As a supplement to this first-blush reaction to The Dark Knight Rises I’m now ready with some spoiler-filled observations. Proceed at your own risk. The rest below the fold.

* Overall, I haven’t softened on the movie. But then again, neither have I hardened on it. It still strikes me as either a flawed masterpiece or a really interesting and noble failure. All of my misgivings about the editing and structure stand.

* For instance, look at the way Bane’s arc is built. We meet him in the opening plane heist–and then the next time we see him he’s masterminding a huge underground city beneath Gotham. There’s nothing in between, no journey for him, no build-up. As a result, his character doesn’t get the narrative heft it deserves.

* As my friend Mike Russell notes, this is the first time in the series that Nolan, et al resort to comic-book logic to solve a plot problem. Bruce Wayne escapes from his prison in South America/Uzbekistan/Parts Unknown with nothing but the clothes on his back and gets himself inside Gotham City in a matter of days by . . . umm . . . gee, that’s kind of hard . . . well . . .

Because he’s Batman!

As Mike notes, “Because he’s Batman!” is actually a pretty good explanation and I suppose you can’t fault the writers for playing that card once in three movies. Nonetheless, this seems like a pretty easy problem to solve, writing wise: Instead of having the bomb set to go off after 5 months, just make it 7 months. Give Bruce an extra 8 weeks to scrap his way back to the U.S. Why would you not do that?

* One of the great achievements of TDK is that not only is the story great, but so is the dialogue. On the other hand, the scene in DKR, where Bruce and Alfred part ways is terribly, painfully mis-written. Again, the scene isn’t misconceived–I just got the sense that the Nolans and Goyer couldn’t quite get the polish right and instead of staying with it, eventually just decided that it was serviceable enough.

* As I said initially, there’s a lot of stuff I really loved about the movie. For instance, Galley Friend M.W. points out the beautiful thematic echoes Nolan gives us on the idea of holes: From the vertical fuselage Bane descends (and then ascends), to the prison hole Bruce Wayne must conquer, to the well that young Bruce tumbled down in Batman Begins. It’s lovely.

* I also really appreciated that they address the problems with keeping a secret identity when you’re Bruce Wayne. In DKR it’s pretty clear that Batman’s real identity is the worst-kept secret in Gotham. Everyone–from Blake to Bain–knows who he is. Selena Kyle gets if figured out pretty quick, too. The only guy who seems to be still somewhat in the dark is Gordon, and that may be because he’s too old to realize that he should have figured it out years ago.

* I loved–loved–the Bane character. (Even if I though more could have been done with him in the first act.) Both the writing and Tom Hardy’s performance do so many little things right. For instance, the way he strides around clutching his lapels is so wonderfully Napoleonic. The scene where he menaces the corporate weasel he’s been working with by simply placing the back of his hand on the guy’s shoulder–phenomenal work.

But my favorite aspect of the character is that he’s funny. And not funny in a laughing, ha-ha way, but funny in the sense that he’s this hulking monster who’s so much smarter than everyone else in the movie–including Batman–that he’s constantly making little jokes for the sole purpose of amusing himself. There’s the moment on the plane where everyone else is on edge and he quips about wondering why you’d bother shooting someone you were going to throw off a plane. Then there’s the moment when he faces off with Batman in the cave and remarks, under his breath, “Not as serious as yours.” My favorite moment is his speech on the steps of City Hall where he’s obviously play acting, theatrically gesturing and rolling his eyes as if to say, I can’t believe that you idiots are going to buy this stuff. A wonderful conception of a great character.

I suspect that Bane is destined to forever be regarded as “He’s no Joker.” But that’s not really the point. In the same way Aaron Eckhart’s less-showy Harvey Dent glues TDK together, Bane does all of the heavy lifting with regards to both story and tension in this movie. And he’s fantastic.

* One of the things Nolan has talked about before is how he mines the Batman canon for moments–characters, scenes, even settings–that he can then appropriate and make his own. He does this toward the end of DKR with one of my favorite Batman moments ever: the confrontation between Jim Gordon and Ellen Yindel in The Dark Knight Returns.

You’ll recall that Yindel takes over as commissioner for Gordon in the Frank Miller books and you want to hate her, because she’s out to arrest Batman and she’s an affirmative-action hire. But you can’t. Because she’s respectful and a great cop and tough-as-nails in her own right. So Yindel, who’s no fool, asks Gordon why he put up with Batman for all those years.

And Gordon responds with the story that maybe FDR knew about Pearl Harbor ahead of him. And maybe he let it happen, because he knew he needed to get America into the fight. And maybe good men died so he could have his pretext. But that you can’t judge actions like that, men like that, in hindsight, Gordon says. Because the times–and the men–were just too big.

Nolan appropriates that scene and uses it for the conflict with Officer Blake and Gordon, this time over the Harvey Dent cover-up. And once again, it works great.

* The official nerd opus on this will come Monday.