wouldn’t matter much if the mainstream media didn’t give it so much importance that fanboy fanaticism becomes today’s reflective standard.

I wrote about this before in the Sept. 28, 2010, New York Press article “Discourteous Discourse”:

Attacks from internet bloggers–crude interlopers of a once august profession–is not about diversity of opinion. What’s at root is an undisguised rivalry. Every moviegoer with a laptop claims equal–vengeful–standing with so-called professionals. This anti-intellectual backlash defies the purpose of the [New York Film Critics] Circle’s founding in 1935. Professional dignity is the last thing internetters respect. Their loudmouth enmity and lack of knowledge are so overwhelming it is imperative to put this crisis in perspective.

These new social networks overturn the informed judgments and occupational decorum of journalist-critics, substituting the glib enthusiasms and non-discriminating devotion of apparently juvenile cliques. Worse yet, this schoolyard style of peer group fanaticism has devolved into all-out, ugly intimidation (internet bullying). It has begun to sway the professional ranks already frightened by media transitions that have cost many of my colleagues their jobs.