In an article written earlier this year I asked a question: Could the indisputably most anticipated cultural event of the year, “The Dark Knight Rises”, live up to its predecessor, “The Dark Knight”? The answer turned out not to be as cut and dry as I had thought it’d be.
To start, it must be said that the film was absolutely incredible. It has already generated significant Oscar buzz and I would only expect that momentum to snowball. Christopher Nolan’s (“The Dark Knight”, “Inception”) films get bigger in scope with each he takes on, but his knack for bringing an intimate feel to his storytelling has never been lost in the process. TDKR had a particularly large set of characters and part of what it does so well, surprisingly, is actually shift the focus off of Batman frequently. In big-budget action movies millions of lives often face annihilation but usually we aren’t given a reason to really care. Here, Nolan invests you in the welfare of world-weary beat cops, hopeful orphans, pickpockets, and members of the upper class. Through each of them he builds a sort of mosaic of the perception of Batman throughout Gotham and saves the movie from becoming too noisy and flashy to be touching.
Now, did the film rise to the level of 2009’s “The Dark Knight”? No. TDK was the ultimate superhero movie. The Joker is the ultimate villain—killing with no pattern or reason behind it. And Heath Ledger’s performance was the ultimate achievement an actor can hope to accomplish. Maybe once or twice every generation an actor will put so much conviction and passion into a performance that they cease to exist apart from the role. They become icons of fiction. This is the level Ledger would have risen to had he not died just before the release of the film. At that moment he became not just an icon, but also a legend. Unwilling to recast the clown and dishonor Ledger, and concerned that he could not match TDK, Nolan considered not making a third film. Thank the movie gods he did. Strangely enough, I’m glad “The Dark Knight Rises” didn’t rise because it is exactly the film it needed to be. Nolan has always said he would do three and be done, and Bale has stated he won’t play Batman without Nolan, so TDKR needed to be a satisfying conclusion. That’s exactly what it is. Bane isn’t the Joker, but he was the villain this movie needed. He was a physical enemy, not just a psychological one. His well-planned attacks on Gotham were grand in scope beyond the Joker’s theories of random chaos. **Spoiler Alert** And when Bruce’s love interest turns out to be Talia, the revenge-seeking daughter of Ras Al Ghul, the trilogy is bound up in a nice circle. The way all of the intricate little side-stories come to completion in the last twenty minutes of the film is perfection and for hardcore fans, genuinely emotional. In five or so years big studio execs are going to get hungry for more money. They’ll decide to reboot Batman and create a new franchise just as has been done with Spiderman and X-Men. When they do, I pity the poor soul who has to try and hold a candle to Nolan’s trilogy.