(No spoilers here)
Holy hell this was good. It's not *PERFECT*, but it's damn good.
Finally we have an actual Batman-as-"World's Greatest Dectective" story. Nice shades of Chinatown and Seven going on here. And the look of everything is gorgeous. Gotham is a city that is crumbling, physically and morally, and it shows.
Did it need to be 3 hours long? I don't know. The story is incredibly dense, so I can't immediately say "Yeah, they could have easily trimmed half an hour off this and not lost anything". I posit that we would be talking about cutting entire sub-plots to get the runtime down in any significant way. And I don't think any of the subplots are extraneous.
There are lots of (let's admit it to ourselves) GOOFY characters in Batman's Rogue's Gallery. And for a long time I considered the Riddler one of the goofier ones. What they did to make him not only believable, but downright scary was amazing. Turning him into the Zodiac Killer was genius. And Paul Dano's casting was spot on.
They went a long way toward giving Selina Kyle a workable motivation. There was one line that I rolled my eyes at (especially considering who it's directed at), but I won't mention it here.
It's a shame that I found Colin Farrell's fat man makeup a bit jarring, because I LOVE everytyhing else about his Penguin, and I'm looking forward to seeing him pop up again.
Pattinson's Bruce Wayne is so DAMAGED. Possibly one of the most tortured versions of the character we've seen yet. This makes sense given the time frame. He hasn't had the time or inclination yet to build up his millionaire plaboy public image.
Andy Serkis is one of those actors that is phenomenal no matter what he shows up in (there's an Unreal Engine tech demo where he recites some Shakespeare that's fantastic, even discounting the fact that they're just doing it to so they could show off completely transforming his face in real time), so it's no surprise that he does a fine job here. If I had a complaint it would be that they didn't give him a whole hell of a lot to do (which is frequently the case with Alfred), but like with the Penguin, I'm that there's more in store in later installments.
There's a scene near the end that can go one of two ways, and it's not clear which way it goes right up til the end. You'll know it when you see it.
To compare apples to oranges, I'd say that overall this was an even better experience than Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which is also a damn fine movie, and singlehandedly responsible for getting me motivated to go to theaters again for the first time in like 5 years.
-- Ben