|
|
| Tuesday, July 17, 2012 09:35 PM |
| (Last updated on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 03:25 PM) | | On the Viewer - The Dark Knight Rises |
 by Fëanor |
(Note: I think I managed to keep this review free of major spoilers, but if you really don't want to know anything about the movie going in, you might want to skip reading this until you've seen it.)
The Dark Knight Rises is the conclusion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and also of the story of Bruce Wayne. It plays with all of the same themes and moral questions as the other films in the series, but the stakes are higher and the stage is larger than ever before. This is a truly epic film where the metaphorical war for Gotham's soul that has been fought throughout the series becomes a literal and practically apocalyptic one. It is brilliant, stunning, and powerful - a great film on every level.
The movie opens, like The Dark Knight, with a big action set piece that introduces the film's main villain: the masked man known as Bane (Tom Hardy). What's happening in this scene (a daring and really rather insane kidnapping) doesn't really make a lot of sense until later, but you will at least immediately understand that Bane is another Joker-level bad guy: ruthless, brilliant, fearless, passionate, and with an army of devoted soldiers at his beck and call, ready and willing to lay down their lives for him. In fact, if anything, Bane is an even more dangerous enemy than the Joker. The Joker could out-plan and outsmart, and he knew how to attack the soul. Bane can do all of that, and is also physically overpowering. "You adopted the darkness," he tells Batman later. "I was born in it."
(Oh, and yeah, Bane is a little hard to understand. It's kind of a problem - maybe the movie's only real flaw. I look forward to getting the DVD so I can turn on the subtitles and figure out all his dialog.)
Back in Gotham, we find it's been eight years to the day since the events at the end of The Dark Knight. The best and the brightest of Gotham are assembled at the newly rebuilt Wayne Manor to celebrate a civic holiday known as Harvey Dent Day, where they remember the city's fallen hero. Thanks to a piece of legislation known as the Dent Act, which gave the police greater freedom, organized crime has been smashed to pieces and Gotham is experiencing a new era of peace and prosperity. But Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is still tortured by the lie this peace is built on. And Batman, now despised as a murderer, hasn't been seen since Dent's fall. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), having lost his lover and, as he sees it, completed his mission, has nothing left to live for. So he's let himself go to seed and embraced the classic eccentric millionaire persona, holing himself up in his mansion, apparently planning to wait there until death takes him.
But the unexpected intrusion of a certain cat burglar (Anne Hathaway, easily shedding her good girl image to become a sexy, knowing, confident, dangerous Selina Kyle - who is never referred to as Catwoman, by the way) wakens Bruce from his slumber and gets him interested in the world again. He looks around and realizes that Gotham isn't as saved as he thought. Both it and Wayne Enterprises have been slowly rotting away from the inside. The poor in Gotham are poorer than ever. The dirt and evil and lies that he and Gordon buried underground are about to rise back up and destroy everything they built. With Bane's help, of course.
In this film, that "class war" we hear so much about becomes a real war. Nolan has said he based the story on A Tale of Two Cities, and it shows. He's fond of metaphors writ large, and the figurative made literal. There is a lot of falling and rising of all kinds in these movies. In one of the most powerful sequences in the film, Bruce finds himself at the bottom of that well again that he fell in as a child, but this time he will have to rise out of it on his own with no help from his father. He has to rediscover fear, this time not as a weapon, but as an ally.
Masks and identity are again key. To Gordon, Batman's true identity has always been unimportant. He's Batman, that's all. (Although, as an aside, it's kind of funny how many people in these movies know Batman's true identity. He's pretty bad at keeping that secret.) And Bruce points out that Batman can be anybody, because anybody can be a hero.
Another recurring theme is redemption. Can a thief like Kyle put the dark things she's done behind her and get a fresh start? Can Bruce Wayne?
A new hero that rises in this film is a smart young cop named John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Marion Cotillard plays Miranda Tate, a business partner and love interest for Bruce Wayne. And Michael Caine returns as the wise father figure Alfred. He seems to break down crying in nearly every scene he's in, and he's such a damn good actor you'll find yourself crying right along with him. In fact, for me, at least, there was quite a lot of crying in this film, believe it or not. It's incredibly emotionally effective, especially at the end.
To put it simply, The Dark Knight Rises is nothing less than a masterpiece, and the perfect capstone to a fantastic trilogy of films.
UPDATE: I have more things I want to say about this movie, but they require me to include spoilers! So I'll hide them as white text. Once you've seen the movie (or if you don't care about spoilers), go ahead and highlight the text below to read the rest of my review.
The class war that's central to The Dark Knight Rises even extends to Bruce's love interests - Miranda and Selina. One is from the upper crust of society - a businesswoman, wealthy, lovely, altruistic; a companion in Bruce's mission to save the world. The other is from the lowest level of society - a thief, poor, pessimistic, aggressively self-interested; a liar and betrayer. But underneath her mask the upper-class woman is really a demon come from hell; her project to provide free power to the city is really a bomb designed to destroy it. She is the real betrayer. Meanwhile, underneath the lower-class woman's mask is someone decent at heart who's just looking for a fresh start away from the darkness. When the chips are down, she's the one who sticks by Batman. Bruce (and all his friends, for that matter) is taken in by the lovely society lady, but eventually learns to put his trust instead in the liar and thief - to believe in the possibility of her redemption - and thus they save each other.
For some reason, although I suspected Miranda was not to be trusted and was probably working with Bane, I was completely unprepared for the revelation of her true identity, even after the earlier revelation that Ra's al Ghul was the father of the child born in the pit (which also took me by surprise), and even given the fact that I knew from the comics that Ra's al Ghul's child was a woman: Talia. It's a powerful shock. Another wonderful surprise was Jonathan Crane's cameo reappearance as the judge at the French Revolution-style show trials. There's something fun about this lower level villain surviving the entire trilogy, just hanging on somehow by blowing with the wind and taking on whatever role is open to him.
I also didn't expect Bruce to survive. He seems to spend nearly the entire movie waiting to die, and in the climactic moments, he at last appears to have found a heroic way out. But it was wonderful to see him finally able to shed his Batman persona and become a whole person again, and it's wonderful that Alfred gets to witness it. Bruce's climb up out of the pit - fighting his way back up out of the darkness to rise up again into the light - has given him the strength to live again; given him back his fear of death. This is the satisfying completion of his journey as a character.
And in fact, not only does Bruce live on, so does Batman. Batman, as we've heard time and again, is not just a man - he is an immortal legend. So someone else must take up his mantle now that Bruce has put it down. And that someone, as I suspected (OK, I wasn't entirely right, but nearly!), is John Blake - or Robin, as we learn in the final moments of the film, in a lovely and cheeky reference back to the source material. Blake is an orphan, like Bruce, and he goes through his own journey in this film, learning to despise guns and killing, and coming to realize that you can't always just follow orders, and sometimes the rules of law become shackles, keeping you from doing what you know is right. And that's when you need Batman.
UPDATE 2: I couldn't resist adding how incredibly powerful I found the scene in which Gordon finally realizes who Batman is. "Anyone can be a hero," Bruce tells him, "even a man who just puts a coat around a boy's shoulders and tells him the world hasn't ended." I'm getting choked up right now just thinking about it. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
