The infamously campy toy commercial with unintentional homoerotic tones that was 1997's BATMAN & ROBIN effectively shut down what was once one of the most lucrative franchises in Hollywood, and in 2003, Warner Bros. chose an unlikely and perfect director to resurrect the character on film. Christopher Nolan, a British filmmaker known only for a few low-budget psycho-thrillers, and who didn't like comic books or superheroes, reinvented the world of Batman and Gotham City as a (mostly) real-world compatible environment, and applied the long-awaited focus on psychological aspects to the characters and story. The year after the excellent and very comic book-inspired SPIDER-MAN 2 was released, and a month before the lame but still comic book-faithful FANTASTIC FOUR came out, BATMAN BEGINS was a crime drama. But in 2008, THE DARK KNIGHT revealed a Nolan unleashed, and as extremely, in fact, ludicrously, unlikely as it might have sounded before, a comic book film was compared to THE GODFATHER PART II and went on to seriously shake up the Academy Awards. A summer superhero blockbuster (okay, no Batman doesn't have "super powers" in the typical sense, but for all intensive purposes, he's a superhero) became a generation-defining film, received eight Academy Award nominations (impressive for any film, but the third most that year), swept the Best Supporting Actor categories for Heath Ledger's performance as 'The Joker," also widely considered one of the best onscreen villains of all time. At the time of its release, it was the #2 film of all time, behind TITANIC (AVATAR came out at the end of the next year), and the third film ever to cross the $1 billion mark worldwide.
That's a hell of a reputation to live up to, and it's common knowledge anyway that these kinds of trilogies almost always peak by number two (if they improve on the original at all) and then the climactic chapter is usually the weakest, but on the other hand, THE DARK KNIGHT brought respectability and awards show clout to an otherwise much-derided but lucrative genre, so why not hope for another miracle?
Well, first off, nobody thinks of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as a debacle, and nor should they; it's an incredible spectacle and another unusually meaty, ambitious take on the superhero concept, and epic in a sense rarely ever seen in today's movies, even with the increasing frequency of $200+ million budget. Even as the second highest-grossing film of the year, it crossed the $1 billion mark (without the added boost of 3D) and was one of the best-reviewed "threequels" ever. But it wasn't quite the miracle we would have hoped for.
It may seem unfair to point out how great and successful a film was, and then pick it apart with disparaging intent, but THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is one of those anomalous cinematic events that is so good, and so frustrating for not being better. So-called "fanboys," the scourge of intelligent internet discourse on pop culture and media, who attack or defend media properties and franchises with an undue cult-like fervor, infamously made threats against certain film critics (presumably tongue-in-cheek, but in bad taste regardless), some of whose early reviews of the film were less glowing than what would be associated with THE DARK KNIGHT, prompting some sites to temporarily disable their comment forums. In some peoples' minds, the film was going to be a DARK KNIGHT-esque landmark, and whether it deserved that status or not, they would accept no less. It's not like those who lashed out against the early reviews had seen the film anyway.
With 88% of critics appraising the film positively though, according to RottenTomatoes.com, while it didn't match the 94% of its predecessor, it still qualifies as an excellently-reviewed film.
The best trait of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is definitely its ambition, which is tremendous. In interviews, Nolan described his intent as coming as close as possible to making a Fritz Lang film, referring to the great German Expressionist director of the silent epic of class warfare, METROPOLIS (1927). On a brief side note, it's worth mentioning that Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN was also very strongly influenced by Lang's work, although his influence on Burton was far more visual than Nolan's, which was more ideological. What makes the DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY, as the collection of Nolan's Batman films has come to be called, particularly different from other trilogies of its sort, is that Nolan's three film's are all inspired by separate genre ideas. While all three films share characteristics of crime films, BATMAN BEGINS is particularly crafted as a "Hero's Journey" tale; THE DARK KNIGHT is directly inspired by gritty crime dramas, in particular, Michael Mann's HEAT (1995), with moral ambiguity and elaborate crime scenarios; while THE DARK KNGIHT RISES is designed like a classically-styled, Wagerian epic, particularly inspired by METROPOLIS and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
But an epic is very tricky, and like others that have gone before, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES sometimes creaks under the weight of its own ambitions. At a length of 165 minutes, the film is gambling in a dangerous game; as the legendary late film critic Roger Ebert once said, "No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough." For the most part, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES justifies its epic running time, which is a feat in itself, and it's difficult to accuse the film of being bloated, considering how densely packed the film already is. In fact, it's tempting to suggest that it should have been longer, because the passage of time seems to be the most apparent weakness to the film in which about halfway through, the protagonist has his spine snapped, with the bone protruding through the skin of his back (as mentioned briefly in dialogue), and then has to heal from this wound in a Third World prison, before finally managing to escape after a couple of fails; all of this within a matter of a few months, after which the hero is back to his full strength and able to beat his powerful adversary into submission. In a trilogy where the real world-plausibility of it all has been so important, Bruce Wayne/Batman's miraculously rapid reconstitution is difficult to swallow. All of this happens against a continuously running clock, a literal time bomb, until the end of the film too, as the film's primary villain, Bane, holds the entire city of Gotham hostage with a fusion reactor-turned-nuclear bomb.
A VILLAIN AND A THREE-ACT STORY
The old adage goes, "A hero is only as good as his villain," and just about everyone knew too well from the beginning that there would be no equal, let alone, improvement on THE DARK KNIGHT's antagonist. Heath Ledger's variation on the classic Batman villain, The Joker, became the golden standard of superhero film villainy, joining the likes of Alex DeLarge, Hannibal Lecter and John Doe from SE7EN. Taking a directly opposite turn from the chaos-driven, urban terrorist of THE DARK KNIGHT, the Nolans and co-writer David S. Goyer selected a relatively new villain, Bane, who first appeared in the comics in 1993; a militant revolutionary whose campaign of terror was organized, and physical brawn worthy of the Batman. Tom Hardy, who worked with Nolan previously on INCEPTION, was cast and plays the role like a university professor with a Turn-of-the-Century strongman physicality. Although lesser-known in the Batman pantheon than the likes of The Scarecrow, The Joker or Two-Face, Bane was an apt selection for the role, known in the comics as "The Man Who Broke the Bat," and he's an effective threat, but the revelation at the end in regards to his actual role in things is a bit disappointing.
Nolan constructed the trilogy like a three-act saga, with each film as one act each, and as such it follows the structure of the first act where everything is set up and the hero is victorious, then the second act escalates things and the hero loses, which he learns from, then the third and final act is heavily retrospective toward the first act before the hero finally achieves his goals. But as acclaimed as BATMAN BEGINS, the first act, was, it was THE DARK KNIGHT that came to define Nolan's Batman, and still, for a third act, it had to return to its origins. In BATMAN BEGINS, the League of Shadows, led by Ra's al Ghul, attempts to destroy Gotham for its sins, and in the end, that is the intention of the antagonists, remnants of the League of Shadows, in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. However, the earlier part of the film, and the film's marketing, placed an emphasis on the social revolution and class warfare of the story, which turns out to be merely a ploy in the manipulations of Bane. But I would really have liked to see that film! THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY is known for having interwoven difficult contemporary politics into the fabric of the story, such as the debate on Patriot Act-esque surveillance and response to terrorist acts in THE DARK KNIGHT, which was released just as the Bush Administration was coming to an end, and the Occupy Wall Street movement had just begun the year before the final film came out.
THE POLITICS OF BATMAN AND REAL WORLD CREDIBILITY
Batman is naturally a conservative superhero, given his immense wealth and overall cynical and violent outlook in a crime-ridden metropolis, so it only stands to reason that an honest Batman film be conservative, and that's fine, but Christopher Nolan has insisted that his films are apolitical, and remarkably, it is undeniable that the script was completed prior to the Occupy movement. In the film, Bane arrives on-scene to, supposedly, bring down the established order, encouraging the dregs of Gotham to rise up and remove the wealthy and corrupt from their positions of power, which was probably most inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, including show trials of enemies to the movement that are particularly reminiscent of French Revolution imagery. Furthermore, the police force are a tremendous symbol for good in the film, with a stunning moment at the film's climax in which an army of cops and an army of revolutionaries charge at each other on the city streets. Ironically though, it is the initially-revolutionary/anti-wealthy Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman, a title which she is never addressed by in this film) who is a proponent of gun use, while Batman orders her, "No guns! No killing!" Either way, its films like these that Hollywood-hating conservative culture embraces so dearly, while condemning the makers of such films as "Hollywood liberals." Sigh.
In the end though, the class warfare device is all a facade to cause Gotham to implode in a repeat effort by the League of Shadows to finish what they started in BATMAN BEGINS, and Bane is merely Talia al Ghul's (Ra's' daughter, previously disguised as a Gotham philanthropist) unrequited lover and willing bitch.
A point of interest in analyzing the trilogy is that it's really a pretty brutal crime saga with an extensive body count and grisly acts of violence and terror, but in order to receive the requisite PG-13 rating for a mainstream comic book film, there's hardly more than a few occasional drops of blood ever onscreen, but THE DARK KNIGHT RISES takes that a bit far by giving its characters, namely its titular character, a bodily durability that threatens the intended real world-plausibility. At the beginning of the film, Bruce Wayne is a Howard Hughes-styled hermit who walks with a cane and a hunch from years of physical punishment as a vigilante (an extremely interesting notion given far too little attention), and his knees, his doctor informs him, have no cartilage (I'm no doctor, but that sounds very bad), but he applies a bio-mechanical device to his knees and that's that. Then he's back in peak form and fighting crime again, until Bane snaps his spine with a dropkick. After a couple months, he heals from that wound that could just have well killed the average person, or at least paralyzed him for life, and then he's climbing perilous rock walls to escape a prison pit. He makes that climb with a rope tied around his waist, and I'm willing to believe if he fell and the rope caught him, that he'd live, but I'd think there'd at least be some sort of resulting injury that he's have to then heal from before climbing again, but he fails the climb twice with the rope, with only his pride injured. Later he's also stabbed, with the knife twisted in the wound, but once the knife is out, no further mention of the wound is made. Lastly, there's the big twist ending where Batman fakes his own death by carrying the active nuke out over the ocean away from the city (in a scene that calls to mind a goofy bomb moment in the campy Adam West television-based movie), and at the last moment that Batman is shown actually inside his aircraft, The Bat, the countdown says five seconds. The last moments of the film reveal Batman's survival after he allegedly ejected from his craft, but it sure doesn't look like the Bat was moving fast enough to carry the bomb's explosion away from Batman's reach within five seconds, assuming he ejected immediately following the last shot of him in the cockpit. But in the end, I guess, what the hell? He's freaking Batman. Still, even outside of the explosion radius, Gotham's going to suffer from sever nuclear radiation fallout for years to come, so luckily the trilogy ends here.
The new character of Detective John Blake, used as throwback to Bruce's and Lt. Jim Gordon's now-dissipated idealism and Batman's ultimate successor, has a glaring bit of coincidence to his story as well. An orphan, like Bruce Wayne, Blake approaches Wayne and identifies him as Batman, simply because he knows what it's like. Well then, why don't all the orphans know who Batman really is? And then poor Jim Gordon, Batman's longtime accomplice, is the last person in the whole damn city to figure it out. When he finally asks near the film's conclusion, Batman answers him cryptically (it probably would have been better to just spit it out; it would make more sense and everyone already knew anyway) by referring to an incident in which Gordon comforted young Bruce after his parents' murders, which Gordon inexplicably remembers, but whatever; good on him.
THE JOKER AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I think the greatest disadvantage THE DARK KNIGHT RISES faced was the death of Heath Ledger. His performance in THE DARK KNIGHT redefined the expectations of a villain. His psychopathic indifference to everything but an undefinable criminal ideal, his gruesome visage and his menacing, reptilian demeanor constituted a masterpiece of character, and when the Nolans wrote the script, they prudently maintained his existence in the Batman saga. But the real world defied their intentions, leaving Gotham shaken by a presence that could not return. After Ledger's death, and in no small part due to the definitive nature his performance, another actor could never fill in those shoes, not within the trilogy anyway (God help the next actor who tries to reinterpret The Joker), and any attempts to recreate Ledger's presence by some form of the limitless effects possibilities of our day would have smacked of bad taste. THE DARK KNIGHT was propelled strongly by the haunting presence of the last explosion of creativity from an artist who was gone too soon, but this setup was accidental, and understandably, Nolan opted to not drag those ghosts into a further film. But even ten years after the fact, as is held in the story, the complete and utter absence of mention of a terrorist, and terrorist acts, that forced the calling in of the National Guard and the evacuation of a metropolitan area, strains credulity.
What's truly devastating is to consider what might have been; while Christopher Nolan never made either BATMAN BEGINS or THE DARK KNIGHT with follow-ups in mind, co-story writer David S. Goyer did have some loose outlines drafted for a trilogy, and while it's largely based in rumor, there had been speculation that the final film would feature The Joker in a Hannibal Lecter-type role of meeting the Batman in a battle of the minds to provide Batman with the inside information to apprehend the main villain. Whether or not that was ever seriously considered, that would have been so freaking awesome.
THE MOST EPIC OF SUPERHERO FILMS
Summer blockbusters have a habit of threatening some sort of worldwide domination and/or Apocalyptic destruction, and yet, even with such far-flung implications, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is probably the best candidate to lay claim to the title of of 'most epic' of the modern summer blockbusters. And yet, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES does not threaten the world on that scale; the only area of its focus in true mortal jeopardy is Gotham City, which may plunge the world into economic depression if destroyed, but even that much is hardly even implicit. So what makes a film like this an epic among epics? Mostly, its ambition. Its ambition in ideas, in scale and in most other ways you could think up. The central theme of the film is to choose life, to crawl out of the damned pit and reach for the better, even at the risk of falling. I have great disdain for the common cinematic/literary concept of a noble death, stoic and unfearing of what lies in the great beyond. It's boring, rarely relatable and inaccessible, so I love how THE DARK KNIGHT RISES turns that on its head to tell a story about a man who is expecting and prepared for such a death; Bruce Wayne sees death as the only way out of Batman, and in a loose sense, that expectation is fulfilled, but his turning point is choosing to fear death. The safety rope (which looks pretty debilitating anyway), like Batman, keeps the fear of death, of failure, at bay, but it is that fear that proves to be the most important motivation that finally gives him the power to make the climb out of the prison pit. If you didn't notice, there a fair bit of pretty blatant symbolism in the movie.
Parallel to that line of story is the military state of an entire American city, a compelling notion and a relevant fear in a post-9/11 world, although it does prove to be a bit large in its ambitions for the film to sustain and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. A common complaint about the film is the overly convenient way that all but a few policemen are ordered into the underground tunnels of the city to find Bane, after which the exits are collapsed, trapping them for much of the film. Also a bit convenient is how Bane order that the police force be kept alive, which becomes useful at the film's climax when Batman has an army to help him out. It is an odd battle scene though, because neither side seems to have much in the way of weapons, other than a bit of artillery, so it's basically two armies fist-fighting, including Batman and Bane, who share a brief exchange of typically corny superhero film dialogue. The snow in that scene is a very nice touch though, and the setting on the steps of Pittsburgh's Mellon Institute is excellent.
MY TWO FAVORITE SCENES
I have two particular scenes in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES that stand out above the rest, those being the first physical showdown between Batman and Bane, and the ballroom dance with Bruce and Selina. I feel these scenes define the rest of the film, along with the climbing out of the pit scene, but that's a given.
The fight between Batman and Bane in the Gotham sewers is the film at its most raw and brutal form. The blows land the hardest, Batman is more desperate and the mood is dire. The moist environment enhances the sense of velocity to the combat, as droplets of water fall behind the sweeping movements and explode in splashes as each blunt impact is delivered. It is in this scene that Batman is both physically and metaphorically broken, splintering the famous cowl and concluding with a cringe-worthy dropkick that cracks Batman's spine. It is an excellent and brutal action scene.
The ballroom scene is often overlooked but best emulates the classically-styled epic tone of the film. Bruce makes his first public appearance in a decade, at an amber-lit charity ball, where the wealthy and dispassionate upper crust of Gotham play to a humanitarian philanthropy facade, while in a world of decadence. Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne dance while engaging in a bit of traditional romantic screwball repartee, and Selina condemns the decadent lifestyle while she's trapped by a checkered past which forced her hand in order to survive, and the masses starve in the streets. It has an excellent eve-of-the-revolution feeling to it.
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| The Century 16 Multiplex in Aurora, Colorado |
Midnight screenings for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES sold out rapidly, and on that night, cinemas nationwide were packed, but at the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado, one James Eagan Holmes, sporting garishly-dyed hair, a gas mask and assorted armor, set off tear gas and begin firing guns into the crowd, killing 12 and injuring 70 other persons. This abhorrent act startled the nation, but there was certain repulsion for cinephiles, as if something evil had violated a place of sanctity; a cinema, the portal to worlds of human understanding, imagination, emotional realizations and spirituality.
The news media, as human as the rest of us, joined the panic and some sources misleadingly announced that Homes had had brightly-dyed hair and identified himself to police as "The Joker," encouraging some people to draw a connection to the violence and sadistic behavior in THE DARK KNIGHT, which had been controversial for its violent content in relation to its PG-13 rating, which some parents believed should have been an R rating. Such statements were misleading though, because they deliberately implied that Holmes was enacting a character from the films, despite the fact that his hair was orange, not green (which was the implication), and his appearance had no apparent correlation to the character.
In the conservative state of Colorado, the shooting resulted in a spike for firearm sales, as is often the case with some people looking for a quick solution for personal protection and also the result of the imminent surge in gun regulation attempts. But Hollywood did not shift into a defensive gear the way gun advocates did, and do whenever these tragedies happen, and instead, Warner Brothers Studios chose to cancel premieres in Mexico, Japan and Paris; they retracted a trailer for GANGSTER SQUAD, which depicted a scene of gangsters firing guns into a movie theater crowd, and had the film restructured and re-shot, and the studio made a donation of an undisclosed amount to benefit the victims. In the end, the incident likely also resulted in a blow to the film's potential box office, particularly in the U.S., where it performed very strongly regardless, after the tragedy left a bad taste in the mouths of moviegoers and stained the film with a horrifying association.
Ironically, the film, widely considered conservative in its politics, had a line of dialogue from the titular character, saying, "No guns! No killing!" although the morally ambiguous Selina Kyle/Catwoman refutes that notion, despite her character being considered a "misguided" liberal personality by some. Whether or not the films' violence can be directly associated with such evil events is unanswerable and a source of constant debate that usually coincides with the firearms debate as a counter-debate, but if media depictions of violence are the factual source of such evil behavior, the rarity of such cases would still indicate mental health as the true issue.
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