The biggest problem with The Dark Knight Rises...

I've touched on this before, but I feel it's important.

The hype around this film deals with (among other things) who Joseph Gordon-Levitt will play, will Talia al Ghul show up, how good Anne Hathaway's Catwoman will be, and the "oh boy" factor of Bane being in it...

There's a lot going on.

But that's not the problem.

There's talk of the plot being a combination of the "Broken Bat" and "The Dark Night Returns" comics - two different stories from two different writers at two different periods in Batman's comic history.

But that's not the problem either.

The problem is right there in the poster...in the bottom right hand corner.

No, not the release date...right above it:

"The Legend Ends"

This is the final film in the Nolan trilogy. Props to him for committing to and sticking with all three films. Same for Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, and the rest of the cast and crew for their continual hard work. However...

...this is the final film in the trilogy.

Yes, there's talks of DC "reinventing the character" in future films to go along with a more unified DC movie universe, which is a fine idea...

...but they're essentially hitting the "reset" button...AGAIN.

Is this all DC can do now? Get out (somewhat) decent stories only to start back at zero when things get too convoluted?



This is why I stopped buying DC books in the nineties. Zero Hour was the big thing and it was an attempt to fix what went wrong with their Post-Crisis universe.

Which didn't work, because they had to start over again...



...and again...



...and again



By the way, DC is having (another) "Zero Month" in September, 2012.

I've said it before. There are two ways to build a comic-book universe:

1) Organically, from the ground up, like Marvel and the original Valiant Universes, and

2) Through acclimation - the buying up of failed comic companies' characters, like DC.

Neither one is wrong per-se, but the inherent problems facing any published comic universe - expansion, gaining new readers and updating characters for example - are more difficult when also trying to incorporate multiple companies' worth of characters into the same damn universe.

Every time DC hits that reset button, a little more of the DC fanboy in me dies.

I'm forty years old...there's only so much of me left.

So, is it really worth seeing The Dark Knight Rises when we all know things will be completely different in two years?

I say yes it is...not because I want to see something new or exciting...but because I just want to see how this Dark Knight...well...ends...