Christopher Nolan, you have just raised expectations for your new movie. You really did. Nolan told Empire in their recent tell-all about the film:

“I think this is the biggest one I’ve done. The biggest one anyone’s done since the silent era, in technical terms.”

Now, he’s talking about the size of the shots and technical things like that so he probably is right. He’s not saying the cultural impact is huge or that the movie is bloated with special effects and stuff like that. No, he’s just saying it’s a huge technical accomplishment.

“I’ve been watching a lot of silent films with my kids on Blu-Ray. We’ve shot over a third of the movie on the IMAX format, and that naturally puts you more in the mode of staging very large events for the camera. It’s my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could. It’s also more in the mould of Doctor Zhivago, or A Tale Of Two Cities, which is a historical epic with all kinds of great storytelling taking place during the French Revolution. There’s an attempt to visualise certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely to the idea of an American city. Or, to put it another way: revolutions and the destabilising of society have happened everywhere in the world, so why not here?”

All right, I got you Mr. Nolan. Turning my expectations back down to extraordinarily high rather than astronomically high. So what’s this about The Dark Knight Rises being a war film?

“It’s all about historical epics in conception. It’s a war film. It’s a revolutionary epic. It’s looking back to the grand-scale epics of the past, really, and for me that goes as far back as silent films.”

Oh yeah, cool. Ahh silent films, like The Artist. So grand and adventurous. That’s what we’re going to get with TDKR. Grand and adventurous. And an epic war film. That’s also the biggest movie of all time. Well, in technical terms. [Empire via IGN]

the dark knight rises