This is a problem I have with The Dark Knight. An excellent film, yes. But it's also one that delivers big scene after big scene and after a certain point, doesn't stop to let you catch your breath.
Now that you mention it, I did have feelings of confusion during the last action scene where Batman fights against the SWAT teams.
I agree that many action filmmakers have gone over the top with relentless, endless "cappers", where one action tops the preceding one in endless succession without taking a breath. Ultimately it becomes tiresome and numbing because there's no time to build up tension (oh my gosh, will they make it?) before the next whammy hits you. Peter Jackson also has no self control and can't figure out when a scene actually has ended, dragging such action out interminably. I was pretty done with him by King Kong, and then suffered through the first Hobbit film (via a screener), and I simply will not waste any more time on him on his movies. The man proves my current signature (the Welles quote).
Very much like what happened to Lucas. The limitations imposed on him during the first two episodes (and to a much lesser extent the third) forced him to find less expensive and better ways to do things. He pissed and moaned for years about all the things he wanted to do but couldn't so when parts 1-2-3 come along he has a virtual blank check and none of the three came close to matching the first three. In TOS the transporter was a device dreamed up because they couldn't come up with a cost effective way to use shuttles. As someone noted the transporters proved to be a great storytelling device because it allowed them to get right into the meat of the script without an interim in the shuttle.
This is one of the things I noticed about Gravity. It quite deliberately takes "breaths," and the surrounding action is much more striking for it. This is how you'll know genuinely good action filmmakers henceforth. Restraint. (I'd put TDK right on the cusp of this. It's a major motivator for the "relentless action beats" style of filmmaking, but has a purpose for the pace it sets -- conveying the anarchic progression of a Joker rampage -- that imitators don't have.)
The PG-13 audience that these pictures are aimed at have to be taken into consideration, as well. They've seen it all, already, in the first place. Every effect and style of storytelling has been presented to them, some way, or another. And empathy is one thing that people seem to have a big problem with. They simply cannot, or will not, put themselves into other people's shoes. And it does seem that is responded to, actually, with the way characterizations are set up. Peter Jackson's LOTR Trilogy has been presented as an exception here, but the "firsts" involved in it's never having been a movie before and the classic importance of Tolkien's trilogy lent themselves to a sort of restraint, in an attempt, at least, to be somewhat faithful to the books. It's worth noting how directors like Peter Jackson, still talk about how FX have become so easily accessible that audiences know their source and become less impressed by them, so now, the emphasis of a movie becomes the story. Strangely, this sentiment is seldom acted upon, much less delivered by those same directors ...
I think CGI has become digital crack for some directors. Jackson did a great job of hitting the right notes in the LOTR films. It appears to me that the Hobbit just kept expanding and getting more bloated as it went along. It seems to me that it would be lot healthier to start pre=production with the idea of throwing in absolutely everything the film maker wants and then cutting from there. The Hobbit would have benefited from a lot of stuff being cut out of the final script and then some more cutting in the editing process. It's when a film maker says they couldn't bear to cut certain things out and have the power not to cut them that red flags start going up for me. I feel much the same way about NuTrek, even though I have great respect for Abrams' fillm-making abilities.
In prose writing, there's the concept of scene and sequel that comes to mind here. It's almost like action and reaction. Something important happens, the character processes it, and then the story moves on. I think many movies focus on the scene at the expense of sequel, which becomes tiring and confusing for many viewers.
I have the feeling that because the majority of those sequences was created in post production, they see it over and over and over again, get "blind" so to speak, and forget that the audience won't be able to catch up with that sequence.
Personally, I think the LOTR films also suffer from Jackson excesses, but perhaps not to the degree that Kong and the Hobbit films do. I found them overlong and many of the sequences needlessly overwrought and drawn out....especially the endless battles.
Jackson hacked up three of my favorite books, so with me and Jackson's LOTR films, it's pretty much urge to kill rising. However, I will give him props for brilliantly making use of New Zealand and finding what perhaps are the most ideal locations possible, at least for many of the Middle-earth locales, and generally speaking, still images from the films are difficult to fault.
I actually fell asleep during the Battle of Helm's Deep in the theatre. (Just one sign of The Two Towers being the weakest film in the series: also worst offender for dwarf-tossing jokes, needless padding, Legolas-surfing-on-a-shield...)
To be fair, the point of Helm's Deep and eventually the battle on the Pellenor fields was that they took A LOT of time.