Away from the Hype: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Sometimes, a movie is released and the hype/controversy surrounding it are too much for the movie to get out from under. Sometimes this means we sit down in the cinema with expectations and preconceived notions that we can’t escape.

Away from the Hype is an ongoing series looking at some of these movies years away from their initial release to see if, without all of the window dressing of hype, expectation, and controversy, the movies are actually any good or not.

Fear of the Threequel

The Dark Knight is a tough act to follow. In terms of sequel pedigree, it is up there with the greats: Aliens, Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather part 2, etc. and it really kicked open the door for serious filmmakers to get involved with superheroes (and it probably didn’t hurt that Iron Man came out the same year.)

There was always going to be a sequel to it, a trilogy finisher to complete Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham and the hero that protects it. And deep down a lot of us were preparing for disappointment. After all, the threequel isn’t exactly known for its winning streaks. However, if The Dark Knight Rises was going to be not as good as The Dark Knight, it was still exciting to see how. Would it be flawed but enjoyable (The Return of the Jedi), would it get better with time (Alien 3), or would it be pointless and not even worth watching out of a sense of morbid curiosity (The Godfather Part Three)?

And then it was released, and it was brilliant. It had a stellar cast, big action, a lot of emotion, and while Tom Hardy couldn’t ever hold a candle to the late Heath Ledger, his Bane is better than a good 90 percent of the cinematic supervillains we’ve seen since 2008. I went back to see it at the cinema a few times and after the initial euphoria died down I saw that, while I really enjoyed it, it had some flaws with pacing and a few strange choices, but overall I thought it was great.

But there was also a very loud corner of the internet who decided that no, actually, The Dark Knight Rises was very, very bad and then they would present a list of why. And the why would be a series of continuity errors and plot holes and questions like ‘How can Batman get back into Gotham City?’ (the answer: he’s Batman.)

As a big Batman fan I saw this as pointless nitpicking and railed against it, especially as this sort of criticism, in which a movie’s meaning or intent is ignored for the sake of pointing out the tiniest of tiny errors and making a “joke” about it, was becoming more and more popular with the creation of Cinema Sins in the same year. As a film critic, I find it completely infuriating, especially as this sort of idea continues to gain traction with Cinema Sins and the less egregious though still pretty terrible Honest Trailers.

But I digress. The last Batman movie I saw was Justice League, so it’s definitely time to get back into the good Batman movies and see how The Dark Knight Rises fares away from the hype.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I’ve always speculated that in order to get this movie made, Warner Bros. had to promise Nolan he could make Interstellar, and that once he said yes they wrote him a check and left him to it. After this watch that feels very much like it could be the case, as sometimes the script feels as though a first draft was written and Warner Bros. saw dollar signs, so instead of getting further work on it or making notes, they just gave it a thumbs up.

Case in point, the bomb’s timer. It feels as though the Nolan brothers (Jonathon Nolan co-wrote the script) knew that if they used Bane in their movie, they would have to break Batman’s back. However, if you break his back then he needs time to heal. In the comics when Bane broke Batman’s back, Batman wasn’t Batman for a year and only came back after his physiotherapist magicked him back to health (ah, 90s comic books).

For The Dark Knight Rises, they wisely ditch that angle but instead they remove Batman from the action for five months which is also the timer on the bomb. But really, the only reason the bomb’s timer needs to be five months is because that’s how long Batman takes to heal. This whole conceit feels like something that would usually be a placeholder until they concocted something better, but instead it is the plot that was filmed.

The same could be said for the plot-line of every cop in Gotham being trapped underground. It works on paper, but if you scratch it a little bit it begins to fall apart i.e. after six months why are all the cops clean-shaven? But it also feels very comic book-y which I like, considering how much people go on about Nolan’s Batman being grounded in the ‘real’ world. Much like the Joker’s plans within plans within plans, overthinking it ruins it, but in the moment, when you’re watching the movie, it works like gangbusters. However, much like the bomb’s timer, it does feel as though it could have handled another draft just to smooth over the sharp edges and to silence the detractors.

However, those (and other) quibbles aside, this is still a fantastic movie. It is fun, propulsive, wild, and a bit nuts. It manages to, within the confines of a superhero story, hit on some interesting points about the distribution of wealth in America, the physical toll of being a vigilante, and how a billionaire with Bruce Wayne’s reputation and resources could do so much more for Gotham in the boardroom than on the rooftops.

The Dark Knight Rises’ release coincided with the Occupy movement protests of 2011, so the story of the 99% casting the 1% into the streets was right on the money. Though it was more influenced by The Tale of Two Cities, the people rising up themes felt pulled from the headlines then, and still feels very real today, as we see the gulf between the rich and the poor widening all the time. This is all heady stuff for a movie about a man in a bat costume beating up a giant in a mask. And it shows that the Nolan brothers do still care about this character and this setting even if their minds were already halfway focused upon wormholes and Anne Hathaway in space.

Speaking of Hathaway, she is a revelation in this movie. Her Catwoman is a perfect mix of cold intelligence, sexiness, and danger. She is like a cornered animal throughout and her outward character changes on a dime to suit the purpose, with Hathaway perfectly embodying the body language and voice needed for each new version of herself.

Less subtle, but still brilliant, is Tom Hardy who is, as usual, hidden behind a mask and yet manages to portray so much with his physicality and strange, lilting voice, which was definitely a choice and one that enhances the other-worldliness of this huge villain.

Bane is a million years away from Ledger’s Joker by being more about control and power than chaos and fun. He is Batman’s physical better, which means that when they tangle Batman is uncharacteristically the one on the receiving end of a good kicking. The central fight between Bane and Batman is as good as anything in the trilogy. It is a music-less, art-less fight between two men in which we are forced to watch our childhood hero get beaten to a pulp by a superior fighter. It is only around four minutes long, but it feels as though it drags out because up until this point we’ve always had faith that, in a fistfight, Batman wins.

The Joker could defeat him in terms of long cons and mind games, but hand to hand Batman was always going to win. Now we have Bane taking him apart without breaking a sweat. Nolan stages it with very little flare or romance. It has none of the tricks usually employed when Batman is taking down goons: quick cuts, strobe lights, one liners. It is Batman being humiliated and broken by a villain who is his superior in all the ways that we see Batman as being great.

Another reason that The Dark Knight Rises succeeds is Nolan’s decision to make each film in the trilogy a different genre, and then to stick to those genre tropes as faithfully as possible. With Batman Begins, it’s a superhero origin movie, while The Dark Knight is a heist movie and Rises is very much a disaster movie; only Bane is the earthquake or a meteor on a collision course with Gotham. The speed of events, the destruction, Blake and Gordon not being believed by other characters until it’s too late, and the finale being a noble sacrifice are all disaster movie staples.

By doing this, Nolan manages to avoid the standard complaint against superhero movies that they are all the same. The closest to this in recent superhero movies would be the Captain America films where the first is a war movie and the second is a ’70s paranoia thriller. They are both excellent movies and neither feels like a re-tread of the other, something I don’t think could be said for the Iron Man movies, which all feel quite repetitive, something The Dark Knight Trilogy managed, right up to the end, to avoid.

Final Thoughts

With this movie being the final film in a trilogy, the Nolans are able to leave everything on the field and not hold back. An issue with the MCU and DCEU is that they have no end point in sight. Much like the comics they are based on, there cannot really be a The End to the whole thing. Characters can come and go but the series will continue until the money stops flowing and then they will ignominiously grind to a finish well past their prime. With The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan is able to craft a clear beginning, middle, and end, with each movie able to stand alone without the need to have watched a dozen or so movies to keep track of events.

I’m a big fan of the MCU but I’ll always be disappointed by the fact that the Captain America trilogy ends with a sequel to Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3, Ant Man, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, instead of just the Cap movie. There was something very satisfying about watching The Dark Knight Rises and having a clear ending to a fantastic series without there needing to be sequels, spin-offs, and the like.

Away from the hype, this is still a brilliant movie, though there are undeniably shoddy parts. However, none of those parts really upend the positives of this movie for me, and as a sworn hater of the Cinema Sins brand of criticism, I could never spend a whole movie looking for errors to nit-pick anyway. The Dark Knight trilogy might have a Return of the Jedi threequel, but it is still stands as the best superhero trilogy ever put on film.

What are your thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises?