“Why do we fall?” Seven years ago, in Batman Begins, a young Bruce Wayne was posed that question by his father. The answer: so that we learn to pick ourselves up again.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster trilogy closer, Batman has fallen farther than ever before. Having taken the blame for a series of murders committed by one-time District Attorney Harvey Dent in order to preserve that man’s untarnished legacy, Batman is a wanted fugitive; in his absence, Gotham City has rid itself of organized crime with the oft-mentioned Dent Act.
The Dark Knight Rises  
Directed by Christopher Nolan |
But a new and exceptional threat rears its head in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy), a muscular escaped convict with links to Ra’s al Ghul’s (Liam Neeson) League of Shadows and aspirations of mass terrorism who pulls double-duty as both the pseudo-philosophical arch-villain and his own physically unstoppable “henchman number one.”
Drawn out of retirement by Bane’s violence, Batman tracks him down. But in their first encounter – an effective, brutal scene – it is Batman who is vanquished, broken, and imprisoned. Consequently, he has a very long way to rise.
Whether the film awes with its relentless bleakness and pristine cinematography or stupefies with conspicuous plot issues and mounting inconsistencies is largely dependent on the degree to which the viewer is invested in this universe. Nearly $1.5 billion in Nolan Batman ticket sales to date suggest there will be a lot of happy moviegoers.
However, once Batman reaches his lowest point, shortly after facing off with Bane, his rise is at once too long, too direct, and too predictable. Beaten and imprisoned, he has nowhere to go but up, and during an extended interlude that witnesses a seismic upheaval in Gotham in his absence, the plot relies on intrigue as much as on tension for propulsion.
Even while tapping into some extended Batman mythology that circles back to Batman Begins – which is more relevant as a refresher course than The Dark Knight – Nolan delivers what every blockbuster promises: spectacle with emotional heft.
The spectacle, indeed, is bigger than ever before, with legions of convicts and cops brawling in Gotham’s streets, new vehicular toys for our heroes, and a looming nuclear threat. But in emotional terms, there is nothing to match Rachel Dawes’ death or even the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, though Alfred (Michael Caine), who as the Wayne butler has been the trilogy’s sentimental anchor, soldiers dutifully on in the moral compass sense, supplying waterworks as required.
Back-stories for no fewer than three new characters – cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), Wayne Enterprises executive Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), and rookie hero cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – still fail to provide much resonance in the way of human attachment and loss. And with Hardy and Caine joined by Gordon-Levitt and Cotillard, it begins to feel like an Inception reunion.
Despite succeeding in giving a general sense that things have reached a much lower point for society than they ever did in The Dark Knight at the hands of the Joker – a football stadium is partially demolished in the middle of a game and Gotham’s entire police force is largely neutralized by Bane, whose intentions grow more incomprehensible with each unnecessary soliloquy – The Dark Knight Rises never generates the horror that came with seeing judges and police commissioners killed in broad daylight at the hands of the Joker.
It was far scarier to behold the establishment intact and powerless than it is to see it completely absent while Nolan muddles about with the politics of depicting a bloodthirsty mob sentencing rich people for their privilege: the choice is between exile, which means death on an icy river, or death, which turns out to be death by exile.
Even seemingly extraneous characters tend to matter by the time all chips are down, but the ones enacting blunt, painfully obvious character arcs – such as Matthew Modine’s cowardly deputy commissioner – contribute to the feeling that there was more fat to be trimmed from this 165-minute adventure.
For Nolan, “bringing things full circle” seems to mean rehashing a lot of League of Shadows platitudes from the first movie that never completely made sense to begin with.
If The Dark Knight aspired bleakly in the direction of Michael Mann’s Heat and similar crime dramas, sensibly doing away with most of the cartoon mythology in the process, here Nolan returns largely to the comic-book tone and universe of Batman Begins and modulates the tone accordingly, allowing for sporadic moments of levity in the form of banter between Batman and Selina Kyle or Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who, as ever, has a few tricks up his sleeve when Batman and Gotham need it most.
Even if The Dark Knight has not aged perfectly, it remains the standard against which summer event movies are now judged. The impossible level of expectation for The Dark Knight Rises is precisely that, but it was unavoidable. Nolan was the one who raised the bar so high that now even he finds it beyond reach.