The Dark Knight Rises is finally here! After months of waiting, and countless theories about how Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy will end, we get our answer! Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to see the friggin’ flick yet! So, to get the review out there, I asked resident AFC editor Alex Langley to step in for me to review it. There’s a number of spoilers in this review (so he tells me. I haven’t read it because of the aforementioned spoilers) so if you want a general review of TDKR without spoilers, check out Alex’s spoiler-free intro.
The Dark Knight Rises: Batman Begins (Being a Bonehead)
Let me start off by saying that I enjoyed TDKR; despite some issues, it was an entertaining experience and a satisfying way to wrap up the trilogy.
(This review is chock full of spoilers, so don’t read on from here if you haven’t seen the film. Seriously. I mean, you can if you want, but there’s a crapload of spoilers so consider yourself warned.)
Now, that being said, the film has its share of problems. First and foremost is that, for a Batman movie there sure isn’t much Batman in it, and when he does show up it’s generally to behave like an idiot. Throughout the film we see Bruce Wayne/Batman engaging in bullheaded and uncharacteristically trusting behaviors. Bane, this massive, expertly trained brawler, wants to fist-fight me? Sure, why use gadgets or try to defeat him by being clever when I can instead just hope that I’m a better kick-puncher than he is, and then, after he severely beats my ass in a one-on-one fight, I’ll track him down in the climax of the film and do the exact same thing, hoping for different results.
I sure do hope I can out fist-fight this guy, despite the grueling, one-sided beating he dealt me the last time we faced off.
That’s honestly my primary contention with this film— too much of it doesn’t feel like Batman. Bruce Wayne is not the kind of guy to give up being Batman for eight years just because he feels mopey about losing someone/has to hide from the police. The man’s mission is too important. Likewise, he’s also not the kind to let a random rich girl into his mansion and sleep with her, or start spitting fatherly advice to every hotheaded cop who wants to help, or to trust a cat burglar who just turned him over to Bane and let him get severely beaten and left to die in an Indian prison.
Speaking of newcomers Marion Cotillard, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, while all four performed well, each of their characters presents some problems.
To anyone familiar with the comics, Marion Cotillard’s true role may be obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s kind of distracting, not to mention frustrating to watch Bruce Wayne fall for her very obvious ploys. He does that a lot in this film— Bruce Wayne/Batman falls for every trick the badguys throw his way, and only emerges victorious seemingly by virtue of being Batman. If you’ve seen Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows you may recall that Holmes spends a lot of the film getting his ass handed to him by Moriarty. In the film’s climax, however, it’s revealed that all of this was part of Holmes’ greater plan to destroy Moriarty from within, using his own overconfidence against him. It’s a supremely satisfying moment, one that does not exist within The Dark Knight Rises. No, here Batman is just being kind of a dummy.
Speaking of out of character actions, Alfred abandoning Bruce towards the beginning of the film feels wildly out of character for him. This is a man who sticks by Bruce Wayne and the Wayne family no matter what; he’s driven to help Bruce with the same level of passion Bruce has about bringing a greater justice to the world to prevent anyone from suffering the same way he suffered as a child. Also, with Alfred being gone for most of the movie so is the source of most of the previous Batman films’ humor. Alfred’s funny. He gives good advice, tells great stories, and does so with wit and style, even managing to bring out some humor from Bruce. But without him we get a dry film, bereft of levity.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, zealous young police officer John Blake, has a similar issue to Marion Cotillard’s: it’s far too obvious what his role is in the story. Here we have this new character getting convenient little tidbits of advice from Commissioner Gordon and Batman about justice and making decisions, all of which not only feel out of character for the people giving the advice, but broadcast to the audience that hey, this guy’s gonna end up taking over the cowl once Bruce hangs it up.
Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman is great, and she gets more than a few zingers and badass moments to make the audience like her, but her plotline could have been completely excised from the film and it would have made little difference. Similarly, because she gets so many moments of showing off how cool she is, it feels like there wasn’t time for Batman himself to get any. Every good superhero, or action, or hell, even drama, grants the audience a payoff to the struggles they’ve watched the hero endure, something cool and satisfying to make us feel that we haven’t wasted our time in watching this hero.
The hulking killing machine that is Tom Hardy’s Bane is a wondrous foe, worthy of clashing with the Dark Knight. However, his accent is definitely kind of weird, distracting at times, and elements of his storyline don’t resolve well. Like a number of the many, many storylines at work in TDKR, there are elements at play with Bane that don’t go anywhere, like the early presentation of him being the embodiment of the 99% facing off against the rich 1%, which is abandoned and forgotten in the later parts of the movie. Also, after building up Bane as an ultra-badass for the entire film, how does Batman beat him? He doesn’t. Catwoman shoots him with a cannon, the end. Nothing smart or even particularly heroic about that. Catwoman just happens to show up and blasts ol’ Bane with the cannons on the Batcycle. Seriously?!?
The Dark Knight Rises features a Batman who is rusty and a bit dumb, but somehow the film still works. Tom Hardy’s Bane brings a menace to the screen with every frame that he’s on it, and the film resolves itself nicely, so while it’s the weakest of the Batman trilogy, it’s still a good film, and better than most that grace the theater.
(Side note: Since this review is on AFC, I feel obligated to mention that the action sequences in TDKR, while visceral and exciting, are also few and far between. I’m hesitant to give it an action rating since that’s Action Chick’s thing, but if pressed for a number, I’d give it 2 Batcopters out of 5.)
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I agree with most everything in this review. I’d add that I was severely disappointed that they decided to go with the whole “League of Shadows” thing. I consequently found the villains’ motivations to be unclear at best, silly at worst, just as in Batman Begins (Dark Knight Returns seemed better in this respect, though I’m at a loss to explain why). So we have …
A secret society whose mission is to purge evil cities? Really? In the realistic grittiness of this Batman trilogy, that entire premise stands out for its comic-bookishness. The threat of evil secret organizations who want to destroy evil using overly extreme methods is just not realistic. I know people are probably shaking their heads in pity at my ignorance now, but think about it. The real threats the world faces are mostly from people who want to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Occasionally we have people who want to benefit their country, or group, or ideology or whatever at the expense of others. How often do we have people who want to benefit no one at the expense of everyone? Imagine if Bin Laden said he blew up the towers not because he opposed American policy in the middle east, not to strike a blow against secular or Zionist hegemony on behalf of Islam, but just because New York was an evil city that needed to be purged. Seriously? That only happens in the comics. And I really dislike the comic book mentality that villains don’t need to have any kind of serious, rational motivation.
And then we have …
Marion Cotillard’s character, who spends a while explaining how she hated her father and the League of Shadows and didn’t share any of their (nonsensical) motivations until … Batman killed her father and suddenly she decided she did share all their motivations after all? WTF? This seriously makes no sense whatsoever. If she hated her father then why wasn’t she grateful to Batman for killing him? Even if she wanted revenge on Batman, surely there were 1000 simpler and more effective ways to go about it? Hunt down all his friends and shoot them in front of him, for example? I mean look, the Joker seriously put Batman through much more psychological torture with much fewer resources and planning, just by killing Rachel. There was no shortage of similar targets in this movie such as Fox, Alfred, etc. and somehow they all manage to survive. Jeez, if I were a villain, I’d do a better job with a smaller budget.
I applaud this review but have my reservations about the conclusion that this was the weakest of the trilogy. For me personally, I felt the second film deserved that honor but that’s only relevant in regard to what this current review brought to my attention.
My feelings on the second film could be summed up by the simple acknowledgement that it didn’t feel like “Batman” after all was said and done. For what ever reason, the character on the screen just didn’t seem to resonate with the character I’ve spent years getting to know in both comics and through movies and series over the last two decades. In regard to that knowledge, the second movie to me seems almost to foreshadow the primary concern the reviewer expressed. This Batman was not “Batman.”
I’m not sure where or when the division really started to pick up speed but the essence of the character seemed the underlining casualty. *SPOILERS* Batman’s brazen disregard for human life at the movie’s climax alone really had me reevaluating the world Christopher Nolan had created all this time. His portrayal as Batman at this point in the timeline seemed to represent more man than symbol. The reliance on the police (see as Det. Blake) and accomplished thief (see as Catwoman) made it seem as though Bruce had lost far more than his fighting spirit.
By no means would I dare purposely insinuate that the Dark Knight Rises was a terrible movie but at the same time it became quite clear, quite early on that this wasn’t going to be a movie about “Batman” any more as opposed to an ailing man in a bat costume.
You could say this film is on a level with RETURN OF THE JEDI.
A very weak sequel in itself that serves only to tie up the loose ends to the films before it.
A CATWOMAN MINI- SERIES WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER VENTURE.
WHO’S WITH ME ON THIS ONE?
WHO WOULD YOU WANT TO WRITE,PRODUCE,AND STAR IN THAT ONE?
LET ME HEAR FROM ALL READERS……..NOW!!!