Film #44 - The Dark Knight Rises

And so we get to arguably the summer’s biggest flick – the culmination to Christopher Nolan’s sprawling Gotham trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.

By this stage both Nolan and his trilogy have had so much adulation lapping at their feet that it’s nearly impossible to say anything against The Dark Knight Rises and not come across as being a bit contrary. Yet, for all of Nolan intricate cerebral mechanics and call backs to Batman Begins and the Dark Knight, the lustre seems to be off a bit this time round and TDKR impresses more for its intellectual audacity than any visceral joy.

I know. I’m a hard man to please.

Even Bane is a fanboy

Set eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham is enjoying a precarious golden age as the city’s devotion to the deceased Harvey Dent has allowed a series of draconian laws to be quietly ushered in, breaking the Mob’s grip on the city. Batman, who took the fall for crimes Dent committed, has vanished and his alter-ego Bruce Wayne has taken on a Howard Hughes-like existence scuttling in the abandoned corridors of Wayne Manor. Gotham’s prosperity hasn’t been universal though and, as the remains of Gotham’s underworld plots to rise again, they make the mistake of hiring criminal mastermind Bane who promptly raises an army from among Gotham’s diaspora and readies them for a war much more wide-reaching than his employers have in mind. As Batman begins to re-emerge from the shadows, Bane sets his sight on breaking the Bat – in every conceivable way.

It sounds like a standalone plot, but one of TDKR’s major strengths is how well the events of the film tie into events that happened elsewhere in the trilogy, including many more references to series-starter Batman Begins that I would have expected.

But even as TDKR impresses with its grandiose vision and complexity of the trilogy as a whole, I’d argue that the potential flaws in Nolan’s vision have never been so obvious either. I say ‘potential’ because whether you regard them as flaws or not really depends on how much you’ve bought into what Nolan has been doing quietly to date but which comes back resoundingly this time around.

It almost goes without saying that Nolan’s Batman trilogy is not really about Batman at all but rather Batman merely serves as a convenient symbol for the city of Gotham itself. In Begins, the city learns to rise above the fear that has held it stagnant for decades; in The Dark Knight, it exhibits a core of goodness and hope that refuses to give in even when it has every reason to. And in TDKR it pays the brutal price for not standing up for the values it once aspired to.

It’s beautiful, laudable stuff. Nolan isn’t really making superhero films here, even as he reinvents superhero films, so much as gripping crime dramas about nations of people. The problem is, for me at least, the closer the Bat moves into symbolism, the sillier the Batman looks in reel life.

Considering how much TDKR caps off the trilogy, it’s a little odd that Nolan essentially rescinds the Batman’s use of fear and secrecy as a crowd control technique here. Batman fights in broad daylight here, one of a throng of people, his fights in the midst of audiences and appears as clearly merely a man in front of groups of citizens even as he tries to inspire with some symbolic pyromania. It may be a metaphor I just don’t get, but I just don’t get it.

I'm only using this photo to prove that Bruce
does put on the suit at some points

And he is undercut in a myriad of ways throughout TDKR. He’s barely onscreen as Bruce Wayne does most of the heavy lifting, everybody in Gotham seems to know his secret identity by now and he’s oddly ineffectual. It doesn’t help that his early set-piece brawl with Bane is portrayed in near-silence, rendering events strangely boring.

It kind of overshadows proceedings. Without anyone to really get behind in the central role, it wasn’t as absorbing an experience as watching The Dark Knight and I often felt more like a wind-up toy compelled to watch until my spring ran down than an active participant in the film’s events.

Ironically, The Dark Knight could probably have gotten away with more of this, given the mesmeric presence of The Joker to spice things up. But Bane is no Joker, with all due respect to Tom Hardy who gives his all. Between the facial expression obscuring mask and the convoluted yet seemingly directionless plot (does he achieve his goals at the midpoint? Is there more to his ambition?), he’s not given enough to be a driving force either.

She might look like a t cat, but thankfully, she doesn't think she is one.

Much more successful and more humane is Anne Hathaway’s turn as the Catwoman, who (much like Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns) add a jolt of pleasure nearly every time she’s onscreen. Selena Kyle’s (she’s never referred to as Catwoman) journey throughout the film is the easiest to understand and engage with and Hathaway treads just the right line between mischievous villainy and conflicted pathos to keep us on board. Yes, Kyle is the stereotypical femme fatale but it’s not the worst cliché to throw at us and Hathaway at least gets into it with gusto.