Nice, that's nice

They spent quite a bit of time on him getting out of that ****ing pit. That was the obstacle. The blockade of Gotham was never presented as a real obstacle to Batman. He's one guy who happens to be trained by the League of Shadows to be a superhuman superhero supereverything, still has lots of assets, friends, and money and has lived in the city his whole life. I can he can find a way across the frozen river in the middle of the night.

Hell, the special forces guys made it in pretty far by posing as DHS agents. I at first thought they were trapped, but that would serve no practical purpose and by the end it was obv Talia found out and had them taken care of.

If I were expecting perfection and a thorough explanation of all plot points from a time-constrained movie, sure, but I'm not. This isn't like a great piece of literature where it's possible and expected that most loose ends either be reasonably covered or rationally filled in by the reader. I know you keep arguing these movies tried to move away from a "comic book" approach, but the fact remains that it's a comic book universe. That's the way such pieces of fiction operate and always will operate. Batman "disappearing" (one of his trademark moves) in the blink of an eye during conversation is physically impossible in many "real world" instances, but does that ever really bother anyone?

Again, I'm not saying it was perfect, but just bashing the movie for such minor things as "HOW'D HE GET BACK IN THE CITY?" is trying really hard to FIND problems, not just discussing some obvious glaring errors.

Bane is as much a sidekick as Darth Vader was. Very smart and strong on his own, but ultimately controlled (well, until the end of ROTJ, at least) by someone slightly more intelligent with more power. Do note that as soon as Talia leaves, Bane almost instantly ignores her order and goes to kill Batman.

It's not that Bane's a sidekick (although I do think he's lessened a lot when he's not the clear #1, as more of his power came from his planning than being able to kick ass). It's that suddenly Batman can beat him by hitting him in the face after dude kicked his ass left and right before- and then BOOM dramatic entrance from my girlfriend and he's gone. Just everything about him kinda diminishes.

Batman had been training for 5 months, whereas before he was coming off cold. Batman also refocused his energy, fear, etc. and all that.

Even Bane comments during the first fight that Batman's inactivity has made him weak.

The reason he won by hitting him in the face the second time was because he ****ed up Bane's breathing/pain management mask thing, thus giving Batman the advantage. Plus, Batman went through his whole Rocky training montage, so he was guaranteed to win. Don't you ever watch movies?

Well he's been "training". He basically did a months' worth of push ups and sit ups.

As Pecota pointed out, it was a movie training montage. Look at your avatar!

Bats was overconfident before the first fight, going into it assuming that since he beat Ra's, who excommunicated Bane, then he'd be able to come out on top like he usually always does.

The pit wasn't a real obstacle. Of course Batman was going to get out of the pit, the only question was how. Once the old guy told him that the child did it without a rope, the tension was gone, 100% chance he was going to make the jump. Really, that was the problem with the whole movie. They raised the stakes so high with a nuke that they made it impossible for Batman to fail. In TDK, there was legit tension. The Joker blew up the hospital, it was plausible that the ferries were going to blow up, and he managed to kill Rachel and maim Harvey Dent. In short, Joker won as much as he lost. In TDKR, Bain managed to blow up half of Gotham, but then they instantly overshadowed it by introducing the nuke plot. It didn't have nearly the amount of tension and suspense as TDK because you knew from the very instant the nuke was introduced that it would never destroy Gotham, the only question was how Batman was going to stop it. That was never an issue with TDK, you had no idea how much Joker was going to get away with.

See the movie was so long that they had to cut out the prison shakeweight scene. That would have explained everything

I clicked a spoiler ITT accidentally that very much made me believe the nuke could explode in the city before I saw the movie, so perhaps that gave me added tension? lol

1) The pit sequence was supposed to be about Batman getting his head straight, much more so than whether or not he'd be able to make the jump. It was the events leading up to the jump that actually mattered.

2) Solid point on the nuke upping the ante to the point of snapping the tension, you can't go full-nuclear and expect the audience to be on the edge of their seat the whole time. Though I'd bet that a lot of people watching thought Batman actually died while disposing of the bomb (myself included), which is quite a feat considering he's a ****ing superhero in his own movie. So I'd give Nolan some credit for not totally killing da drama.