Note: This review contains spoilers and presupposes that you, the reader, have seen the movie. If you have not see the movie, then my immediate recommendation is that you don't. If you have and want to know why I don't recommend the movie, then do read on.
The Dark Knight Rises
I've never read a comic book. Not a single one. Ever. Some might say that this fact disqualifies me from offering a worthwhile opinion on The Dark Knight Rises, it being a film adapted from a comic book character, but I beg to differ. In this age of blockbusters based on superhero properties, an era which - let me be clear - I've grown to despise, I feel it's necessary to point out that such films are adaptations, and that the point of adaptation is to translate from one medium to another what works brilliantly while abandoning what doesn't work at all, tailoring to its strengths and weaknesses. And to my, admittedly very limited understanding, it's the vibrant, colourful, fantastic action that makes comic book adaptations such a delightful onscreen spectacle, while it's its inherent inanity which prevents it from being taken seriously. And yes, my ignorance is probably showing with that last jab.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr4.jpg
It's for this reason that I quite like director Christopher Nolan's take on The Batman property, a trilogy beginning in 2005 with the laughable Batman Begins, continuing in 2008 with the stellar The Dark Knight, and concluding with the fatally flawed The Dark Knight Rises, which just released last Friday. Nolan seems to understand that the premise of an affluent billionaire battling baddies in a batsuit is thoroughly ridiculous, so his decisions both to jettison the idiotic trappings of its source material and to ground the cinematic series in contemporary crime drama (more so with the second and third installments) make his treatment infinitely better than any property to come out of the Marvel camp as far as I'm concerned. Well, that is with the exception of Iron Man in 2008, but that masterstroke had the good fortune of being born to a world that hadn't yet been utterly inundated with superhero movies, a world of which I'm increasingly cynical because the promise of infinite world building (and colliding) means routinely praising the people who regularly take $15 and two hours from you, obliging obedient sheep that you are.
If I sound bitter, it's because I am indeed. I actively try to avoid the buzz and hype surrounding hot properties because it inevitably leads both to prejudging and to tainting a fresh perspective. Passing judgment on something before having experienced it can only lead to false validation. In this regard, the prospective audiences of superhero movies are the worst offenders. They obsess over every little detail leading up to the film, and by the time they sit down in the theatre, nothing is new. They're not so much watching a film as they are testing the preconceptions they've long since held. What's the point?
Acutely aware of the perspective I didn't want to have when I approached The Dark Knight Rises in particular (for I do in fact try to apply this pure perspective principle to everything from film & drama to food & drink), all I knew about it beforehand was what I saw in its two minute trailer preceding The Avengers and the advertisements littering everything from websites to bus stop ads in the weeks leading up to its release. Nothing else. And with that, The Dark Knight Rises proved itself to be a decent movie. While admittedly it never manages to eclipse the intensity and spirit of its immediate predecessor (mostly because it regresses to the loopiness of Batman Begins at certain times), I'd wager that it's nevertheless the most ambitious of the three, and with that perhaps even the most intriguing of them, glaring flaws and all.
At any rate, it's been eight years since the events of The Dark Knight. Gotham City has been thoroughly cleaned up owing to legislation within The Dent Act which has eliminated all organized crime (and which also apparently included a stipulation that Gotham is now to resemble New York more than it does Chicago) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has since become a recluse, taking his alter ego The Batman into hiding with him. However when a daring attack at the Gotham City Stock Exchange is staged by a mercenary named Bane (Tom Hardy), The Batman reappears in order to deal with this threatening new menace, in which the fate of the entire city hangs in the balance.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr1.jpeg
Or course there's quite a lot more to it than that, but it's difficult to encapsulate succinctly the wide-ranging scope and sheer density of The Dark Knight Rises, so I chose to err on the side of brevity with the aforesaid synopsis. There's a wily cat burglar by the name of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a rookie detective named Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a new ensemble of powerful Wayne Enterprises board members with their own agendas, and the usual entourage of Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). This is very likely the single most convoluted blockbuster since the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2007.
The immediate problem with so many characters and plot threads is that, on top of arbitrarily bloating the movie, it makes the entire affair unfocused. The Dark Knight four years ago benefited immensely from a tightly knit structure interweaving the fates of antagonist and protagonist while simultaneously contrasting and exploring their motivations, but the contest in this installment is not nearly as intriguing, let alone as well executed. Remarkably, Bruce Wayne has become even less engaging after having voluntarily lost all character, while Bane turns out to be nothing more than a beefy henchman promoted to criminal mastermind in lieu of someone more qualified. Even without the late Heath Ledger's excellent performance, The Joker's playful anarchic streak still would have made for some damn good entertainment in addition to being an intriguing counterpoint in a subtextual moral contest against The Batman's principles. In The Dark Knight Rises, all Bane stands for is terrorism against decadent capitalism, or rather that's the facade he maintains until dull old revenge rears its boring head as the true motivator.
Yes, Bane's wrath is all about avenging both the betrayal Bruce Wayne decided to inflict upon his adopted mountain ninja brethren from the League of Shadows (remember when this reboot was billed as "realistic"?) and finishing the job Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson) started in Batman Begins, despite the fact that Gotham City has never seen better days and it did indeed seem like The Batman really did turn things around. Bafflingly, then, it feels as if the filmmakers held Batman Begins in higher esteem than The Dark Knight, since that's the installment which The Dark Knight Rises evokes the most, almost obligingly so. Occasional lines in the first acts connecting Bane to The League of Shadows as hopefully nothing more than a resigned acknowledgement of a sillier past some seven years ago regrettably led to entire sequences reminiscing about and restaging wholesale the worse parts of Batman Begins.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr3.jpg
Loopier still is the League of Shadows family tree, which must be discussed because it poisons considerable chunks of the movie: a Wayne Enterprises board member and clean energy champion in whom Bruce Wayne has invested considerable resources is one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul, in a superficially surprising twist when she stabs The Batman in his side towards the film's end. In her youth, Talia was a prisoner in a pit from which the only escape was an impossible climb upward through a deep stone cylinder. Conveniently, she is the first and last person to manage the feat, at least until Bruce Wayne is trapped in the same pit by Bane in a masterplan to keep him alive and suffering while he destroys Gotham City. However the only reason Bane was able to deposit Bruce Wayne in such a place (which is actually a scheme that even most Bond villains would call tempting fate) was because he beat him at fisticuffs in the Gotham City sewers, taunting about how his power comes from having escaped the very pit from which he evidently never escaped (though he was indeed a prisoner there). Worse than that is how Talia as Miranda has a romantic encounter with Bruce Wayne, in full knowledge that she's sleeping with the man who murdered her father. This even manages to ruin a bit more of his own characterization, as Bruce Wayne is still hung up on Rachel Dawes enough to dismiss his best friend and closest ally in Alfred for merely suggesting the factual truth that she'd sooner choose Harvey Dent than him. Though regardless, it seems he's not above a quick hook-up with sexy Miss Tate the next day.
Conceptually, these aren't bad characters, but the Nolan brothers and screenwriter David Goyer have them say and do so many ridiculous things that it becomes increasingly difficult to care about them, even when their actors ham it up on screen unabashedly. Bruce Wayne is a mopey moron, Bane is dull and stupid, Miranda Tate is thoroughly unbelievable; the only character of substance is Selina Kyle, and she practically exists in an entirely different movie. Though a plot catalyst on team evil, she's nevertheless driven primarily by her own self-interest, and the fact that so little is known about who she is and why she does the things she does makes her the most fascinating player by far. Still, I'm reluctant to give The Dark Knight Rises too much credit for keeping most of her details hidden, partly because I reckon a longer cut holds the answers, but mostly because fickle attempts at rationalizing them are periodically made. Though certainly chaotic, she's obviously good since she's raising a nameless waif to be at least a benevolent pickpocket. I'd also prefer if her personification as "Occupy Gotham City" subtext remained as such. Railing against privilege only to end up as billionaire arm candy rather undermines what the golden hearted cat burglar stands for. If anything, it only offers further evidence that their mission is less about justice and more about assuaging guilt.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr2.jpg
However the absolute worst thing about The Dark Knight Rises is the simple fact that the identity of The Batman is, apparently, still unknown. Commissioner Gordon has a chat with newly promoted detective Blake from his hospital bed offering the advice that, as detective, you're no longer allowed to believe in coincidences. Wise words indeed, except for the colossal coincidence that Bruce Wayne and The Batman going into and coming out of hiding at the exact same time is never acknowledged. This culminates in a brazenly stupid exchange in the final minutes. Just before The Batman tows away over open ocean the bomb that would level Gotham City in his Bat-jet-copter-hovering thing, he gives Gordon a cryptic hint at his real identity, at which point Gordon whimpers "Bruce?!?" as if he's genuinely surprised. So an eccentric billionaire with too much time and money on his hands as well as terrible deep-seated guilt issues, whose disappearance, resurgence, and alleged death perfectly coincide with those of The Batman, who is presumably one of the few people in the world who can afford to develop and deploy such futuristic technologies and is certainly the one more heavily invested in the fate of Gotham City than anyone else, is, in reality, The Batman? What a shock!
Honestly, the only things The Dark Knight Rises get right are the things which are no longer exclusive to talented blockbuster filmmakers. The action scenes are well staged, but not terribly inventive. The score is a thundering and infective driving force, but then again so are many scores, and it's really only a cut above insofar as it has an appreciable theme. Lots of blockbusters have both of these things in regularly serviceable qualities, so to complement their existence here is really little more than empty praise.
Really, the biggest tragedy is discovering that what worked best four years ago is now its fatal flaw. The strongest part of The Dark Knight wasn't its action and effects, but rather its focused and effective character studies hitherto mostly unexplored in such big budget action packed filmmaking. This is why it's such a shame to see that the same characters this time around are so bloody awful.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr5.jpg
There is, however, one saving grace, and it's the element I most respect in filmmaking which The Dark Knight Rises indeed has a great deal of, and thus it's perhaps even enough to elevate the film from abysmal to all right. The Dark Knight Rises is an ambitious film. It wants to be an epic crime saga and riveting superhero film, telling an intricate story with well rounded characters, clever writing, and surprising twists. Unfortunately, it's also a deeply flawed film. While its tale is indeed complex and engaging, its writing is mostly expository fluff and its characters are marred conveniences. It's less a logical sequence of events (far from it, in fact), and more a series of plot points the filmmakers desperately want to explore before culminating in a tidy conclusion into which the details of character and motivation had to be seriously deformed to fit.
But it's ambitious! It kept me surprised and entertained, and indeed I did think highly of it at first, at least until I began to reflect and realize how wretchedly inane it all was. Still, I can't recommend it. Is this really what passes for exceptional entertainment; a certainly enjoyable but nevertheless colossally dumb 165 minutes, the apparent praising of which mostly seems to be good will carried over from its brilliant predecessor? Perhaps in a regrettably real world where alternatives such as the Transformers movies exist, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't demand better. So no, I won't become like Commissioner Gordon, who would sooner wait for the time when the truth is more palatable than say what needs to be said. The Dark Knight Rises is not a good movie. It's not a bad one, either, and certainly a hell of a lot better than its immediate adversary, The Avengers (indeed it would have to be actively trying to be terrible to be worse than that grotesque monstrosity). But there have been better superhero movies, better blockbusters, better crime movies, and just thousands of other better movies in general, each of which more worthy of your time than this misfire masquerading as a quintessential cultural experience.
The Dark Knight Rises
I've never read a comic book. Not a single one. Ever. Some might say that this fact disqualifies me from offering a worthwhile opinion on The Dark Knight Rises, it being a film adapted from a comic book character, but I beg to differ. In this age of blockbusters based on superhero properties, an era which - let me be clear - I've grown to despise, I feel it's necessary to point out that such films are adaptations, and that the point of adaptation is to translate from one medium to another what works brilliantly while abandoning what doesn't work at all, tailoring to its strengths and weaknesses. And to my, admittedly very limited understanding, it's the vibrant, colourful, fantastic action that makes comic book adaptations such a delightful onscreen spectacle, while it's its inherent inanity which prevents it from being taken seriously. And yes, my ignorance is probably showing with that last jab.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr4.jpg
It's for this reason that I quite like director Christopher Nolan's take on The Batman property, a trilogy beginning in 2005 with the laughable Batman Begins, continuing in 2008 with the stellar The Dark Knight, and concluding with the fatally flawed The Dark Knight Rises, which just released last Friday. Nolan seems to understand that the premise of an affluent billionaire battling baddies in a batsuit is thoroughly ridiculous, so his decisions both to jettison the idiotic trappings of its source material and to ground the cinematic series in contemporary crime drama (more so with the second and third installments) make his treatment infinitely better than any property to come out of the Marvel camp as far as I'm concerned. Well, that is with the exception of Iron Man in 2008, but that masterstroke had the good fortune of being born to a world that hadn't yet been utterly inundated with superhero movies, a world of which I'm increasingly cynical because the promise of infinite world building (and colliding) means routinely praising the people who regularly take $15 and two hours from you, obliging obedient sheep that you are.
If I sound bitter, it's because I am indeed. I actively try to avoid the buzz and hype surrounding hot properties because it inevitably leads both to prejudging and to tainting a fresh perspective. Passing judgment on something before having experienced it can only lead to false validation. In this regard, the prospective audiences of superhero movies are the worst offenders. They obsess over every little detail leading up to the film, and by the time they sit down in the theatre, nothing is new. They're not so much watching a film as they are testing the preconceptions they've long since held. What's the point?
Acutely aware of the perspective I didn't want to have when I approached The Dark Knight Rises in particular (for I do in fact try to apply this pure perspective principle to everything from film & drama to food & drink), all I knew about it beforehand was what I saw in its two minute trailer preceding The Avengers and the advertisements littering everything from websites to bus stop ads in the weeks leading up to its release. Nothing else. And with that, The Dark Knight Rises proved itself to be a decent movie. While admittedly it never manages to eclipse the intensity and spirit of its immediate predecessor (mostly because it regresses to the loopiness of Batman Begins at certain times), I'd wager that it's nevertheless the most ambitious of the three, and with that perhaps even the most intriguing of them, glaring flaws and all.
At any rate, it's been eight years since the events of The Dark Knight. Gotham City has been thoroughly cleaned up owing to legislation within The Dent Act which has eliminated all organized crime (and which also apparently included a stipulation that Gotham is now to resemble New York more than it does Chicago) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has since become a recluse, taking his alter ego The Batman into hiding with him. However when a daring attack at the Gotham City Stock Exchange is staged by a mercenary named Bane (Tom Hardy), The Batman reappears in order to deal with this threatening new menace, in which the fate of the entire city hangs in the balance.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr1.jpeg
Or course there's quite a lot more to it than that, but it's difficult to encapsulate succinctly the wide-ranging scope and sheer density of The Dark Knight Rises, so I chose to err on the side of brevity with the aforesaid synopsis. There's a wily cat burglar by the name of Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a rookie detective named Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a new ensemble of powerful Wayne Enterprises board members with their own agendas, and the usual entourage of Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). This is very likely the single most convoluted blockbuster since the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2007.
The immediate problem with so many characters and plot threads is that, on top of arbitrarily bloating the movie, it makes the entire affair unfocused. The Dark Knight four years ago benefited immensely from a tightly knit structure interweaving the fates of antagonist and protagonist while simultaneously contrasting and exploring their motivations, but the contest in this installment is not nearly as intriguing, let alone as well executed. Remarkably, Bruce Wayne has become even less engaging after having voluntarily lost all character, while Bane turns out to be nothing more than a beefy henchman promoted to criminal mastermind in lieu of someone more qualified. Even without the late Heath Ledger's excellent performance, The Joker's playful anarchic streak still would have made for some damn good entertainment in addition to being an intriguing counterpoint in a subtextual moral contest against The Batman's principles. In The Dark Knight Rises, all Bane stands for is terrorism against decadent capitalism, or rather that's the facade he maintains until dull old revenge rears its boring head as the true motivator.
Yes, Bane's wrath is all about avenging both the betrayal Bruce Wayne decided to inflict upon his adopted mountain ninja brethren from the League of Shadows (remember when this reboot was billed as "realistic"?) and finishing the job Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson) started in Batman Begins, despite the fact that Gotham City has never seen better days and it did indeed seem like The Batman really did turn things around. Bafflingly, then, it feels as if the filmmakers held Batman Begins in higher esteem than The Dark Knight, since that's the installment which The Dark Knight Rises evokes the most, almost obligingly so. Occasional lines in the first acts connecting Bane to The League of Shadows as hopefully nothing more than a resigned acknowledgement of a sillier past some seven years ago regrettably led to entire sequences reminiscing about and restaging wholesale the worse parts of Batman Begins.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr3.jpg
Loopier still is the League of Shadows family tree, which must be discussed because it poisons considerable chunks of the movie: a Wayne Enterprises board member and clean energy champion in whom Bruce Wayne has invested considerable resources is one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul, in a superficially surprising twist when she stabs The Batman in his side towards the film's end. In her youth, Talia was a prisoner in a pit from which the only escape was an impossible climb upward through a deep stone cylinder. Conveniently, she is the first and last person to manage the feat, at least until Bruce Wayne is trapped in the same pit by Bane in a masterplan to keep him alive and suffering while he destroys Gotham City. However the only reason Bane was able to deposit Bruce Wayne in such a place (which is actually a scheme that even most Bond villains would call tempting fate) was because he beat him at fisticuffs in the Gotham City sewers, taunting about how his power comes from having escaped the very pit from which he evidently never escaped (though he was indeed a prisoner there). Worse than that is how Talia as Miranda has a romantic encounter with Bruce Wayne, in full knowledge that she's sleeping with the man who murdered her father. This even manages to ruin a bit more of his own characterization, as Bruce Wayne is still hung up on Rachel Dawes enough to dismiss his best friend and closest ally in Alfred for merely suggesting the factual truth that she'd sooner choose Harvey Dent than him. Though regardless, it seems he's not above a quick hook-up with sexy Miss Tate the next day.
Conceptually, these aren't bad characters, but the Nolan brothers and screenwriter David Goyer have them say and do so many ridiculous things that it becomes increasingly difficult to care about them, even when their actors ham it up on screen unabashedly. Bruce Wayne is a mopey moron, Bane is dull and stupid, Miranda Tate is thoroughly unbelievable; the only character of substance is Selina Kyle, and she practically exists in an entirely different movie. Though a plot catalyst on team evil, she's nevertheless driven primarily by her own self-interest, and the fact that so little is known about who she is and why she does the things she does makes her the most fascinating player by far. Still, I'm reluctant to give The Dark Knight Rises too much credit for keeping most of her details hidden, partly because I reckon a longer cut holds the answers, but mostly because fickle attempts at rationalizing them are periodically made. Though certainly chaotic, she's obviously good since she's raising a nameless waif to be at least a benevolent pickpocket. I'd also prefer if her personification as "Occupy Gotham City" subtext remained as such. Railing against privilege only to end up as billionaire arm candy rather undermines what the golden hearted cat burglar stands for. If anything, it only offers further evidence that their mission is less about justice and more about assuaging guilt.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr2.jpg
However the absolute worst thing about The Dark Knight Rises is the simple fact that the identity of The Batman is, apparently, still unknown. Commissioner Gordon has a chat with newly promoted detective Blake from his hospital bed offering the advice that, as detective, you're no longer allowed to believe in coincidences. Wise words indeed, except for the colossal coincidence that Bruce Wayne and The Batman going into and coming out of hiding at the exact same time is never acknowledged. This culminates in a brazenly stupid exchange in the final minutes. Just before The Batman tows away over open ocean the bomb that would level Gotham City in his Bat-jet-copter-hovering thing, he gives Gordon a cryptic hint at his real identity, at which point Gordon whimpers "Bruce?!?" as if he's genuinely surprised. So an eccentric billionaire with too much time and money on his hands as well as terrible deep-seated guilt issues, whose disappearance, resurgence, and alleged death perfectly coincide with those of The Batman, who is presumably one of the few people in the world who can afford to develop and deploy such futuristic technologies and is certainly the one more heavily invested in the fate of Gotham City than anyone else, is, in reality, The Batman? What a shock!
Honestly, the only things The Dark Knight Rises get right are the things which are no longer exclusive to talented blockbuster filmmakers. The action scenes are well staged, but not terribly inventive. The score is a thundering and infective driving force, but then again so are many scores, and it's really only a cut above insofar as it has an appreciable theme. Lots of blockbusters have both of these things in regularly serviceable qualities, so to complement their existence here is really little more than empty praise.
Really, the biggest tragedy is discovering that what worked best four years ago is now its fatal flaw. The strongest part of The Dark Knight wasn't its action and effects, but rather its focused and effective character studies hitherto mostly unexplored in such big budget action packed filmmaking. This is why it's such a shame to see that the same characters this time around are so bloody awful.
http://www.confederatewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/dkr5.jpg
There is, however, one saving grace, and it's the element I most respect in filmmaking which The Dark Knight Rises indeed has a great deal of, and thus it's perhaps even enough to elevate the film from abysmal to all right. The Dark Knight Rises is an ambitious film. It wants to be an epic crime saga and riveting superhero film, telling an intricate story with well rounded characters, clever writing, and surprising twists. Unfortunately, it's also a deeply flawed film. While its tale is indeed complex and engaging, its writing is mostly expository fluff and its characters are marred conveniences. It's less a logical sequence of events (far from it, in fact), and more a series of plot points the filmmakers desperately want to explore before culminating in a tidy conclusion into which the details of character and motivation had to be seriously deformed to fit.
But it's ambitious! It kept me surprised and entertained, and indeed I did think highly of it at first, at least until I began to reflect and realize how wretchedly inane it all was. Still, I can't recommend it. Is this really what passes for exceptional entertainment; a certainly enjoyable but nevertheless colossally dumb 165 minutes, the apparent praising of which mostly seems to be good will carried over from its brilliant predecessor? Perhaps in a regrettably real world where alternatives such as the Transformers movies exist, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't demand better. So no, I won't become like Commissioner Gordon, who would sooner wait for the time when the truth is more palatable than say what needs to be said. The Dark Knight Rises is not a good movie. It's not a bad one, either, and certainly a hell of a lot better than its immediate adversary, The Avengers (indeed it would have to be actively trying to be terrible to be worse than that grotesque monstrosity). But there have been better superhero movies, better blockbusters, better crime movies, and just thousands of other better movies in general, each of which more worthy of your time than this misfire masquerading as a quintessential cultural experience.
