If you’re going to relate the latest entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise to the two that came before it, then Batman Begins is the baseline. Nolan’s first crack at the character was the most sturdy, standalone entry in his franchise. It tells the most solid story and it exists as the most complete film. But its also the most mundane and forgettable of the three. The Dark Knight was far more sprawling, and way more of an epic. With this added scope came a messiness and some logic issues, but it also brought sublime filmmaking moments that will be added to the canon of cinema history. The highs in that second film are so high that you never even consider the mess that they leave behind. Comparatively, The Dark Knight Rises is the most uneven of Nolan’s trilogy. It gives us some of those crazy moments of pure movie joy like The Dark Knight did—moments that are rare and need to be cherished—but it doesn’t give us quite as many, and it offers up the lowest lows that this series has to offer. There are chunks of this movie that are flat-out boring, and, even worse, there are moments that are just plain bad.
Most of the complaints that one might have stem from the fact that Nolan and his brother Jonathan just haven’t written a very good script. The basic story is that its been 8 years since the end of The Dark Knight. The death of Harvey Dent has been spun into being an inspirational tragedy, and has resulted in the signing of the Dent Act, a sweeping legislational reform which gave Gotham P.D. unprecedented power to clean up the city and crush organized crime. During this time the caped crusader has been inactive and Bruce Wayne has been secluded in his mansion, growing weak and hobbled. But now a mysterious cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who’s shown up at Wayne Manor to steal his mother’s pearls, and a mysterious mercenary named Bane (Tom Hardy), who’s shown up with a small army and intentions of taking over Gotham, have forced Wayne to once again don the cape and cowl, and become the Batman.
This premise is the first place where the script runs into problems. The basic character arc that Bruce Wayne goes through over the course of the film is that he faces new threats unprepared, is handily defeated, and then has to build himself back up for a climactic showdown. That’s good in theory, but in practice it takes too long to set up, and it makes for a boring first act. The dialogue is largely to blame, as it’s not only forgettable at its best and completely lame at its worst, but it also just never stops. The bulk of the first half of this film is made up of characters monologuing, one after another, in 1000 word speeches that only needed around 200. They hammer home the themes, they hammer home who each of the players are, and they hammer home the intricacies of the story, but mostly they just hammer us over the head.
The monologuing isn’t the only reason the film is slow to start, however. It spends too much time setting up the premise that Batman has been inactive and physically degenerating for 8 years; a premise that doesn’t add anything to the movie, and which doesn’t even jive with the heart of the Batman character (but more on that later). We’re a good ways into the first act before Bruce dons the Batman gear again and gets beaten by Bane, and there really doesn’t seem to be any reason why this couldn’t have been the first scene of the film. It would take only a few throwaway lines to establish that crime has been beaten in Gotham and the Batman has gotten soft over the past few years. To spend so much time establishing the character’s inactivity was wasteful. Additionally, having Wayne go through the process of building himself back up, getting beaten, and then building himself back up again makes the film feel repetitious and cluttered. Having Bane defeat a Batman who is already established as being on his last legs takes away some of the impact of their first encounter as well. Wouldn’t this have been so much better if the film would have opened with Batman versus a mysterious newcomer, and had the hero beaten before the title card even came up? Giving the first act a huge trim would have been beneficial in countless ways.
The biggest of which would have been the elimination of needless complexities. The Dark Knight Rises has too many needless characters to introduce and a needlessly complex plot that it has to keep spelling out for us; and it wouldn’t have been much of a feat to simplify things. A third film in a franchise should already have everything well-established and should be able to hit the ground running. So why do the Nolans give us so many new wrinkles? Why is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Batman’s new contact in the police when Jim Gordon is already his contact in the police? Why is Catwoman in here as an antagonist when the story already has Bane? To be a love interest? Well, why is she serving as a love interest when his new business partner Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) is already playing the role of his new squeeze? And if Tate’s not going to be the new romantic element, then why does Wayne need a new business partner at all? He already has Lucius Fox for business stuff! Half of these characters could have been eliminated completely.
And, for that matter, what is the point of the hugely expensive, hugely complicated mid-air heist sequence that opens the film? The only thing that gets established in this long, complex, epically staged scene that involves dozens of actors, stuntmen, and untold numbers of crew is that Bane has kidnapped a scientist. That couldn’t have been established with a throwaway line? Especially in a film whose later developments require way more of its run time and budgetary resources than they received? None of this was necessary at all, and it just serves as another example of the unwieldy mass that weighs down the first act.
But what of those later developments that deserved more screen time and money? Now we’re talking about the second act: the occupation of Gotham by Bane and the rebuilding of Bruce Wayne that takes place in a remote, secluded location. From what we’re told Gotham gets put under the military rule of a brutal dictator for a span of five months that get depicted over the course of the middle portion of this film. The federal government is kept at bay with terrorist threats, and much of the city’s police force has been imprisoned, but a small resistance of police officers and Wayne Enterprises executives has formed. This is huge in scope, big stakes stuff, and it all gets glossed over in montage sequences. Nothing in the first act comes close to touching how interesting exploring life in occupied Gotham over five months would have been. And none of it was as interesting as the personal journey of Bruce Wayne coming back from the brink of obliteration and finding the inspiration to return as the city’s symbol of justice would have been if appropriately explored. But all of this good stuff—the heart of the story being told—it ends up feeling rushed, and it loses much of its resonance.
It would seem that a film that so thoroughly bobbled its first two-thirds wouldn’t have any chance whatsoever of delivering a satisfying conclusion, but this is the point where The Dark Knight Rises really starts to shine. The glimpses of Bane taking over Gotham that we do get, and the subsequent battle that takes place once all of the players get lined up to clash against one another, they’re all stunning examples of big budget, big adventure moviemaking. Remember those thrills that you got from The Dark Knight, from the scenes where Batman jumped off impossibly tall buildings in Hong Kong, or the Joker stuck his head out of a car window to feel the wind in his hair after causing untold of amounts of carnage? There are moments like those here too. And, despite how uneven and disappointing the film is overall, it would be pretty impossible not to walk out of the theater feeling buzzed after experiencing its big finale. If there’s one thing Nolan has proven he can do since he transitioned into making hugely budgeted films, it’s handle the technical aspects of staging gigantic action scenarios.
With Nolan’s writing/directing out of the way, that brings us to the performances. The usual quartet of Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman perform exactly as you’d expect they would at this point. Bale is probably given a meatier journey to take in this film than he was in the previous two, and he handles the dramatic scenes well; but his interpretation of Wayne when he’s in the mask is still goofy and cringe-inducing. How strongly you’ll react to the ridiculous growls is something you’re probably already clear on. Oldman, Caine, and Freeman are all universally great, and though they are each given moments to shine, it’s so much damned fun to watch them bring these characters to life that you’ll be left wishing they could have each gotten even meatier roles to play in the story. That’s pretty par for course as far as this series is concerned as well, though.
The big question is how the newcomers fare. Gordon-Levitt is really great as John Blake, a younger member of the Gotham Police Department who shares a link with Bruce Wayne due to childhood tragedies. This new character gets well-defined over the course of the film, and the humanity Gordon-Levitt brings to his performance is enough to make you feel like you’ve been following him in Batman comics for years (despite his being a new creation). The problem is, there are huge chunks of this movie where Blake becomes the main character, and though he’s generally up to the task of carrying a film, people bought a ticket for this thing expecting it to be a movie about Batman, not a movie about rookie cop John Blake. That’s inevitably going to be the cause of a lot of resentment among fans. Ultimately, Blake is an unnecessary addition to the universe, and Nolan would have been better served having the Gordon character handle the police work he does. The place he goes by the end of the film just isn’t worth all the effort put in to getting him there.
Anne Hathaway was my biggest concern going in, but she managed to be a pleasant surprise as Selina Kyle. Generally I find that when she plays anything more charismatic than vanilla, Hathaway appears to be visibly trying too hard, so Catwoman didn’t seem like a good fit for her. The scene where her character gets introduced initially seemed to confirm my fears. There are moments right at the beginning where she appears to be too pointedly putting on the affectation of being charismatic, but after a couple of early hiccups she really settles into things and ends up owning this version of Catwoman. Selina Kyle is charming and capable, but with an undercurrent of anger running beneath everything she does. Hathaway is able to nail those second two aspects of her character perfectly, and the only way her performance could have been improved upon is if they had cast an actress with equal chops and a smidge more natural charisma. As that’s easier said than done, it’s hard to be disappointed by what she did with so legendary a comic book femme fatale.
Tom Hardy’s performance as Bane is a little easier to be disappointed by though. The main problem with the character is the ridiculous mask they designed for him that completely covers his mouth and obscures 90% of what’s going on with his face. Hardy is enough of an imposing presence that he physically looked the part of the muscly mercenary who broke the Bat, but other than that you might as well have not even cast an actor with Hardy’s pedigree in the role. He goes the route of giving Bane a voice that sounds like one of the Ents from The Lord of the Rings narrating a Winnie the Pooh story and, while interesting, such a bold choice doesn’t end up panning out. If we could have seen Hardy emoting, seen him delivering this unique vocal take on the character, then I have no doubt that it would have been brilliant. But, in this mask, any bit of acting is going to be completely obscured, any personality shown completely drown out. They might as well have just hired a muscleman stand-in to play the character and had Christopher Lee or somebody provide his voice.
Add it all up and you get a wildly uneven if not slightly disappointing end to a generally strong trilogy of films. Certainly, anybody who tries to make a Batman movie from this point on is going to have huge shoes to fill in the eyes of the moviegoing public. Likely, when the history books are closed, Christopher Nolan will be viewed as the definitive voice when it comes to portrayals of the Batman character on film.
And still, as this trilogy wraps up I can’t help but feel that there was one important aspect of the character that Nolan and company never quite got. As dark as this series gets, it never quite understands that Batman, at his very core, is a tragic figure. Batman is a character born of and rooted in doomed obsession. Everything he does, every choice he makes, stems from a childish, impossible promise he makes to himself as a boy that nobody will ever get murdered again. The first act of this film, where Batman has ceased operations for 8 years because the signing of the Dent Act effectively broke up Gotham’s organized crime, it never would have happened. With crime on the downswing and Batman being feverishly pursued by the authorities, perhaps Wayne would have taken the Batman more to the shadows, perhaps he would have continued helping Gordon in more clandestine ways, but he would never quit. As long as there is a gun left on the street, a petty crime being perpetrated in an alley anywhere, Bruce Wayne would never stop being the Batman. His stubbornness, his obsession, is the heart of the character, and it all stems from a unique form of insanity that has doomed him to never being able to achieve his goals. That’s what makes Batman more interesting than every other good samaritan in the history of fiction.
The conceit here seems to be that Batman was so broken up by the death of Rachel Dawes at the end of The Dark Knight that he’s checked out of the world completely. Never would have happened. Batman already reached his breaking point as a very young boy. Ever since then he has just been the broken, messy pieces of a man. Bruce Wayne doesn’t exist, Bruce Wayne is just a mask. After that one day there is only the Batman. Which brings us to the end point of this trilogy. Without giving too much away, the last few minutes of The Dark Knight Rises seem to concern themselves with the question of what happens to Bruce Wayne after he stops being Batman, and what happens to Batman after there is no more Bruce Wayne. This is a question the film should never have tried to answer, because it’s flawed at its core, and the answers it comes up with seem like the root of many of the narrative complications that slow things down on the way to the big finale. The real answer would have been “nothing.”
From the very beginning of Nolan’s trilogy every storytelling mistake made has seemed to hover around the character of Rachel Dawes. Dawes was Wayne’s connection to his past life, the thing anchoring him to his humanity. In no other version of Batman’s stories has she existed, and in this version she becomes an anchor around the narrative’s neck. Batman has no grounding presence in his life (not even Alfred can pull that off), he has no connection to the past. He has turned his back on humanity and embraced idealism and rigidity as substitutes. He didn’t need a girl named Rachel slapping him in Batman Begins to teach him that becoming a criminal wasn’t an answer to his problems. He knew what he needed to do the day his parents were shot. He didn’t need to be involved in a love triangle with Harvey Dent and the same girl when he should have been focusing on his mission in The Dark Knight. He lost the ability to trust love the day his parents were shot. And he certainly didn’t need to take 8 years off from his life’s obsession in The Dark Knight Rises because he was sad that his girlfriend got exploded. He gave up taking time off the day his parents were shot.
Nolan’s Batman trilogy was great, and perhaps more than we could have ever hoped for as far as film adaptations of this beloved character go. But it’s hard not to imagine how much better they could have been if a new character hadn’t been created whose sole purpose seems to have been robbing the central character of everything that makes him different from other film heroes. I get what the point of it all was: to humanize the character so that he might be relatable for a wider audience. But Batman isn’t a human, he’s a legend. And it’s hard to imagine him becoming any more universally beloved than he already was before this series of films ever began. Nolan’s movies will be remembered fondly, but this is a character who will never die. Hopefully the next time we see him in a live action feature they don’t give him a lame girlfriend.
