The Dark Knight Rises

Wow. A fortnight ago words failed me, but now I just can’t stop gushing about The Dark Knight Rises.

Having now seen it twice, I think I’m now in a position to calmly put pen to paper and comment on the spectacle that I’ve just witnessed. Following the first time, I was so giddy I couldn’t do anything for hours, let alone form coherent thoughts and organise them in a way that may at all make sense.
The Dark Knight Rises is just spectacular. Utterly amazing. My heart was racing the entire time and I can’t remember the last time I came out of a film so dejected that it had ended and yet so satisfied in the way it had reached its conclusion.

Christopher Nolan does a standard Christopher Nolan and produces a film that you never want to end. It’s filled with EPIC action sequences, a devastatingly destructive villain, a flawed and yet vulnerable hero and more twists and turns than you can shake a stick at. He excels and truly steps up to the plate, and I hope beyond measure that this time next year he will have received recognition for his efforts with the series that has been previously snubbed during awards season.

This isn’t a film that will only appeal to fans of the comics or those who’ve seen and loved the first two films: this is outstanding in its own right and will undoubtedly appeal to everyone who watches. I defy anyone to think watching this film is 2 hours 44 minutes misspent: this is nearly 3 hours of bringing one of the most successful trilogies of ALL TIME to an EPIC and satisfying conclusion.

At the opening of the film, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is at his weakest, walking with a limp from his final altercations as his masked alter-ego, Batman, and emotionally destroyed by the death of Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes/ Maggie Gyllenhaal) eight years previously at the end of The Dark Knight. Consequences of the lies that had surfaced at the end of The Dark Knight run rampant from the onset of this movie – the idea that Gotham DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) was a crime-fighting hero and not the evil Two-Face; and by taking the fall for Dent so that he could become the poster-boy for Gotham’s fight against organised crime, Batman was (wrongly) viewed by Gotham as a thug and murderer. As a result, Bruce Wayne had hung up his cape and retreated into a self-imposed exile in the rebuilt Wayne Manor.

BEWARE, SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW! DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU ARE YET TO SEE THE FILM! You have been warned…

For the first two films, Christian Bale had been nothing particularly special as billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne; however, here he seemed to have grown into his character and has really done it justice. In this film, the audience is reminded that Batman is no superhero: he isn’t a God, he has no special powers and most importantly, he isn’t untouchable by pain and suffering. He is, essentially, just a very rich man in a fancy black suit trying to make a difference. He’s human – he’s just Bruce Wayne – and when you take away the mask and the Tumbler and the Batpod he’s no different to any other Gotham resident (ninja training from Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul aside…). It’s this vulnerability that makes the film so dark, depressing and totally surprising: I don’t think I’ve seen a ‘superhero’ movie that shows so many of the main characters’ flaws and so brutally strips away the layers of preconceived notions of invincibility.

Bale has always undoubtedly shone as the masked crusader, but now because you’ve seen how damaged, broken and utterly determined to protect his city he is without the suit (point: the heart-stopping leap during his escape from Bane’s prison), you believe in Batman even more. Job well done, Bale…

This other side of Batman opens the door for the new villain, Bane. Played by breakout star of Inception, Tom Hardy, Bane is an intimidating force of nature. His face is half obscured by a menacing mask necessary to hold in his pain, and he cuts a terrifying silhouette. The main issue from the mask was that initially it obscured the clarity of his dialogue, and along with a strong accent based on ‘King of the Gypsies’ Bartley Gorman it was difficult to understand until you got into the rhythm of his acting. Bane was a former member of the League of Shadows before being excommunicated; proving him to be in Nolan’s words “a terrorist in both thoughts and actions” and thus a significant threat to Gotham. I thought no villain could top the Joker – and despite Hardy’s talent, I was right. However, Hardy is convincing, physically dominates each scene he’s in due to his sheer muscular volume (he packed on an additional 30lbs of muscle for the role), and successfully scares the audience as Batman has clearly met his match both mentally and physically – a double threat that the hallucinogenic-brandishing Scarecrow and psychotic Joker could not achieve. In this sense, Bane embodies all the key facets of a seriously dangerous villain. He is chilling, destroys half of Gotham, and repeatedly tries to kill the hero, almost succeeding on more than one occasion: what more could you ask for in a baddie?

Batman regular and scene-stealer extraordinaire Michael Caine proved for a final time how Alfred was the unsung hero of the entire film. Yeah, Batman’s great: the Dark Knight, the eponymous hero, but without Alfred keeping tabs on Gotham’s police and miscreants, ordering parts for the bat-suit, coming up with viable excuses for Bruce Wayne’s behaviour, and generally being awesome, Batman would have been nothing. His snarky comments – “I’d set you up with a chimpanzee if it’d bought you back to the world” – added a humour to the film, and his performance at Bruce Wayne’s funeral bought a lump to my throat. Caine nailed the scene in the café at the end, even ignoring the fact that he was directed to his table by Mateo from Benidorm. What a legend.

Another Inception graduate, Marion Cotillard, provided a good femme fatal as Miranda Tate but nothing special. Her cold and chilling culminating sequence, and the line “kill them, kill them all” made me shiver: however, it was a predictable plot twist from Nolan, with the Big Emotional Reveal at the end showing how she’s been the brains to Bane’s brawn. Since the moment Alfred sung her praises to Bruce Wayne, and the shots of the very feminine looking child in the prison, connecting the dots wasn’t too much of a challenge and it was almost obvious she would have a part to play in the finale. The fact that she ultimately wasn’t the green, sustainable energy loving businesswomen we’d initially been introduced to wasn’t too much of a surprise, though I liked how she did it, emerging as a subtle villain like her father Ra’s al Ghul.

It’d be amiss of me not to mention tight-leather-wearing cat-burglar Selina Kyle, as played by Anne Hathaway, and my, my, hasn’t she come a long way from the Princess Diaries! I found it hard to accept her straddling the Batpod and saving Gotham: images of her as Mia Thermopolis and Ella (from Ella Enchanted) were the dominant ones in my head, but as the film progressed I was – to a certain extent – pleasantly surprised even though I couldn’t shake them. I suppose it shows her versatility as an actress – like her performance in Brokeback Mountain – but there was just something about her that I didn’t quite like, and that didn’t sit comfortably with me.

Morgan Freeman was technologically savvy as ever as Wayne Enterprises employee Lucius Fox, continuing to develop more weapons and gadgets to help Bruce Wayne (and his alter-ego). Gary Oldman is magnificent, as always, as Commissioner Gordon. He is a favourite actor of mine, and in my eyes can do no wrong, and I simply adore him as Gotham’s unfailingly honest but tortured cop, wracked with guilt over his lies in order to protect Dent’s reputation and destroying Batman in the process. His drive to protect Gotham is uncompromising, and as I said, Oldman is the perfect actor in my opinion! I particularly liked the tender moment when he found out Batman’s true identity and how he took rookie “hot head” Officer Blake under his wing – as an actor he does surrogate father-figures really well indeed.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Blake is a very transparent representation of a loss of innocence through war: his hope and optimism surrounding Gotham and his job are lost the tighter Bane’s hold on the city becomes, such that by the end he is eagerly throwing his badge off a bridge and leaving the police force for good. Blake shouldn’t be restricted by the “shackles” of his job, and he is almost a mini-me of Commissioner Gordon, with a dash of Bruce Wayne in the mix. I had SO MUCH love for his ending, and so much respect for Nolan for breaching the Robin issue despite vehemently claiming since Batman Begins he wouldn’t acknowledge it. I just hope and pray that if, and when, the studios take the Robin idea and run with it, that it will be made in the same vein as this trilogy, and not made into the average superhero movie, with copious special effects and predictable bad acting, compromising on plot and complexity for a sure-fire box-office hit.

Overall, acting-wise, I kind of agree with the acting awards bodies, specifically the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, who were apparently unimpressed during a recent screening and now are predicted to act accordingly – The Dark Knight Rises isn’t expected to achieve many awards nods. The acting was definitely nothing spectacular, and certainly not award worthy, but within the context of the film, it worked, with the ensemble cast proving to be nothing short of astonishing.
In every film I watch, there’s always one scene, or a line, or a shot that just captures my attention and steals more of my soul over to the film. It makes me sit up a little straighter, and admire the performance even more, reminding me of how much I love films. In The Dark Knight Rises it was pretty near the end, at the beginning of the climax, in a brief conversation between Officer Blake and an orphaned boy during his attempted evacuation of Gotham. It went thus:

Boy: “Is he back?”

Officer Blake: “Keep your eyes open.”

As silly as it seems, I got instant goose-bumps, spine tingles and was hit by a lightning bolt of excitement. The last time I had such a reaction was in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and anyone who knows me will assure you how much I LOVE Harry Potter so such a reaction was sort of expected. Here, however, it was not. This is what pushed the film – for me – from fabulous to EPIC.

I feel like I’ve said EPIC too many times (and in caps lock for that matter) to describe this film and it’s a term branded about way too much for my liking and in danger of losing its meaning, but to be honest, I can’t think of any other word that accurately sums up the experience of watching this film in all its EPIC glory.

Nolan continues the themes seen in the first two films, building upon and developing the darkness and complexity of Bruce Wayne with Bale. He interweaves the different elements of the story well, utilising his stellar cast to develop their own storylines in conjunction with the main plot. The film provides the audience with visually stunning scenes, be it thousands of policemen thundering through the streets of Gotham towards Bane’s army in battle; or the deadly destruction of a football pitch during a match, following a deathly silent build up; or the opening sequence of a daring plane hijack that Nolan was determined to shoot with as little special effects as possible. It is here that the film excels.

My heart raced all the way through. I was swept up in the story and mercilessly dragged along for the ride like the nuclear reactor under the Batplane. It gets a firm hold of you from the first panning shots of the plane, progressing to show you a broken hero who battles to rise from the ashes of his pain and human weaknesses like a phoenix.

It’s an undeniably cheesy ending; with all lose ends tied up neatly in a way that should prompt scorn and an eye-roll. Batman is seen to have died – BUT NOT REALLY! It’s all okay: he fakes death, running off into the sunset with Catwoman (who gets the fresh start she craved), leaving behind his Batcave in the trusty hands of Robin. All the right people know what really happened and Gotham is at peace, enabling him to hang up the suit and finally just be Bruce Wayne. Somehow Nolan seems pull off such a picture perfect ending with a class and dignity that doesn’t undermine the deliciously dark nature of his Batman universe: one that he reinvented and made truly unforgettable.

The man in the grey suit and black pants a la Only Fools and Horses is gone, and in its place is a lasting legacy that displays skilled filmmaking harmoniously alongside the unabashed commercialism present in a trilogy with unforgivably huge box-office clout.

In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne said that “a guy who dresses like a bat clearly has issues” and surely by extension any director that treats making a film about said man so unapologetically seriously must be worthy of a stint in Arkham Asylum. But it’s almost as if Nolan ignores the fact that his main character is also a masked vigilante called Batman: he’s a human being not a superhero, and as this film goes to particular lengths to confirm, Batman is only a part of Bruce Wayne. It’s a significant part but it’s the man himself who is so much more fascinating and thus it’s the overall picture – the well rounded three-dimensional character – that holds the audience’s attention. After all, a fancy black suit does not Bruce Wayne make. We believe in Batman more than ever because Nolan has finally allowed us to see more of him than ever before.

Nolan doesn’t treat this as yet another comic book film, but as a film about a heart-broken man desperately opposed to the crime festering in his beloved city and unwilling to let it go unpunished. It succeeds regardless, and in spite of, the history and reputation that precedes ‘Batman’.
It works really, really well, and Nolan – master that he is – has produced a trilogy that will stand the test of time. Clearly this is twenty-first century filmmaking at its best.

Christopher Nolan et al, thank you, thank you, thank you. This film confirms for me just how much I bloody love the industry, and long may such experiences of visually stunning masterpieces continue.
Now who else wants to see it again?