The Dark Knight Rises is so aware of its own importance that I’m surprised the cast don’t stop mid-action and start saying, “Wow, dude. Just … wow.” From beginning to end, it screams significance, without managing to say anything at all. It’s the cinematic equivalent of two and a half hours of a geek shouting, “It’s not a comic book! It’s a graphic novel!” 

When I was growing up, superheroes were fun. Adam West’s Batman was a groove-arama and Tim Burton’s was a black comedy. The 1990s movie series hit its peak with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze in Batman and Robin (1997). Dear old Arnie didn’t so much phone in his performance as he sent a belated postcard from Pisa. Who could pass up on lines like this? “Allow me to break the ice. My name is Freeze. Learn it well. For it's the chilling sound of your doom…” Pure genius.

But between then and now, 9-11 and the Credit Crunch happened. And movies got way, way too big and serious. As is always the case with Hollywood, business masquerades as art. The old studio model was to make several movies for $30 million in the hope that one or two would be hits and cover the costs of the others. But after the success of blockbusters like Spider-Man and Transformers, the suits realized that they could make one movie for $100 million and rake in close to a billion dollars. It was a gamble, so to improve the odds they decided to make films that were rooted in an established franchise (this got so silly that they even made a feature based on the game Battleship). Once they found a brand that sold well, they would exhaust it and then reboot it with younger actors. This year, we got The Amazing Spider-Man and next year we’ll get Man of Steel. By the time I’ve finished writing this, they’ll be planning to re-launch Batman, staring a fetus. 

They call these expensive bores “event movies,” because who would want to miss out on an event? And in order to convey that “event” feel, they turn them into epics. They were helped in that task by a rolling media keen to sell copy off the idea that we really ought to care about all this twaddle. That’s how Batman – a comic book about a flying man-rodent who tussles with cartoon psychopaths – got turned into a modern Iliad.

And, o, how The Dark Knight Rises reeks with pomposity. There’s the endless choir music, the ubiquitous shots of an apocalyptic landscape, the talk about the importance of myths (“The people need to belieeeeve…”), the dark shadows, the whispered voices and the constant references to previous movies that make no sense unless you know them off by heart. An example: Catwoman isn’t called Catwoman. The movie needs a Catwoman because, well, Batman is nothing without a sexy feline-themed heroine to spar off. But because this is Batman in an age of seriousness, the kitsch is chiselled off and she is redubbed a “cat burglar” (I see what they did there). So the bare bones of Batman remains, but the fun is excised. Which is a tragedy because the movie was screaming out for a Mrs Slocombe-style innuendo about a pussy that had spent all night in the rain.

All this seriousness is undermined by one horrible error: the villain. Tom Hardy’s performance is already hampered by a giant gas mask covering his face, which gives the impression that he’s got a nasty bout of asthma. But it’s made all the worse by a criminal case of poor-dubbing. The best way I can describe it is like a drunk Sean Connery. The first time I heard it, I was not the only one to burst out laughing. “I shupoose you shink you can defeat me, Mishter Batman,” etc. Every scene he’s in is farcical: Hardy grimaces and flexes while the dubbing artist camps and coos. To use appropriate gay slang, Bane is a Muscle Mary.

Bane’s voice belongs in one of the Burton movies, but not in this adolescent attempt at serious drama. What is the point that The Dark Knight Rises is trying to make? It starts as a critique of one-percenter greed as Gotham slips into peaceful disparity between the rich and the poor. But Bane’s socialist revolution (he uses a bomb to blackmail the city into creating a commune) is sadistic, not egalitarian. The characters bitch endlessly that Harvey Dent’s memory has been used to create a myth upon which they built a police state – but who cares, so long as the murder rate is low? The movie pretends to be about goodness, but its heroes are all pretty shallow. Batman refuses to do what his butler says and help the police. Instead he dons his cape and catalyzes much of the anarchy. Catwoman steals wallets and apples and it’s treated like a joke. Robin abandons both the police and the Church to become a vigilante because he’s tired of working within “structures.” Why? They worked perfectly well until the random elements of Bane and Batman came along. Violence is the only apt response to violence in a horribly violent world. It left me wanting to join one of those encounter groups where everyone hugs each other to whale music.

The only reason why this movie seems clever is that it stands out from the current big budget dross being made by Hollywood. If it doesn’t star Adam Sandler, logic follows that it must be good.

Of course, there are good movies being distributed. Wes Anderson is back, Ted was hilarious and Young Adult made me seriously consider online dating. But The Dark Knight Rises is the kind of epic-by-numbers that is the product of a movie business that won’t take risks. It’s time to run the suits out of Hollywood.

A hangover is a tragedy in three acts. The first is waking up at 8 in the morning and trying to figure out what the Hell is going on. You will ask yourself a series of existential questions. Where am I? Who am I? And, on rare occasions, who are you? The answers are never satisfactory, for this is the moment when a man first consciously realizes the damage he has done. A few adjustments are necessary to endure the next four hours of sleep. Take off your tie, close the curtains, pour a pint of water, retrieve the keys from the front door, take two asprin, attempt to urinate, return to the bed, and sob back to sleep.

Stage two is the reawakening at midday. All you will know for the next two hours is pain. It starts in the head, which throbs like a lighthouse – strong and bright enough to blind you to all the other terrible things happening down below. If you’re going to vomit, it will be now. You must run to the lavatory (for time is of the essence), kneel as if in prayer, and prepare for the horror to begin. It hurts most when there is so less to offer. Don’t be ashamed to cry; the poisonous ethanol is looking for exits.

Back in the bed and the head is dying down to a low roar. Next comes the stomach cramps. Eat now and you will surely die; wait too long to eat and your brain will think that you are already dead. Inside, you are consume yourself as your organs try to find a morsel of something other than gin. Clench, clench, clench they go, running from tummy to throat, squeezing you inside and out. “God help me! Deliver me from this Hell!” This is the moment that makes cowards into martyrs, for who would turn down the guillotine now?

It is there, at his weakest, that the invalid enters the third and final act: vague recollection of the night before. Kingsley Amis called this “the metaphysical hangover.”

Paranoia overwhelms you. What did I do? What did I say? Did whatever happened in the Bedford Arms end my career once and for all? Don’t make the mistake of calling anyone to find out. They’ll either be so ill that they’ll confirm all your suspicions, or they’ll be one of those dreadful prudes who “never touches the stuff.” And nothing kills someone’s respect for you more quickly than a phone call at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon from a weeping man trying to find out if he’s lost his job.

It might be counterintuitive, but what you need right now isn’t a heart-to-heart with your third wife or a letter of apology in The Times. It’s sugary tea and pizza. Rule out the rest of the day, digest as much fat as possible, and do something wholesome like bleaching the kitchen. Watch something serious but that doesn’t deserve too much attention – Bridge Over the River Kwai is perfect. Around eight, have a hot bath and inspect yourself for cuts and bruises. Depending on how much you drank, you may need to extend this process over two days. If you have the time, do something you don’t really want to do but know you must – like having a haircut or visiting a relative. Minimize contact with important people. You won’t actually call them a Nazi pederast to their face, but you’ll worry that you have. Long after the head and the stomach pains are gone, the paranoia will remain.

But have hope. Within three days you’ll feel as good as before. And you’ll be ready for another night on the town.

The Shard in London was unveiled this week, a glass building so tall and sharp that it threatens to pierce God’s eye. Some think it’s preposterously phallic and ugly. I’m with those that see it as inventive and hopeful. South of the river, London is still dominated by rotting Victorian warehouses and modernist blocks. If The Shard is the sign of a brave new futurism, then so be it. I’d rather live in a city dominated by alien rhomboids and metal cathedrals than the tired slums of yesteryear, when the money was slight and the imagination lacking.

However, I was surprised by my old priest, Fr Ray Blake of Brighton, comparing The Shard to the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Quite what he means is hard to tell because the meaning of Babel is itself opaque. In the story, a united humanity builds a tower, “whose top may reach unto Heaven.” God sees the tower and says, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.”

There are two ways of reading this story. One is that is simply explains why we speak different languages – man reached a certain point in his civilization and God decided, in his infinite wisdom, to mix things up a bit. Babel is thus an “origin myth” (which could be literally true or fable) that has no more moral weight than all those interminable lists of “begats” that we get in Genesis. This God seems rather capricious.

An alternative explanation is that man was punished for the sin of pride. He constructed a tower in celebration of himself (it was not a temple) and from manmade things. Realizing that man had the capacity to stop worshipping him and start worshipping themselves, God evens the playing field by scattering humanity across the continents. Later, Christians believe, God offers Christianity as a way of reuniting ourselves around the divine made flesh. Of course, we pretty much screwed that up, too.

So is The Shard the new Tower of Babel? I wouldn’t say so. It’s certainly built for the purpose of man’s enjoyment rather than worship of God, but then Christ is healthily contemptuous of such things and urges us to render material them unto Caesar anyway. “You can have your consumerist, wealth-obsessed civilization and keep it,” the modern prophet might say. “We are more interested in what happens next.” Critics of The Shard should adopt the Franciscan approach and wander through the opulent city in the rags of the poor. Be in the world, but not of it and chuckle at the follies of the rich.

But what the Tower story does remind us that the antithesis of monotheism – Judaic, Christian or Muslim - is worship of man. That might seem like a harmless assertion, but actually it contradicts the modern impulse to put man first, be it for benign or malign reasons. You find that in theology, where rules and teachings have been adapted to make it easier to be a believer. It sometimes feels like my own Catholicism only encounters orthodoxy for 60 minutes on a Sunday morning. The rest of the week is a constant negotiation over what is and isn’t the right thing to do. 

Within civil society, there was a trend in the 20th century to see man as the genius of his own invention, someone who could command his own destiny. Disease, environmental catastrophe, recession and the pitiless logic of war indicate that he cannot. Mankind is primed for self-destruction: only this species would behold a wonder like the split atom and then use it to murder hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Love man – yes. But don’t worship him. It’s the failure to recognize a moral order beyond what men want that leads to the collapse of civilizations.