Movie Review: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

The last superhero... until the next one.

The movie summer of 2012 may very well go down as the summer of the comic book superhero, with one major franchise getting its reboot and two others reaching its apparent apex.

Like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man before it, The Dark Knight Rises has the curious trait of being enjoyable and entertaining while it is being watched, then fading as soon as you walk out of the theater. I'm beginning to wonder if this is merely a function of the genre, that is has an inevitable half-life. I've reacted similarly to some of the other more recent examples of successful superhero movies. Marvel's kickoff to The Avengers' series, Iron Man, was a thrill to watch on its initial viewing, but having screened it upon the release of the latter, while it holds up better than the others, it feels more competent than transcendent. Ditto that with regard to The Dark Knight, the second of Nolan's Batman trilogy, which was so highly and widely praised, that the Academy expanded their Best Picture nominees the following year due to the film's apparent snub. As big and potent as that film was, the grandness of its aspiration and the scope of its ambition crack upon further reflection, revealing both a visual and moral sloppiness.

Why should this be, though? Is it really something endemic to superhero movies or just a coincidence amongst these films? I'd hate to believe any genre, whether or not it aligns with my particular personal taste, couldn't rise to a level of greatness that exists past the roll of its own credits. (As I wrote in a previous post, I think Richard Donner's 1978 Superman comes the closest.) My biggest complaint with these movies (again, as I've said before) is that they inevitably lead to a big fight between heroes and villains so super that it's difficult to believe the gravity of the violence. The sense of real danger among the combatants seem slight compared to the high stakes given to the regular folks these superheroes are trying to defend and protect.

The Dark Knight Rises begins eight years after The Dark Knight ends, wherein Batman (Christian Bale) and Gordon (Gary Oldman) conspire to let the superhero take the blame for the death of Harvey Dent, Gotham's D.A., thinking it would give hope to the city's fight against organized crime. Bruce Wayne becomes a Howard Hughes-like recluse, still mourning the death of his love (and, unknown to him, Harvey Dent's fiance), Rachel Dawes.

The opening sequence though belongs to Bane (Tom Hardy), our movie's villain, a mercenary of the League of Shadows, the militant organization intent on restoring order in the world through destruction that we first see in Batman Begins. It's quite a masterful sequence, one of the best in the whole series, in which Bane's henchmen "rescue" him from one plane by attaching it to another and destroying it. Instead of relying on CGI, the sequence is done with stunt work and actual planes and that's part of Nolan's visual M.O. It's striking visually and, like the opening bank heist in the previous film, announces the type of villain we're dealing with.

While certainly an imposing physical presence, Bane is a much less menacing villain than The Joker. Part of his plan has to do with returning the city to the citizens of Gotham by freeing many of its major criminals (incarcerated in large part to the Dent Act) and putting the rich through a surreal tribunal in which they can choose either death or exile (spoiler: both options are pretty bad).

He is also in many ways the flip side of Batman. They're both League of Shadows outcasts. At least a couple of times, Bane is referred to as "the man in the mask," a moniker easily attributable to our hero. In that way, Nolan's final installment fails to expand on his vision and instead doubles back on itself, echoing story elements of that first one. The Joker pointed to something much more devious and anarchic, a much more chaotic Gotham. Though The Dark Knight Rises attempts to scale its narrative as more epic than The Dark Knight, Bane's backstory makes it that much more insular.

And for all the talk about how Bane's plan for revolution invokes the ethos of the real-life Occupy movement, the so-called "99 percent" barely gets a voice here. It exists as merely a narrative device and for all of the trilogy's philosophical posturing, Nolan never really posits, well, a philosophy. By his own admission, he's just "throw[ing] a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks". I would never suggest a movie should tell us how we should think, but I do believe a movie should know (or at least explore) what it, itself, thinks.

Nolan is an artist not of finesse, but of sheer power. That's appropriate given the epic-sized canvas he's trying to work on. But his brawn-over-brain approach is relentless and, while his assaultive sensibility produces images worthy of the movie's use of IMAX cameras, the whole affair displays a sort of inelegance. His dialogue--written with his brother, Jonathan Nolan--is clunky and halt the proceedings simply to give exposition or have characters explicitly state the film's themes. Worse yet perhaps is the use of Hans Zimmer's music, which--like his score for Nolan's Inception--is consistently turned up to 11, pummeling and thumping its way through everything in its path.

Nolan's brawn works well in some moments, like a harrowing fight between Bane and Batman in the sewers of Gotham. Nolan smartly reigns in Zimmer's score (taking it out actually) so that we can hear every brutal blow, viscerally feeling every punch of the much stronger Bane on the newly-out-of-retirement Batman. But his style operates in only one mode and that lack of grace causes everything else to suffer because of it.

The density and complexity of The Dark Knight Rises hasn't even allowed me to talk about two of my favorite bright spots in the movie--the addition of Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young cop. Hathaway's Selina Kyle is a cat burglar (though never explicitly referred to as "Catwoman") who provides a pivotal link between Bane and Batman. With all the gravity going on, she often emerges, both as a potential love interest and a criminal, as the only source of levity in the movie. It's a shame then that she disappears for long stretches of the story.

Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, while perhaps not as integral to actual machinations of the plot as Selina Kyle, might be the moral center of the movie. He's an idealist who might be the only one in Gotham that still believes Batman is good and can save the city. Blake is also a smart and resourceful policeman, so much so that after Gordon is hospitalized during an encounter with Bane, he promotes the young cop to detective and his own sort of right-hand man.

Everything of course converges on Gotham, a city that by the end of the film is for months isolated under the regime of Bane. (For anyone who loves New York, the images of Bane's destruction of the metropolis's iconic entryways are kind of soul crushing.) In by now completely standard fashion, the film's final act is a blur of action. Bane and Batman face off in another bout of hand-to-hand combat and an all-out ground war takes place between Bane's henchmen/freed prisoners and the Gotham City Police (who had been trapped underground during Bane's debilitating explosions). That the Nolans put Batman on a time crunch--from a clean energy device gone rogue--does give the ending some narrative momentum. But after The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man--each with their own similarly no holds barred sensory attacks on both its viewers and the citizens of New York--all I can wonder is "Why do all villains hate Manhattan?"