Hacker Cinema
The Dark Knight Rises
2012 · Film · 165 min
Part of The Dark Knight Collection
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect the late attorney's reputation and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years later, Batman encounters the mysterious Selina Kyle and the villainous Bane, a new terrorist leader who overwhelms Gotham's finest. The Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.
11 positive6 negative2 mixed24 neutralfrom 43 commenters
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45 comments on Hacker News
Nolan used Imax 70mm cameras to film some scenes in the Dark Knight Rises, like the plane scene to open the movie. Dunkirk and Interstellar used 65mm IMAX cameras.
The problem with the 48fps release of The Hobbit is it was only available in 3D (and digital). I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes, so watching a 3 hour film was not enjoyable at all (I hadn't internalised the sunken cost fallacy at the time; I shouldn't have stayed for the whole thing).
IMAX shows that 3D is completely unnecessary. Gravity is the only 3D film worth seeing, but even that never made me hold on to my seat like the helicopter scene at the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises. Not a great film, but I was able to see it in IMAX.
One format I'd really love to see for real is Doug Trumbull's Showscan. It uses 70mm film at 60fps. I kinda wish Nolan had picked up on that instead of IMAX. The flicker at a proper 70mm IMAX screen is really noticeable for me.
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
There are only 3 screens in the UK; I've accepted I won't be going. I'm glad I got to see The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet in the BFI IMAX, though. The latter was during COVID and we had a whole row to ourselves. I don't even mind that these aren't the greatest films. IMAX is more of a spectacle in its own right and a great film will still be great on any screen.
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
That may be true if you're severely depressed, but I think it can save you if you're starting to get depressed. That's what happened to me at one point, and an online comment saved me.
I was like 60% depressed but on my way there. I just took my first computer science class in college but I was overly ambitious when I participated in an undergrad CS research. The stress and imposter syndrome was shoving me to the downward spiral.
I posted some gloomy thoughts on an online forum. It was long ago, but I remember the post contained how I could kind of relate to the villain while watching the movie The Dark Knight Rises.
Some online person advised me "lift weights". I had never tried seriously lifting weights, but I was living in a student apartment 10 minutes away from the student gym, so I decided to give it a try. I can't forget the sensation when I did a set of bench press. After a period of amassing so much stress, each rep felt like I was reaching my hand into my brain, directly scooping out the waste and tossing it away.
I became much more active after that, and successfully finished the research and the degree.
It's like how homelessness is more reversible for people who became homeless less than a year ago, and why organizations focus on those groups.
Mentioned this elsewhere but The Dark Knight Rises is one of the worst dark movie offenders. When someone says dark movie scenes it’s what comes to my mind. That one confusing backwards movie has terrible audio he did on purpose.
Oppenheimer didnt suffer from either of those issues but I’ve only watched it once on a good TV.
Maybe you should turn off the motion smoothing and show the movies in their proper 24 fps?
Playing something like The Dark Knight Rises from an UHD Blu-ray on a good OLED looks incredible!
I didn't realize Wray had already resigned, and would have assumed the same as you, but, much to my surprise, this article about acting director Driscoll came out yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/politics/fbi-director-brian-driscoll-trump-justice-department.html
By Adam Goldman
Reporting from Washington Feb. 4, 2025
Brian Driscoll, the acting director of the F.B.I., has become an improbable symbol of quiet resistance toward the Justice Department’s campaign to single out F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 riot.
To start, Mr. Driscoll’s appointment was an accident. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, the White House identified the wrong agent as acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake.
Even if he was not meant to be leading the agency, he has defended the rank-and-file. His refusal at the time to furnish the names of employees, as top Justice Department officials desired, and his insistence that a formal review process be put in place, has spurred widespread support for Mr. Driscoll.
Former and current agents have traded memes and satirical clips celebrating him, offering a rare moment of levity as dismay and deep unease set in across the F.B.I. and as Mr. Driscoll navigates the political perils of Washington and a president who is deeply hostile to the agency.
Known as “Drizz” among his friends, Mr. Driscoll, 45, does not possess the typical G-man bearing of his predecessors, with a bushy mustache and his face framed by long curls. It is a demeanor that has become the focal point of artificially generated memes.
In one, he is depicted as a saint grasping the handbook for agents running investigations. In another, he glances upward, encircled by the words “What Would Drizz Do?” One video, a compilation of scenes from the movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” portrays Mr. Driscoll as Batman doing battle with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in Los Angeles.
Former agents jokingly called his appointment a providential mistake.
A heated confrontation on Friday with top Justice Department officials left many wondering at the time whether Mr. Driscoll had been fired. Scrutinizing agents and others involved in the sprawling investigation into the Capitol riot would touch a startling number of people: The F.B.I. opened about 2,400 cases that involved about 6,000 intelligence analysts, agents and other employees.
In a defiant email Friday night, James Dennehy, the top agent in the New York field office, warned his staff that the F.B.I. was “in the middle of a battle of our own.” Praising Mr. Driscoll and his deputy, Robert C. Kissane, as “warriors,” Mr. Dennehy asserted they were “fighting for this organization.”
In fact, Mr. Kissane, the top counterterrorism agent in New York, had been widely believed to be in line to be acting director, several current and former agents said, with Mr. Driscoll as the No. 2 official. But when the White House unveiled its website to reflect its staff under the Trump administration, Mr. Driscoll was identified as the bureau’s chief.
Rather than correct the error, the administration left it.
Mr. Driscoll had been in charge of the Newark office for only about a week before he moved to the director’s suite on the seventh floor of F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, thrust into the middle of a political firestorm. Rumors of his dismissal continued to swirl on Friday until the bureau released a statement a day later to confirm that he was still in charge.
Friends and colleagues describe Mr. Driscoll as unflappable. He was a special agent with the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service in San Diego before joining the F.B.I. in 2007. His first assignment was in the New York office, the largest outpost in the bureau, where agents form powerful alliances and deep connections.
In 2011, he passed rigorous tryouts and was selected to the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, a highly trained unit formed in the years after the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Many operators were once in the U.S. military and served in the Joint Special Operations Command.
Rescue team operators, including Mr. Driscoll, have repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there, embedding with Navy SEAL and Delta Force commandos.
Former members of the rescue team said that Mr. Driscoll was dispatched in 2013 to Alabama, where they successfully rescued a 5-year-old boy who had been taken hostage in a bunker. He was a gunfighter on the blue squadron.
He also took part in a dangerous raid with U.S. commandos in May 2015 in Syria in the hopes of finding clues about Kayla Mueller, a young woman from Phoenix who was kidnapped by the Islamic State. (Ms. Mueller died in captivity.)
During the operation, Delta Force commandos killed a top militant leader and captured his wife. Mr. Driscoll later testified in a criminal trial in Northern Virginia about the evidence he collected at the scene, including a red laptop that the Islamic State had used to force Ms. Mueller to watch jihadist videos.
In 2020, Mr. Driscoll returned to New York, where he supervised terrorism cases in Africa, Western Europe and Canada. He then took over the Hostage Rescue Team in 2022, which handles the most dangerous missions inside the United States, like disabling a nuclear weapon or rescuing a hostage held by a terrorist.
Chris O’Leary, a former top counterterrorism agent in New York who worked with Mr. Driscoll, pointed to his experience.
“What the F.B.I. needs most is a principled leader, and we have one right now in Brian Driscoll,” Mr. O’Leary said.
He added that Mr. Kissane, a West Point graduate, is of the same mold as Mr. Driscoll.
On Friday, Mr. Driscoll notified staff about the Justice Department’s efforts to collect the names of all F.B.I. personnel who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.
“I am one of those employees,” he wrote.
Indeed, Mr. Driscoll took part in the arrest of Samuel Fisher, an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in Manhattan two weeks after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
F.B.I. agents found over a thousand rounds of ammunition and several weapons, including an illegally modified AR-15 rifle and machetes, in Mr. Fisher’s Upper East Side apartment and car. Among them was a “ghost gun,” which is unregistered and thus untraceable.
In 2022, Mr. Fisher was sentenced to three and a half years in prison after he pleaded guilty to a gun possession charge in Manhattan Supreme Court. He also pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mr. Fisher was pardoned by Mr. Trump.
I think the sequels are easy to ignore and tolerable bycatch if it means you get strong films amongst them - Batman Begins, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Logan, Infinity War (even just for a great villain), and (last but definitely not least) Into the Spider-Verse, etc. That last one is a relevant example given how many Spider-Man films there are and how few of them I've bothered watching.
Similar to the feeling I got when re-watching Dark Knight Rises, and Drive on a plane (Lufthansa?). Something was missing — the violence. I guess airlines have to assume that any age can watch films on those screens and cut films accordingly. Strange to think that a country wants to treat the entire population like Lufthansa treats kids.
Can't speak for everyone, but for me its a handful of things:
1. The action sequences. While we are mostly past the era of "shaky" cam fight scenes, we still have a lot of bad action choreographing. I'm thinking of "The Dark Knight Rises" style fighting where bad guys with guns kind of just fumble around and wait for Batman to get close and pummel them. John Wick is over the top, but it still feels grounded in reality, as it feels like the characters are fighting in a way in which they realistically could be killed by a single gunshot. That's relatively unique in action movies today.
2. The world building. The series is very good about "show, don't tell". It doesn't come right out and explain everything about the structure of this underground society of assassins and criminals, their codes of conduct, their relationships, etc. It slowly reveals them over the course of the movie, and often not through exposition but simply through the character's living and interacting in the world that's been created. I think most people find this kind of storytelling more satisfying.
3. The simplicity of the story. The premise is absurdly simple. A former assassin is wronged at the lowest point of his life. He decides to get revenge. Literally all 3 movies take place over the course of like a week and the entirety of the plot is just the continuation and fallout of that initial premise. People aren't saving the world. There are no large governments involved, no super-powers, no MacGuffins, no overly convoluted plans. I think that gives the movies a grounded feeling that isn't common in big budget action movies.
I work in the industry. Look at Heat and the opening of Dark Knight Rises and you'll see a partial direct remake of many shots.
People take shots from other films all the time. The only weird thing about this is how close the two films were chronologically. Usually people steal from older films. But this is far from a big deal. Tarantino has talked about how Reservoir Dogs is basically a segment of one of his favourite Honk Kong films made into a whole feature. This is literally the way a lot of films get made, people are inspired, sometimes they see a scene that's quite tough or they can't quite crack it so they take from some other film. Doesn't mean they're hacks.
> Bane vs. Pink Guy, also known as Bane vs. Filthy Frank, is an image macro series based on a screenshot from the film The Dark Knight Rises altered to include the Filthy Frank character Pink Guy. In the image, the Batman villain Bane is preparing to fight to Pink Guy.
This is the part that bothers me:
"I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines.
Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?utm_campaign=clip
---If that is the case, that the director does not want us to understand the dialogue then why make it so important to the story? Why make it so dialogue heavy then?
The Dark Knight Rises.
Overdelivered on top of the hype behind the first 2 movies.
The second one was really hard to beat.
From my understanding, this is a Nolan problem. The Dark Knight rises had similar issues with sound mixing, especially with Bane's voice in certain scenes. I remember Interstellar having issues as well. Funny enough, Googling his last few movies (ex: "Dunkirk sound mixing problems") all lead to articles around the time of the movie's release and the audience complaining about sound problems.
Slightly off topic, but I personally use subtitles for everything I watch now because I got tired of missing dialogue for different reasons. More movies being on demand is a blessing for me in this regard.
I agree.
I bought a lot of Blu-rays (obsessed with "owning" the good movies which I then rip - I extract the original streams without reencoding and then I put the files on my mediaserver) and the biggest 1080p-file I have is the one of "Interstellar" being 39GB (original video and original 3 audio tracks and some subtitles), followed by "the dark knight rises" of 35GBs and otherwise all the rest is between 10-30GBs depending on the movie.
Usually when I play a movie in the living room I see spikes of 2.5MB/s transferred data on the mediaservers, and this is original content ripped 1:1.
I believe they had to redub some of his lines before the movie's release, as is clearly evident watching the trailer then the movie's exact same scenes
http://www.alloy.com/entertainment/tom-hardy-bane-voice-before-and-after-the-dark-knight-rises-320/
And yet everyone remembers "I'll be back", or "Hasta la vista, baby!". Any memorable lines from recent movies? I can only come up with ironic memes like Bane crashing the plane with no survivors from The Dark Knight Rises.
This is the best thing i've read on the whole film vs digital debate: http://www.fototazo.com/2015/04/the-meaning-of-films-decline.html # TLDR: most film advocates claim all the wrong reasons for shooting film, and i say this as someone who is primarily a film shooter.
The most compelling reason to shoot film is because it gives you access to a range of camera and lens technology that is impossible to replicate with digital without significant compromise in quality and/or shooting style.
Nolan shoots on IMAX cameras with modified Zeiss lenses that give an extremely shallow depth of field (witness some of the scenes in The Dark Knight Rises).
Tarantino shooting on Super Panavision 70 could not be replicated on digital without extreme cropping of a wide angle digital source, which would change the depth/perspective, or stitching (difficult if impossible in motion picture shooting). See also panoramic cameras: Fuji 6x17, Hasselblad X-Pan.
Large format and even medium format, because the available digital backs have not yet reached the size of a full 6x6 negative. The digital back manufacturers claim they are "full frame" but when used on actual full frame 6x6 cameras they are anything but (this is not a resolution/quality argument, it is a "oh, my 100mm lens is now actually cropped" argument).
That's probably right, Fernet with Coke is a kind of national drink, especially in the province of Córdoba, where everything suggests it was invented.
If you order a Fernet in Argentina, it is assumed that it includes Coke. Nobody that I know of drinks it alone, and it sounds weird to us to do that.
In the movie "The Dark Knight Rises" there's a scene in which Alfred goes to Florence and drinks Fernet Branca alone. The comment from many Argentinians was "What? No Coke? That's gross!".
Bruce Schneier: "Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight [Rises]. They kept that movie in the theaters."
But that Batman movie was a good movie. (OK, not the best of the franchise, but still OK). The plot of The Interview is "a celebrity journalist and his producer land an interview with Kim Jong-un and are instructed by the CIA to assassinate him." That sounds like a good action-adventure movie. But it was made as a comedy. Dumb. Then the plan was to release it on Christmas Day, usually a day for take-the-kids movies. Dumber.
Sony may be using this as an excuse to escape from a turkey of a movie. Of course, now we all have to see it. Probably on Netflix; it's not worth a trip to a theater.
This whole affair is in the realm of stupid, on all sides.
I'm not sure it's "nerdy" since the dark knight rises is one of the most commercially successful movies of all time. Hardly a niche film.
Even though the internet is mainstream, I think imdb's rating are still a bit "nerdy". Granny doesn't go to imdb to rate a movie.
eg Batman: The Dark Knight Rises gets 8.6 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1345836/
Ah, okay, fair enough. It's not really a spoiler, since it is obviously going to happen from the moment the football ground appears, so I'll say the film is the Dark Knight Rises. Bloody good, if disturbing.
Yes. Christopher Nolan made his character a villain for this very reason:
http://popupchinese.com/the-dark-knight-rises.html
No accident that the third film starts with a CIA rendition sequence (the state has devolved into a vigilante actor on the same moral level as Batman or Bane -- "no lawyers [and] no due process"). Meanwhile, we see politicians govern by lying on television ("theatricality and deception") while the justice system has become a monster under the Dent law ("a law with teeth", "based on a lie", etc.).
"Briefly, the categorical imperative states: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Whoa! That certainly describes the extreme nature of tons of the protagonists/antagonists of these various films. From Bane and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises to everyone in Inception, the idea of finding a universal truth and then applying it (sometimes forcefully) onto everyone seems to be exactly what’s at the core of all these movies."
Philosophy grad here. Absolutely none of these characters are exemplary of Kantian moral philosophy. That goes for about 99% of blockbuster heroes.
The key thing to understand is that 'universal' is a technical term in Kantian philosophy. Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members. 'Universal' in Kant is synonymous with 'necessary', as in, "all stones necessarily fall back down to the ground if I throw them in the air." So what the categorical imperative really says is, "Live your life as if it were a force of necessity", or a more humanist formulation, "Live your life as if you were fulfilling your duty." If that sounds weird, realize that Kant doesn't think altruism qualifies as a foundation for morality because it's still based on pleasure, which for him brings us right back to egoism.
In terms of blockbusters, Watchmen's Rorschach or The Dark Knight's Joker are better approximations.
Supposedly he sold the rights already. I finally got around to watching The Dark Knight rises recently, and I think Bale would be perfect for the role. At the beginning of the movie, having isolated himself for several years, he looks quite a bit like mcafee did after being on the run. Also, he knows how to play crazy people like no one else (see the machinist or American Psycho.)
All due to piracy? If you look at the 10 top grossing films of 2012, we have: 3 comic book movies (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spiderman) where the characters have already had several movies, 3 movies that are either the 3rd or 4th in an original series (Madagascar, Ice Age, and MiB), and 4 based on books (Twilight, Skyfall, The Hobbit, and Hunger Games). Maybe people are tired of rehashes of the same IP over and over again, especially when they spread one story over several movies, just to get more money out of you? (I'm looking at you, The Hobbit)
It's a brilliant film, but it really isn't open-ended to anyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities. In Dicken's book, the sacrificial death of scoundrel Sydney Carton "recalls to life" his aristocratic double Charles Darney. And then as Carton walks to the guillotine we share his vision of a post-revolutionary France that has moved past destructive class conflict and emerged "peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy." Ergo Carton's line that "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."
Resolving the ambiguity of the ending is the entire point of this extended allusion. We have the sacrifice of a negative character (Batman) redeeming his positive aristocratic double (Wayne), and then general images of social redemption (even down to the visuals of children returning to the garden) as Gotham moves beyond the political/economic oppression that the film claims has thematically resulted from Batman's vigilante behavior and his refusal to trust in the norms of democratic society.
A great movie and widely misunderstood! And very suitable for the HN crowd given that it operates as an extended critique of the American war on terror. Some more thoughts for anyone curious:
http://popupchinese.com/the-dark-knight-rises.html
I can think of 4 movies I saw this year so far that I enjoyed:
1. The Dark Knight Rises
2. The Amazing Spiderman
3. Bourne Legacy
4. Brave
However, I did catch a few hidden gems I had never before seen or heard of on Netflix Instant. My absolute favorites are "Morning Glory", "The Answer Man", and "Beware the Gonzo".
This year seems to be the year of really really brilliant cinematography.
Skyfall was breathtakingly beautiful in terms of cinematography. It had a solid story too, unlike Prometheus, which while beautiful, falls short on story.
The Dark Knight Rises concludes the series very well. It was well shot, and barring a few continuity issues, it was by all means a very good movie.
Argo was fine as a story, also very well made and I liked it.
One surprise this year which I absolutely loved was Pitch Perfect. My partner had dragged me into an early viewing of the movie, and I didn't know much about it. So yeah, good surprise.
As for the rest, meh. I mean Spiderman and Avengers were fun, but it is not as memorable as the ones I mentioned above. So was Looper
Agree with all of it. Especially Dark Knight Rises.
It was so bad that it reflected badly on the previous two films. I realized at the end of Rises how poor the character development was throughout Dark Knight, and getting (re)confused about the authenticity of Bruce Wayne's motivations in Batman Begins.
The two you need to watch:
- Get the Gringo
- Grabbers
The rest:
- Cloud Atlas was...interesting.
- Pitch Perfect was the absolute worst, but hilarious. In a similar vein: For a Good Time, Call.
- Argo and Beast of the Southern Wild are overhyped in my opinion.
- Life of Pi was great (make sure to read the book at some point).
- End of Watch was better than advertised.
- Dark Knight Rises was a solid conclusion to the series.
- Ted was funny, but doesn't work so well on repeat views.
- Other movies you should watch: The new Total Recall. Safety Not Guaranteed. Lawless. The Amazing Spiderman (awesome series reboot)
These are some of the movies that I watched and liked in 2012:
The Grey
Prometheus
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
The Hobbit
And these are some of the good ones I would like to watch:
Argo
Lincoln
Looper
Life of Pi
Zero Dark Thirty
Here[1] is the list of the highest grossing movies in 2012 thanks to Wikipedia. Among those top ten, the only one I saw was Dark Knight Rises and while it wowed me when I watched it, it is just about meh in hind sight.
Prometheus[2] was confusing as [redacted] but if you like the alien franchise[3], you should watch this one as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_in_film
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(film)
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise)
I think The Dark Knight Rises is a great litmus test for people's opinion on Nolan.
If you think the movie is a masterpiece or remotely close ... agree to disagree.
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.
Dark Knight Rises spoiler alert:
Isn't it really odd that a company called "Knight" makes all these nonsensical trades just a couple weeks after the movie where a similar thing bankrupted a company?
Totally agree with this analysis. The Dark Knight Rises comes out the next day, July 20. Homeless guys handing our ciphered messages with $50 bills sounds like the sort of weird techno-cultural thing you might find in a Chris Nolan movie.
But it's not like that movie needs any more hype. Maybe this the first shot in a longer lead-up to a movie later in the summer.
> A good, clean, new 35mm print is very clearly distinguishable from from a 4k projection. Even casually you can see the difference
What difference are you referring to? If you're talking about clarity/pixels, the source format is as important as the projection. Academy and super 35 waste a lot of space on the frame. Super 35, which was really common for big time movies a few years ago because you could use spherical lenses, actually requires an intermediate step making it anamorphic for projection... which makes it less clear on the print.
The only 35mm source format I would argue provides higher resolution on 35mm than a 4K projector is going to be anamorphic (aka Panavision or 'Scope). It requires no intermediate step before projection. It looks like Nolan is shooting Dark Knight Rises anamorphic and 70mm for the IMAX stuff.
Other than resolution, the blacklevels of film are higher and there's weave on film. Plus, unless you only go to high end theaters that take projection seriously, your typical projector jockey at the local AMC can barely get the movie in focus. I once saw Saving Private Ryan projected with no matte. So every time an effects shot came on, the top and the bottom were cropped. Non effects shots had full frame. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte)
Anyway, given what we've seen with digital photography, I'd expect the technology here to advance pretty fast.
I think if you really want to fight Hollywood it would be best to boycott them at the movie theaters and try to support their competitors (Does Netflix count as a competitor?) as much as possible. That means not going to see Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises". Wait for the DVD/Blu-ray release and don't purchase it. Rent it, or borrow it from someone who has purchased it. Spend as little money as possible on Hollywood. Rinse and repeat with other movies.
Hollywood proposes theatre death as a justification for measures like SOPA. Any downward trends, and Hollywood will cry foul play.
To Hollywood, loss is political ammunition. To politicians who listen to Hollywood, loss is proof. They're hedged against box office losses. Those aren't a meaningful target for boycott.
Perhaps boycotting a single movie in a measurable way could send a message. Would news media react if The Dark Knight Rises became a huge flop because of a boycott? Could this open the debate to factors other than piracy affecting Hollywood's profits?
Go Daddy wants SOPA to pass so bad sometimes they just cold shut down websites whenever big content sends them an email:
http://movies.cosmicbooknews.com/content/michael-bentkover-warner-bros-shuts-down-cosmic-book-news-over-dark-knight-rises