"You get an idea of who the major players are, and then they spend a modest amount of time shouting laughable dialogue at one another while being all but forced off the screen by visual effects. ... I found myself wondering, just for the heck of it, how the movie might have played with a more traditional approach. You know. Literate, concise dialogue. ... You know, that kind of stuff."

"Sam Worthington - Perseus"

"[smacks Perseus] Mutton head. Two days ago, I was trapped in a cell in a dungeon, admittedly, trying to escape— [to Andromeda] —unbecoming of the son of Poseidon— [back to Perseus] —but today I'm here, and I'm trying to save the universe. Jump in."

"Liam Neeson - Zeus"

"Ralph Fiennes - Hades"

"John Arcilla - The Security Guard"

"Lou Veloso - The Fisher Man"

"David Asmar - Evan Pines"

"Just fix my body...and leave my soul to me."

"Stacy Keach - Mark Turso"

"Zeljko Ivanek - Dr. Donald Foite"

"Your boy gave you strength. As did mine."

"Corey Stoll - Vendel"

"Albert Finney - Dr. Albert Hirsch"

"Scott Glenn - Ezra Kramer"

"David Strathairn - Noah Vosen"

"Oscar Isaac - Number Three"

"Edward Norton - Eric Byer"

"Donna Murphy - Dita"

"I am afraid, brother. Is that what you want me to say? I'm a god, and I'm afraid. When your precious humans die, at least their souls go to another place. When a god dies, it isn't death—it's just absence. It's nothing. It's Oblivion..." [whispers to self] "...it's Oblivion."

"Joan Allen - Deputy Director Pamela Landy"

"We are the sin eaters. It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our case can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary."

"You were given a Ferrari and your people treated it like a lawnmower."

"We're here talking about a serious infection, and all we're trying to do is determine how far it's spread so that we know how much we have to cut to save the patient. You have never heard of Treadstone. And Bourne -- I don't care if they bag him and drop the body on the sidewalk, we're not gonna touch it."

"There Was Never Just One"

"I'm not gonna sit here and argue with you. I'm gonna call your boss and we're gonna figure it out."

"We belong here."

"Jeremy Renner - Aaron Cross/Kenneth Kitsom"

"Well, if you're going to reprogram human genetic material, you need a delivery system, and nothing works better than virus. It's like a suitcase."

"I'm still trying to figure out if you're supposed to kill me or give me a pep-talk."

"What I'm going to do is wait for the next person to show up to kill you. Maybe they can help me."

"Rachel Weisz - Dr. Marta Shearing"

"I'm sorry that you think being human is not enough. But we humans hope when there's no hope. And we believe when to believe is idiotic. But sometimes, in spite everything, we prevail."

"You are Perseus, son of Zeus. 'Release the Kraken,' all of that."

"Joseph Gordon-Levitt - John Blake"

"Morgan Freeman - Lucius Fox"

"Tom Hardy - Bane"

"Anne Hathaway - Selina Kyle/Catwoman"

"Every Hero Has a Journey. Every Journey Has an End"

"The Epic Conclusion to the Dark Knight Legend"

"A Fire Will Rise"

"The legend ends. The Dark Knight rises."

"All superheroes are black sheep. But the Dark Knight has always been murkier than most. His superpowers are not an accident of birth, or of stumbling into the wrong lab at the wrong time. They're not powers at all, simply a simulation made possible by good fortune and the leisure that accompanies it. Bruce Wayne can splurge on the kit and cars to set himself up as a crime-fighting Christ substitute, plus power and glitter enough to hide his hobby. He's always been a curious idol: within aspiration because he's flesh and blood; beyond it because he's the lucky recipient of inherited wealth. So it should be no surprise that The Dark Knight Rises so firmly upholds the financial status quo. Christopher Nolan's film indulges in much guttural talk of the gap between the 99% and the 1%, but it is the former who are demonised, whose revolting actions require curbing and mutinous squeals muting. Your average Joe, it turns out, requires a benevolent, bad-ass billionaire to set him straight, to knock him sideways, if necessary. The Occupy Gotham movement, as organised by gargly terrorist Bane, is populated by anarchists without a cause, whose actions are fuelled by a lust for destruction, not as a corrective to an unjust world. Such self-made characters as we meet in the film are, by and large, fishy – power-grabbers hiding behind a fig-leaf of philanthropism. Even someone who earns their crust nicking other people's stuff looks agog when the masses storm posh apartments to try and redistribute a bit of bubbly. Batman's butler-crush and bells and whistles feudalism is swallowable – it's a cartoon, right! Likewise the free pass that Wayne's Rowntree-ish gestures, disapproval of criminals and general tortured grizzling seems to allow him. But The Dark Knight Rises is a quite audaciously capitalist vision, radically conservative, radically vigilante, that advances a serious, stirring proposal that the wish-fulfilment of the wealthy is to be championed if they say they want to do good. Mitt Romney will be thrilled. What's strange is that quite so many of the rest of us seem to want to buy into it."

"You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, there’s a comic-book movie for you. The Dark Knight Rises concludes the trilogy of Batman movies so distinctively rebooted, reimagined, and reinvigorated over the past seven years by director Christopher Nolan at the helm and actor Christian Bale in the Batsuit. And the highly anticipated project arrives with outsize political and cultural ambitions. Theme-wise, Nolan tackles nothing less than societal upheaval, urban unrest, class warfare, personal sacrifice, and spiritual salvation, with some nuclear brinkmanship thrown in for timeliness. That’s epic stuff, as grounded in serious social commentary as the literature of Charles Dickens that the director and his coscreenwriter brother, Jonathan Nolan, have cited as inspiration. This is a Batman narrative for a post-9/11 age of anxiety, morally split between the best of times and the worst of times."

"Christian Bale - Bruce Wayne/Batman"

"The Legend Ends"

"[eulogy at Bruce Wayne's funeral] I see a beautiful city. And a brilliant people, rising from this abyss. I see the lives, for which I lay down my life - peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

"[to Bruce] Remember when you left Gotham? Before all this, before Batman? You were gone seven years. Seven years I waited, hoping that you wouldn't come back. Every year, I took a holiday. I-I went to Florence. There's this cafe, on the banks of the Arno. Every fine evening, I would sit there and order a-a Fernet Branca. I had this fantasy that I would look across the tables and I'd see you there, with a... wife, maybe a-a couple of kids. You wouldn't say anything to me, nor me to you. But we'd both know that you'd made it, that you were happy. I never wanted you to come back to Gotham. I always knew there was nothing here for you, except pain and tragedy. And I wanted something more for you than that. I still do."

"[eulogy at Harvey Dent's funeral] I knew Harvey Dent. I was his friend. And it will be a long time before someone inspires us the way he did. I believed in Harvey Dent."