I think it's too early to call the themes in The Dark Knight Rises "impressive," but yeah, it looks like they're there. Bane seems to be leading an army of the socially disenfranchised (prisoners, terrorists, etc...) against the socially privileged (Bruce Wayne and friends). People have pointed out the connections to the Occupy movement and I agree with them. It's a more violent version of the Occupy movement, sure, but this is an action movie. Catwoman lays it on pretty thick: "You're all gonna wonder how you lived so large and left so little for the rest of us." It looks like the movie takes the phrase "class warfare" pretty literally.

I also agree that the themes aren't particularly subtle. But I don't care. At least they're present, which is more than can be said of most movies. The Dark Knight was thematically upfront too. Good Lord, the Joker came right out and said that he was an agent of chaos. It doesn't get much more obvious than that, but it was still interesting. When you have characters as larger-than-life than these, it probably doesn't pay to be subtle. Why not use the built-in iconography? Batman is Order. The Joker is Chaos. Bane is the vengeance of the disenfranchised. Catwoman is... I dunno, hot; we'll see. The themes in these movies may not be particularly deep, but they're meaty enough to hold my interest. I expect that to continue.

Most stories have themes. Sometimes they're not particularly original or interesting themes, but they do have them. Die Hard has themes. Indiana Jones has themes. Hot Tub Time Machine has themes.

What bugged me about the themes in The Dark Knight (and, to a much lesser extent, Batman Begins) is twofold: one, that the movie puts the themes all over the place in big neon signs. It's not content to simply unfold and allow the themes to grow organically from the material. It forces them in through dialogue and contrived metaphors. I personally find that to be very stifling in movies.

Two, that for all its bloviating about terror, chaos, and human nature, The Dark Knight tends to introduce ideas and not do much with them beyond that. The closest thing we get to a resolution for these threads is the sequence with the two boats. It does some interesting stuff with the way people might behave in that situation, but I don't think it's quite the big profound statement about the goodness of humanity that the movie is driving at.

All very true, and I think a lot of people would agree with your points. Now if only those same people would see that the faults you point out are more than enough to make a film bad, or at least thematically inferior to every one of the examples you point out. People say, Oh, but I enjoy it in spite of those faults, but that just sounds dishonest to me. Refusing to acknowledge faults which you know to be true is dishonest. Because the truth is, there are so many films out there, including big Hollywood films, that do not have those faults. You therefore have no logical reason to think Dark Knight is better.