(As always, here there be spoilers)
This summer's blockbuster season has more or less constantly contradicted my expectations. I honestly was not expecting the Avengers to be as good as it was, and I thought Prometheus and Dark Shadows would be far better than they were. Which brings me to Christopher Nolan's grand finale to his Batman trilogy, the Dark Knight Rises, which I expected to be really good, based on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, although I admit the trailer gave me pause. In fact, based on this summer, I'm prepared to call film trailers filthy liars. They have at every opportunity this summer delivered the exact opposite of what they promised. This scandal will rock the industry I am sure.
I am a fan of of the goddamn Batman. I gird my groin proudly with his symbol. But after finishing this third movie, I'm no longer convinced I'm a fan of Christopher Nolan's or Christian Bale's Batman. I don't think the interpretation is terrible, mind you. I'm not calling it bad, but this third movie landed with a bit of a thud for me, which I blame, as usual, on some questionable writing decisions, an increasing tiredness on my part for gritty reboots and possibly unreported head trauma to Christopher Nolan that caused him to forget half of what he taught us about Batman and Gotham City in the first two movies. Well, I'll even go further and claim I'm not sure he really understands the character, or at least forgot the basic qualities of Bruce Wayne, most likely due to the afore-mentioned head injury.
Batman, Bruce Wayne, is, at his core, a story about a guy who loses his parents in tragedy, and uses the loss of his loved ones to drive his obsessive fight against crime, so that no one else in Gotham City will have to go through what he went through. It's crazy, but noble. So, at the beginning of the Dark Knight Rises, it was a bit perplexing to note that Bruce's reaction to the death of Rachel Dawes was to retreat to his mansion for seven years in a dark depression. Which seems like an odd reaction for a character whose response to loss is typically to fight crime MORE obsessively. Additionally, from the tone at the end of the Dark Knight, the implication seemed to be that Bruce was going to keep fighting crime, whether the police were on his side or not. You know, that's what made him a dark knight. We also learn that during Batman's self-imposed exile, Jim Gordon and the GCPD rid the streets of crime, sans Batman's help which doesn't seem to validate many of his earlier efforts. So this is why I was kind of nervous from the very start of the movie. The idea seemed to be that Batman was neither all that driven, nor all that crucial to Gotham's well-being. Okay then.
The plot, from there, takes a while to build up steam and a lot of it works really well. The story is a pretty stable mashup of the Dark Knight Returns, No Man's Land and Knightfall story lines from the comics. The Dark Knight Returns elements, as mentioned, did not feel right to me (in the comics he retires and Gotham suffers for it, not thrives), but the other stories work pretty well together, if not extraordinarily so. Bane and his "Shakespeare in a can" voice were pretty entertaining, and while the "gotham must be cleansed" plot from the league of shadows was a pure re-hash of the first movie, it was at least consistent. I enjoyed Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle as well, even if I think her character was underused. Basically, the first half of the movie, chronicling a dis-spirited and struggling Batman's attempt to figure out what Bane's up to and stop him, only to have his back broken for the trouble, is pretty watchable, if not perfect (the stock exchange heist goes from daylight to dark in about 20 seconds, and a tumble off of a motorcycle at high speed is comically slow). It's the second half where the plot starts to unwind a bit.
Don't get me wrong, it's still very watchable. But if you're the kind of person who struggles to enjoy a movie once the plot starts becoming incoherent, you may find find the second half more difficult. First, the pit. Oh god, the pit. Bane, in an attempt to torment Bruce, sends him to the pit where Bane himself was forged in absolute darkness, and in savage brawls with the other inmates. Which is why it's fairly funny in retrospect to realize that all of Bruce's scenes there are filmed in a beautiful natural light, and he is not only repaired by the staff physician, but receives much support, encouragement and assistance from the other inmates in his attempt to leave. He does this by attempting to climb out of the pit up the stone wall, and after he and his freshly healed back survive two 50-ft falls, broken only by the rope around his mid-section (it's a stretch), he manages to learn the vital life lesson he needs to defeat Bane and leave the pit. As it turns out, there are no guards at the top, and a convenient rope to lower down to everyone else, so really, any passing shepherd could have saved them all at any time. Everything about the pit is stupid.
Bane's master plan could also have been tighter. Yes, it's fine that he wants to destroy Gotham for it's sins, I like that in a supervillain. What I don't get is why he doesn't just set the bomb off, instead of putting gotham through a 5-month morality play about class warfare, and makes locating the bomb a fairly solvable puzzle. Nor do I understand why he and Talia are prepared to die along with everyone else, when suicide was not the modus operandi of Ras Algul's league of shadows. Was there no grander plan than blowing up Gotham? How would that strike fear into the rest of the world if all the perpetrators were dead afterwards? Furthermore, why keep the cops alive? He's going to kill them eventually anyway, where does keeping the only army capable of challenging him alive get him?
Which brings me to the second way Nolan contradicts himself between this movie and the Dark Knight. At the end of the Dark Knight we learn that Gotham has a better soul than the villains give them credit for. Given the opportunity to blow each other up to save themselves, even the prisoners do the right thing. Gotham won't tear itself apart at the whim of a madman (absent chemically induced fear mania). But when Bane shows up and terrorizes them, they're suddenly okay with it? Are Gothamites just suckers for a good Sean-Connery-eating-beans-out-of-a-can impression?
The finale itself, I had mixed feelings about. The cops charging Bane's army was kind of silly. It's as if they all forgot they had guns. The revelation that Talia had been pulling all the strings was fun, if predictable. Although it effectively muted any satisfaction at Bane's defeat. Batman's morality gets a little confused as well, in that he refuses to kill Bane, but doesn't disown Selina for doing it for him, and his firing on Talia's truck from the Bat effectively kill her and her driver, which he doesn't seem to show remorse about. Talia's death rattle, by the way, was borderline comical. And beyond that, I liked at least that he got to go out the hero, and retire to lead a quiet Bruce Wayne-ish life with Selina.
So yes, it's nice that Batman gets to live out the rest of his days in peace, but I don't really like who Batman turns out to be in Nolan's universe. I mean, yes, the gadgets, the vehicles and the villains were pretty fun, but Batman himself is kind of weak. I mean, Bale plays a pretty good, if not super compelling, moody billionaire, but when he's got the mask on and his cheeks are all poofed out and he's spitting angrily at whomever he's holding by the collar, it's kind of comical. Beyond, that, this grand arc where billionaire loses parents, becomes obsessed with crime fighting for a few years . . . until he quits in self-pity before finally rousing himself for one last battle, where he fakes his death and lives a life of idle luxury happily ever after just seems less epic than it could be.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the first two movies a great deal, but I thought they were building to something, you know? Building towards some grand final, theme about this madman, the Batman. And in the end that theme is: Batmanning is hard for billionaire playboys who can't really sustain the effort for more than a few years. Which is realistic to be sure. But I think too much realism destroys a comic book story and sad to say, I think this is exactly what happened with the Dark Knight Rises.
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