Milo’s review published on Letterboxd:
For a film so ideologically opposed to structures – as shackles, Gordon says – Nolan nonetheless finds ample room to mythologize the police state. Where in Begins and The Dark Knight the police department had been an inherently inept, corrupt, and festering bubo on the pockmarked Gotham, The Dark Knight Rises transmogrifies the boys in blue into the army of justice, the antonym of the League of Shadows. The completely bizarre, abstract grotesquerie of an entire police force trapped underground is played as a kind of genuine tragedy; this military of public servants is all that stands between Gotham and an Occupy/Arab Spring inflected conquest of faux revolutionaries. The ambivalence and misanthropy that mollified any of Nolan’s authoritarian tendencies in the previous films now wrenched away; images bizarrely redolent of Buster Keaton’s Cops play with an entirely inverted moral presumption. This dearth of even a charitable nuance is then met by a film whose formal capacity sprawls and disintegrates: save a taut first act, The Dark Knight Rises is an increasingly laconic gloss on a city under siege, operating without dramatic or structural rationale. Wayne’s metaphoric rebirth – which reframes his childhood trauma as a kind of Biblical tale – is appreciably expressionistic, but the events in Gotham are disparate and irrelevant, scenes therein of increasingly poor motivation. Action sequences – rarely exemplary in Nolan’s cinema – crumble entirely, jerking into strange pantomime. Nolan’s commitment to grandiloquence is palpable, but here it becomes cacophony.