The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Dir.: Christopher Nolan
Plot: A reclusive Bruce Wayne is forced to reassume his alter ego Batman to protect Gotham from a ruthless terrorist with designs on Gotham.

SPOILERS ABOUND

You can’t have your cake and eat it. This is a fundamental rule of many things in life, and movie making is one of them. The Dark Knight Rises tries to straddle the line between bleak psychological drama and extremely fast motorbikes and doesn’t quite manage it. The result is a frustratingly uneven epic - bolstered with good performances, excellent direction and some memorable set pieces but ultimately overlong, turgid and weighed down with questionable subplots and 2D characterisations.

But let’s start with the good. First off, the cinematography and direction are superb. Chris Nolan is wonderful choreographer of voyages through a universe, taking you through his Gotham with an assured eye. The composition and framing of his shots are among the best you are likely to see in contemporary cinema, the equal of many an artier undertaking. Similarly, the action is staged with such polish that even a viewer like myself with an avowed dislike of long fight/chase scenes can simply enjoy being carried away by the artistry of the direction. Credit must go to cinematographer Wally Pfister for the unique palette of colours and textures that give Gotham an unmistakeable character of its own.

Just a brief word on the film’s second big strength - performances. Christian Bale is reliable in the lead, being especially outstanding in the prison scenes. Tom Hardy sounds like Ian McKellan doing an impression of himself, but besides this makes a fairly memorable impression as Bane (a character hampered by vague motives and doing little besides bumping off his subordinates - a villain who unfailingly murders everyone he shares a frame with soon loses his menace). Anne Hathaway’s sassy characterisation seems like it comes from another film and brings some welcome light relief. Cast stalwalts Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine put in predictably solid performances, although they have varying material to work with. I for one am not thrilled about Alfred’s transformation from affectionate, wisecracking guardian to butt monkey whose entire existence revolves around Bruce Wayne. Their relationship is central to the emotional heart of the canon, yes, but this really is a little too much. My head canon is that post-TDKR he joins a bridge club and realises that Bruce Wayne really wasn’t all that much to write home about. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has to be the standout, though, taking a role that could be summarised on paper as ‘idealistic rookie cop’ and making it so much more than that overused trope suggests. The Robin joke at the end was ever so slightly on-the-nose, but I’ll give it a pass because you’ve got to take fun where you can get it in this universe…

This really works. I cannot emphasise this enough.

Alright, now to the bad. Deep breaths… I appreciate that the Nolans wanted to do something more with the script than your average superhero blockbuster, but neither the premise nor the running time can bear the kind of heavyweight existentialism they try to hang on it. Half of the dialogue is made up of ‘profound’ pseudo-philosophical observations which are supposed to resonate but are ultimately hollow and meaningless. Being burdened with completely expendable stuffing means the plot has to consist mostly of clunky exposition to keep the running time under the 3 hour mark. Lines like “Why were we even summoned to this meeting?” spoken as two characters approach the boardroom are simply not worthy of either the actors or the aesthetic. At one point Catwoman even says “There is a storm coming.” This is not good writing. The dialogue, ironically enough, is actually at its best when it’s in full-on superhero movie mode - “When Gotham is ashes, you have my permission to die” is a killer villain one-liner, and much of Batman and Catwoman’s flirty interplay sparkles with self-consciously cheesy repartee.

 The fundamental problem with the script is that it is neither as deep or as smart as it thinks it is. However, lacking serious depth and intelligence is hardly a crime when it comes to an action thriller - it would have been better to jettison the fumbling attempts at psychological insight altogether and concentrate on a more thoroughly-conceived plot and better character development. Because these are two areas where TDKR really suffers. For the first hour or so the various subplots are developed in parallel wonderfully - the introduction of Catwoman is solid, Bane ignites a fair bit of enigma, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character makes perfect sense from the start (possibly the only one to do so). Then somewhere around the middle of the film it all goes a bit haywire. Catwoman’s pretty interesting arc is stopped cold, Commissioner Gordon’s domestic woes are brought up and then never mentioned again - and yet Scarecrow is shoehorned in and allowed to take up time for no reason in a horribly misguided attempt at political allegory (in the lesser-known sense of allegory, meaning ‘to hit repeatedly in the head). The ‘torture Batman’ sequence veers dangerously close to turning into angsty fanfiction (thank goodness they stopped short of having Cilian Murphy nurse him back to health and then they make out on a rug). 

Worst of all, the main plot stops making any sense whatsoever - a nuclear-equipped terrorist takes over a major city and we just leap ahead three months with the smallest handwave at explaining how this works. It’s obviously necessary to get us where we need to be for the big finale, but it just doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. It felt as though they were trying to recreate the unforgettable ethical quandary posed by the Joker in the previous movie. The Dark Knight may not be my favourite movie, but the boat bomb scene posed evoked serious questions about self-preservation, citizenship and sacrifice. The difference is that the Joker’s moral conundrum was agonising in its brilliant simplicity - both Bane’s motives and his plans for Gotham are muddled, both politically and philosophically, as well as unleashing a logical can of worms that stretches the film’s already-tenuous believability to breaking point. What exactly does being ruled by a mass murderer and his cronies entail for the people of Gotham? What is life like in this regime? Does the wider world really not have anything to say about it? How is food and water being brought in? For that matter, how did Bruce Wayne get back into the city? A scenario this vast and all-encompassing needs far more attention than this movie can possibly supply, and this is the point where, for me, TDKR lost a great deal of credibility.

Citizens of Gotham: "I for one welcome our new terrorist overlords!"

To me, most of the film’s problems boil down to Christopher Nolan’s reach exceeding his grasp. His vision is vast and ambitious - too much so for this film to process. Several of the ideas barely hinted at in TDKR could be developed into movies on their own, but here they are forced to become brief plot devices in the race to the finale. Likewise, characters who start off as interesting individuals gradually fall victim to the plot’s need to have them fulfil a certain role (there is not one reason, not a single one, why this movie’s Batman should get with this movie’s Catwoman). In short, as a director he has outgrown the implicit limitations of the genre. This is not a bad thing. Nolan is an incredibly accomplished director and he will go on to greater things. In a strange way, it is precisely the failings of this movie that hint at just how much he may have to give us in the future.

6/10