This document and the following review are identical so feel free to read whichever one you want.
Spoiler Warning
When the Dark Knight was released in 2008 it was considered to be the best superhero movie ever made. I not only consider it to still be the best superhero movie, but even choose it as my favorite movie to this day. The Dark Knight, and Inception two years later, represent director Christopher Nolan at his peak. He had perfected a dark, visually striking style that kept audiences engaged and put the characters in interesting situations and made them relatable. Also, it’s impossible to completely remove the phenomenon surrounding the Dark Knight’s release with the death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, before the movie was released. No matter what some people have suggested, I think his performance completely stands on its own and that he merited the Oscar he was awarded posthumously. But his death not only caught more attention in the media, but also tragically meant that he would never act again, whether in a return as the Joker or as another character.
All this serves to say that the Dark Knight Rises, a sequel four years in the making, had an impossible legacy to live up to. Even the first film in the series, Batman Begins, received overwhelmingly positive reviews, reimagining Batman in a way that revived the franchise from the failure of 1997’s Batman & Robin, meaning that the Dark Knight Rises had to not only live up to the previous installment in the series, it also had to provide a conclusion to a trilogy that had revolutionized comic book films by taking a more grounded and darker look at a superhero world, without being able to bring back the character that had helped make the previous installment so great.
And, for a long time, I thought it succeeded at doing both.
However, in the almost nine years between when I first watched this movie and now, my opinion of it has steadily declined. At first, it was my favorite film in the trilogy, and after a few years I ranked it as the weakest of the three but still a solid entry in the series. Now, I’ve reached the point that I can’t even say I consider this a good film.
Admittedly, in that time, I’ve also lost the high regard I once held for Nolan’s films in general (not all of them). However, this is more than just a difference in stylistic choices from the director. In my opinion, the Dark Knight Rises dropped the ball on almost every aspect of the film. The first two acts are riddled with plot holes and the third act manages to undo any of the good things that we’d seen in the previous two hours of the film.
While I don’t hate this movie, I do have a lot of criticisms with it. While I think the initial popularity this film enjoyed has widely evaporated by now, I still feel the need to justify my dislike for this movie, and so I’ll move through it in a roughly chronological order to explain why.
The film opens with a striking action scene in which Bane and his henchman hijack a plane in mid-air to recover a valuable hostage who will be important to his plan that we’ll learn about later. For now, the scene mostly serves to introduce Bane and provide an entertaining and ambitious action sequence. It largely succeeds at both, as Bane displays a lot of menace and is instantly an intriguing character. The action also works well, as the film manages to present such a complex sequence in a believable manner.
With the main villain having been introduced, the film transitions into showing where the characters from the first film are and how their world has changed since the last movie. This is one of the few things that I will admit this movie does well, without putting any type of qualifier on it, because nothing from the previous movie is negated, as is unfortunately often the case with movie sequels, which choose to retread old ground, rather than continuing with the ideas of the previous film. Batman’s sacrifice in taking the fall for Two-Face’s crimes so that the Dent Act stands has ensured that organized crime in Gotham has been mostly defeated. The city is safe and has been for eight years.
In that time, Bruce Wayne has hung up his cowl as Batman, before becoming a recluse as Bruce Wayne after the failure of his clean energy program at Wayne Enterprises. We later learn he actually found the breakthrough he needed, but chose to scrap the project because it could be used as a nuclear weapon. Why this was what prompted him to cut himself off from the outside world is never really explored, however.
His seclusion is broken when Selina Kyle breaks into his manor and steals his fingerprints off his safe, which she cracks open to steal the pearl necklace that belonged to his late mother. The loss of this beloved item prompts Bruce Wayne to break out of his isolation, as he returns to the Batcave for the first time in eight years to research Selina Kyle.
While he’s doing this, however, Selina has been auctioning off his fingerprints to Daggett, a ruthless and corrupt businessman who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises and who has struck a bargain with Bane in order to achieve his goal. However, things quickly turn to chaos when the police arrive, but the end result is this: Daggett escapes with Bruce’s fingerprints, Selina escapes without being spotted, and Commissioner Gordon is lured into a trap in the city’s sewers where he is ambushed by Bane.
Bane and his mercenaries have set up a base in the sewers, and his henchmen decide to bring Gordon to this secret base. The movie does address this nonsensical decision, as Bane kills one of the henchmen for his incompetence, giving Gordon the time to escape. Though injured, he survives getting washed through the sewer waters. Rookie cop John Blake somehow knows exactly where he will wash up in the first of many plot holes of the film.
For me personally, plot holes, at least small ones, don’t normally bother me that much. This is a relatively small plot hole, as it’s mostly just a convenience to keep Gordon alive and introduce Blake. However, as the movie progresses, the plot gets thinner and thinner, until the whole thing collapses when you think back on it.
This first act does provide us with at least one interesting thing, however. The setup for Bruce Wayne’s character arc is actually really good. Nolan really takes the time to show the toll that the events of the last movie took on Bruce. His seclusion points to how he’s disconnected from the outside world on a physical and emotional level. He’s stopped being Batman, but as Alfred says, he never moved on with his life in any way. This was an interesting exploration of how Bruce’s entire identity got wrapped up in being Batman, only to have that taken away from him at the end of the last film.
Seeing him trying to reconnect with the outside world, through the urging of Alfred, Lucius Fox and even John Blake (more on that in just a second), is really interesting. He goes back to Wayne Enterprises to try to salvage the failing company, seems to connect with Selina Kyle when he retrieves the necklace from her at a costume ball and encounters Miranda Tate, a businesswoman who is intent on developing a source of clean energy and who looks to Bruce’s ‘failed’ project as her best chance.
However, his efforts to become Bruce Wayne once more are interrupted when John Blake arrives at his house and tells him that he knows he’s Batman and that he needs his help.
This moment represents the next in a long line of plot holes in the movie. I’m not saying that no one could ever possibly figure out Bruce Wayne is Batman, least of all a detective. However, what doesn’t make sense is how Blake discovered his identity. He recounts a story when Bruce Wayne visited the boy’s home where he grew up and how Bruce was a hero to all of them because he was an orphan who had still met with great success. But when Blake met him as a child, he recognized a look on his face that he was familiar with as the means for orphans to mask the anger they felt.
And that’s it.
Somehow, the fact that Bruce Wayne is an orphan with repressed anger, anger that Blake shared as a child, means that he’s Batman. It makes no sense, but apparently, they needed this to jump start the plot, as Blake tells him about what Gordon encountered in the sewer.
Alfred tries to dissuade Bruce from investigating this, and here we get to see his character arc progress in another interesting way. Bruce, as he confesses to Gordon when he visits him in the hospital wearing a disguise, isn’t sure he can be Batman again. At the same time, the Batman identity is the only one that he’s familiar with at this point; it’s easier for him to be his alter ego than it is for him to be his civilian identity, and so he falls back to this standby and starts gearing up to fight Bane.
On a brief side note, I do like the idea that being Batman for a year took its toll on him physically and that he is no longer at his peak, requiring medical help to get him back into fighting shape. That was a nice touch of realism and also something that served to press in that this was the conclusion to the trilogy.
Unfortunately, from there, his character arc kind of falls apart.
Alfred knows that Bruce has given up his future because of Rachel’s death, and tells him about the letter she left him in the last film, in which she told him that she was going to marry Harvey Dent. Bruce is angry, fires Alfred, but then seems to immediately heal. After eight years of mourning Rachel and refusing to move on, as soon as he finds out she had already moved on, he’s ready to find another partner, namely Miranda Tate. This doesn’t make any sense, and seemingly exists solely just so that he would have a romantic attachment with Miranda to propel the plot forward. Their romance feels completely forced and unbelievable, and it also just leaves Bruce’s character arc mostly in limbo until he finally faces Bane in combat. And, to jump ahead a bit, this is made worse when Bruce Wayne ends the movie in love with Selina, despite almost zero indications that he felt any romantic feelings up to that point.
Before Bruce begins this romance with Miranda Tate, however, he suits up once more as Batman when Bane and his henchmen storm a stock exchange. As they flee on their motorcycles, we get an admittedly really good intro for Batman, as he kills the lights on the tunnel they’re fleeing in, taking out one of the thieves, before he drives out of the shadows on the Bat-pod (traditionally known as the Bat Bike), giving us our first look at him for the film.
Before Batman can reach Bane, however, he is chased away by the police, only escaping with his new, airborne vehicle, the Bat (I’m going to stubbornly refer to it as the Batwing). While this is happening, however, Selina is breaking into Daggett’s penthouse to search for something called ‘the Clean Slate’ which is supposed to erase all of her criminal records. And this brings us to the most logical time to discuss Anne Hathaway’s portrayal as Catwoman.
Obviously, Anne Hathaway is a good actress, and she gives a good performance as Selina, and the design for Catwoman (like all the other characters Nolan adapted from the comics) is actually pretty solid.
Unfortunately, she’s chronically under-utilized. She propels the plot forward a couple of times (such as getting Bruce out of his manor or leading Batman into a trap against Bane), but largely just exists to be Batman’s love interest for the last ten minutes of the film and to have a popular character in the movie. Her character arc, where she wants to help Bane because he’s promised to reverse the social order in Gotham so that the criminals and poor people like her are on top, before balking at the violence and death caused by it, is actually really interesting. It’s a good way to show the duality to Catwoman’s character; she’s not a villain but she’s also not really a superhero. This idea is undercut by a couple of things, however.
First of all, only a couple of scenes are devoted to this. Mostly, she just seems to be upset that Bane may have killed Bruce and displays regrets to her friend, before switching sides and joining the resistance. That really isn’t enough time to develop this idea in an interesting way, which makes her feel not really like a fleshed-out character in her own right. Secondly, the fact that Bane’s actual plan had nothing to do with what Catwoman wanted means that she doesn’t really give up anything to join the heroes. It removes the interesting dynamic, with Catwoman being pulled between her own selfish desires and the side of her character that’s still fundamentally good, so that her switch to the good side just feels automatic.
As Catwoman flees from Daggett’s penthouse, she is surrounded by Bane’s mercenaries. Batman arrives and the two of them team up in what’s one of the better action scenes of the film (and essentially Catwoman’s only one). Bane arrives, having his mercenaries fire on the two unlikely allies, before they flee in the Batwing. And, apparently, Batman decides not to double back and find some way to face Bane there, because he’s too concerned about the henchmen firing on him.
Having used Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints to tank Wayne Enterprises’ stock at the exchange robbery, Daggett takes control of Wayne Enterprises, forcing Bruce Wayne out and stripping him of his fortune. For reasons that are beyond me, Bruce decides to tell Miranda the truth about his clean energy project, giving her full access to it. What makes this completely infuriating to me is this:
Given that Bruce kept this entire project under wraps even from his own company, Miranda should’ve had no way of knowing about this up until now. Even if she had, she would’ve had no way of knowing that Bruce would entrust her with this instead of, for the sake of argument, Lucius Fox who has been his trusted ally for nine years. Or, even that he would tell anyone instead of simply flooding the reactor with the failsafe system.
Why is this such a problem?
As is revealed at the end of the film, Miranda is actually Talia al Ghul, Bane’s partner, and they repurpose this reactor to be a nuclear bomb to hold Gotham hostage with. A plan that is only made possible because of the reactor that Miranda shouldn’t have known existed, nor that she should have been entrusted with. While I know that comic book movies and the like frequently involve villains with intricate plans that could be derailed by something that is seemingly out of their control, this seems to go beyond the acceptable level of this trope. Had Bruce acted in any kind of rational way, instead of entrusting this secret to someone he just met (someone he has not revealed his identity to, unlike Lucius), nothing about their plan would have worked. On top of that, I can’t think of any plausible explanation for how she knew about this reactor. Had she known about it through some type of League of Shadows spy skills, it seems that she could’ve taken the reactor and had it repurposed into a bomb just as she does later.
However, the end of the movie is still a long way off and this is by no means the least of all the problems created by the revelations and twists of the third act.
At this point of the film, Batman convinces Catwoman to lead him to Bane’s sewer base. However, unbeknownst to him, she has led him into a trap, leaving him to face Bane in single combat. Admittedly, this isn’t the greatest trap, considering Batman wanted this fight anyway, and he had no ability to sneak up on Bane, but it is a nice character moment for Catwoman, as we’re shown that she still isn’t helping the heroes and is just trying to weather this storm and survive.
However, this does lead to what is easily the film’s best scene, as Batman and Bane have their first fight.
While the action in this scene is certainly good, before I discuss that I do want to talk about Bane a bit first. Or at least, the version of Bane that we get in the first half of this film.
I personally consider Bane to be one of the all-time best Batman villains, but he has been criticized for being a ‘one hit wonder’ in that his only really good comic arc was Knightfall, and he just kind of became known as the person who broke Batman’s back. Given that Nolan is only using him for one movie, it should be easy to capitalize on his best aspects.
Bane breaking Batman, only for Batman to have to come back and defeat him is a good arc, and this movie hits a lot of the important beats of it.
Crucial to this is an understanding of who Bane is.
While it’s slightly unclear how Alfred becomes an expert on Bane, he does provide Bruce with his backstory. He was born in a hellish and inhumane prison, which twisted him and made him stronger both physically and mentally than anyone else, even Batman. He also, apparently, was a disciple of Ra’s al Ghul at some point before he trained Bruce Wayne himself, but was ex-communicated for being too extreme. Also, a point is made by Alfred about Bane’s comparative youth to the middle-aged Batman and his ferocity, an edge that Bruce Wayne has undeniably lost in the past eight years.
This setup does a lot of things really well. First of all, his backstory of being raised in the Pit is a really good setup for a villain. It makes it believable that he’s so much more dangerous than Batman, especially in light of the differences in age and drive between the two men. Also, the fact that he was too extreme even for Ra’s al Ghul makes him all the more terrifying, upping the stakes and making us feel like Nolan managed to leave Batman’s most dangerous enemy for the final film, even though the Joker basically took over the entire city.
So, obviously Bane stands out as a great villain in this movie that has, otherwise, been pretty lackluster so far. And while Bane certainly earns the movie a lot of points, elevating it from something that would have been a chore to watch to something that is an uneven film with good and bad, the movie enacts a lot of changes to him during the revelations of the third act that undermine every single one of the things I listed above as his interesting traits.
As for the fight itself: it’s really good. Nolan has been criticized a lot of times for not being a great action director, and in some scenes, I think that’s a fair criticism, but this one works well. I like that there’s an explanation given for why Bane can beat Batman so easily, and that it doesn’t feel like it’s just written in to the script. I also like that the fight lasts so long; Batman doesn’t just go down after a couple of hits or, alternatively, after landing only one or two blows on Bane. He goes the distance and takes a lot of punishment, and even manages to get his fair share of hits in on Bane; he just isn’t strong enough to really do any damage. There’s no insanely great choreography to this fight, but it looks good enough to be entertaining from an action standpoint even as it works well from a story perspective.
My only real criticism is something that’s kind of a nit-pick but it just stands out as something really bizarre to me. Throughout the fight, the camera cuts to a few of Bane’s henchmen watching the fight. While this is incredibly normal for these types of scenes, what’s weird about it is that the mercenaries are showing no reactions whatsoever. No concern when Batman’s landing hits on Bane, no excitement when Bane’s winning, nothing. Maybe this is because they’re so professional that they just have blank expressions, but it just comes off like they’re bored during the fight and just kind of waiting for it to be over. It undercuts the tension somewhat and makes the conclusion feel even more inevitable than it already does, but not in a good way. It’s a minor flaw, but it’s something that annoys me whenever I watch this scene, which is otherwise really good.
With Batman defeated, Bane makes his move.
He and his mercenaries storm the lower levels of Wayne Enterprises, seize the armory that Batman used, including multiple versions of Batman’s Tumbler that he used in the first two films of the trilogy (I do like this touch, seeing the villains using Batman’s armory for their own purposes). Bane takes the board of Wayne Enterprises captive, and uses Miranda Tate and Lucius Fox to disarm the fail-safes protecting Bruce’s nuclear reactor, allowing Bane to convert it into a nuclear bomb.
Even setting aside Bruce’s questionable choice to trust the specifics of this device to Miranda Tate, Bane’s plan even here is pretty flimsy. What if Lucius decides to trip the fail-safes, flood the room and kill all of them?
However, while that’s a somewhat explainable hole in his plan (as he may just assume no one on the board would be willing to risk their lives in that way), what happens after makes even less sense.
Gordon decides to flood the sewers with every single police officer in the city except for himself and Blake in order to trap Bane. While this is happening, Bane moves the nuke into the Gotham football field and detonates a series of explosives that destroy half the field and collapse the tunnels beneath them, trapping virtually the entire GCPD force below.
First of all, how does Bane know when the police will be entering the tunnels? Admittedly, this complaint can be made about some of the things Joker does in the previous film, but that’s only the first problem with this one sequence, briefly setting aside all the other flawed plot points in the film. Also, while Joker has a few instances of convenient timing, most of those are some things he has some limited control over (he can calculate the top speed of the police vehicles in order to know how long he has to wait to tell them about Rachel’s and Harvey’s locations so they can’t save her), but this is something that, if Bane is off by a minute (and he has no way of knowing what the police are doing or how quickly) all the police are right outside the tunnels when he blows them and they can stop his plan in its tracks.
Secondly, how in the world would Bane ever think Gordon would come up with such a nonsensical plan? And, on top of that, why would Gordon ever give such an insane order? Every police officer? All the random detectives who are on the upper end of middle-aged? Not just the SWAT teams that are specifically trained for this? If Bane’s so well armed that Gordon needs a literal army to stop them, shouldn’t he be asking the mayor to call out the national guard like a rational person?
During the football field scene, however, Bane gets a good scene as he sets up some of his motivations (though these are later revealed to be fake) as he says he’s holding the city hostage with the nuke in order to take power in the city from the upper class and return it to the working class and poor people. From there, the city descends into chaos as many people welcome Bane’s overthrow of the established social order, as we see bell hops dragging rich people from their mansions. However, nothing about this is ever mentioned again. There is not one single reference made to this dramatic shift, probably because it’s utterly meaningless once we learn what Bane’s real motivation is.
Again, this is an interesting part of Bane’s character that is set up during the first act, but which we will see completely undone by the end of the film.
That being said, while I do like the setup for Bane’s motivations, I think the actual set-piece that makes up the second half of the film, with him holding the city hostage, is pretty lackluster.
The idea of someone being able to blow up the city is nowhere near as interesting as the psychological terror that Joker unleashed on Gotham in order to turn all the ‘normal’ people in the city into deranged monsters like him. In all fairness, this may be partially because the ‘destroy the city’ trope has become hilariously overused in superhero stories since this film (try almost every season of Arrow for starters).
Also, this ups the stakes about as far as they can be in this universe while still keeping it grounded in the idea of Batman trying to be a symbol of hope for Gotham, which is a good idea for the conclusion of the trilogy. However, there just isn’t really anything interesting about it. Bane talking about the trigger-man who is a normal citizen (later revealed to be Talia) means absolutely nothing and is barely referenced; it exists solely just to provide a hint to the audience that Miranda is actually Talia but which Bane has no reason to do. Secondly, the fact that the bomb is just going to detonate in a few months, while adding some tension, kind of goes back to the way that Bane’s interesting motivations are undercut. Just like with Catwoman, Bane isn’t offering anything to anyone except his fanatical followers, so there’s no reason anyone in the city would side with him.
I’m not saying Bane should have been sympathetic (or would have been had they not changed his motivations at the end), but the way they did it does make his ideology extremely one dimensional and uninteresting.
However, in a nice follow-up to the conclusion of the previous film, Bane exposes the lie that Gordon and Batman used to exonerate Harvey Dent and then breaks into Black Gate prison and frees all the prisoners inside, allowing him to take over the city. It’s a nice way of setting up the idea that Batman was the true hero of Gotham, not Dent. While it was Dent’s work (at least on the surface) that saved Gotham in the previous film, this was (as is shown by this scene) a stop gap measure. Only with Batman’s actions in this film is the city truly saved.
We also get a nice cameo from Cillian Murphy as the Scarecrow. It’s a nice way of connecting the films in the series together, as we see him freed with the rest of the inmates and participating (albeit in a minor way) in the mayhem that Bane is wreaking on Gotham.
Gordon, Blake and the few police that remain in the city begin to form a resistance to Bane when they realize that Gotham has been cut off from the outside world and the national guard or anyone else who could help.
While they’re doing this, Bane has taken Bruce Wayne, whose back was broken during their battle, to the same prison which he came from.
Bane taunts Bruce by telling him that he will watch the destruction of Gotham from his cell while he lies in agony from his injuries, before providing him with a television tuned to a news network covering Gotham’s siege. Him being able to tune into a news station half way around the world is pretty far-fetched, but this is a relatively minor plot-hole. Still, it’s pretty pointless, and it arguably would’ve been more interesting for Bruce if he had no idea what was happening in his absence.
As Bruce recovers in the prison, he makes a series of discoveries. First of all, Bruce’s hallucination of Ra’s al Ghul tells him that Bane is actually Ra’s’ son, and Bruce, and by extension the audience, just accept that this is true. I guess the fact that this is a hallucination didn’t cross Bruce’s mind or the writers. He also learns that Bane climbed out of this pit as a child, aided by a mysterious protector who watched over him in the prison. Speaking of which, he seems to have his means of escape readily at hand.
The prison is built into a pit with a lengthy rock wall stretching back up to the surface, the opening of which serves as the only light inside the prison. This sense of false hope, as the climb is seemingly impossible, is supposed to serve to demoralize the prisoners even more than they already have been.
I know a lot of people hated this segment of the movie, but this is actually one of the few areas of the film I genuinely like. I think this was an interesting enough idea that it merited having all this time devoted to it. I like that Bruce is out of action for this long, so that we get to see him go through a psychological journey to escape as he reassesses his choices in life and his motivations.
Earlier, I pointed out that when Bruce donned the cape and cowl again, he was no longer truly Batman, as he no longer had the psyche to do what he did. It’s a really interesting idea, and one that was explored in Knight-fall (albeit after his back had been broken and healed), and I think its inclusion was one of Nolan’s best decisions in the film.
Also, speaking of how much time is devoted to this storyline, I like how we see Bruce Wayne make two failed attempts to climb out of the pit before he finally escapes on his third try. It makes it feel like this isn’t something easy for anyone, even Batman to do, and that he had to go through a deep journey to escape. One of the prisoners tells him that the child (supposedly Bane) was able to escape the pit because he was born and raised in ‘hell on earth’, while Bruce was raised in privilege. This is essentially revisiting the idea that Bane is Batman’s superior, explaining why he was so easily beaten in combat, and by showing Batman make the same journey that Bane did, we get to see that he is in fact, Bane’s equal, but only after he goes through the process of taking on the Batman psyche once again. This builds anticipation for their final encounter and gives our main hero a triumphant bit of character growth.
One that is completely ruined within the next twenty to thirty minutes of movie.
Yes, Bruce still makes the climb and that still is a big win for him, but once Batman returns to Gotham, gathers the resistance forces and launches a massive assault against Bane’s army only shortly before the nuke is going to detonate, the film unleashes a series of revelations. One of which undercuts the parallels between Bruce and Bane by revealing that Bane not only isn’t the child of Ra’s al Ghul, but that he was not the one who climbed out of the pit.
The child was actually Talia al Ghul, aka Miranda Tate, and Bane was the mysterious protector who sustained massive injuries when he helped her escape, forcing him to wear his signature mask. Bane and Talia were in love, but Ra’s banished Bane because he served as a reminder of his failure to protect his daughter and her mother.
The first time I saw this movie, I thought this was a great twist and was completely blindsided. Needless to say, my opinions have changed dramatically.
First of all, Talia being the child adds nothing to the story. There are no meaningful parallels between her time in the prison and Bruce’s, completely erasing all the interesting ideas that were explored there. Secondly, Talia being in the movie at all adds barely anything to the story. It’s mostly just a way to give Bruce a false love interest, because even having her supply Bane with the bomb was so convoluted that they could’ve probably found another way for Bane to find it himself.
But the real reason I’m so critical of Talia’s inclusion in the movie is because it actively undercuts every single aspect of Bane’s character, who is by far my favorite part about this film.
What do we hear about Bane at the start of the film? He was born and raised in the pit, he was too extreme for Ra’s al Ghul, he’s younger and deadlier than Batman, he wants to ‘restore’ Gotham to the people (or possibly just wants revenge on Batman for betraying the League) and was able to escape the pit.
None of these hold true.
Talia was born and raised in the pit. Maybe Bane was too (he does tell Batman in the first half of the movie that he didn’t see the light until he was already a man, but there also was light in the pit so who knows at this point). The point is, this explanation for Bane’s ferocity and determination is undercut because Talia has that bit of his origin. And, whether he was born in the pit or not, she was the one to escape, not him, so he doesn’t have any sort of determination or drive that’s comparable to Batman’s.
Speaking of which, considering Bane is significantly older than Talia, he probably not only isn’t younger than Bruce, but doesn’t seem to have any reason to be more dangerous than him, because, I might add, he wasn’t excommunicated for being too extreme, but rather because of his relationship with Talia. And, he’s not seeking revenge for Batman’s killing of Ra’s al Ghul, or trying to reverse the social order of Gotham city, but rather just acting as Talia’s henchman in her quest for revenge.
At this point, there really isn’t anything interesting or scary left about Bane except for the mask.
And, to make matters worse, Bane’s defeat at Batman’s hands is pretty underwhelming. Their fight starts out okay, as we thankfully don’t just get the trope of Batman dominating the fight now that he’s staged his comeback, although, if you happen to look at all the extras in the two armies (one mercenaries, one police) fighting in the background, the choreography is truly terrible.
The fight takes a turn for the worse, when as soon as Batman damages Bane’s mask with a couple of blows to it, Bane becomes clumsy and distracted from pain, before he is quickly dispatched. Even setting aside how disappointing of an end this is to such a promising character, it doesn’t even make sense because Batman scored several hits on the mask in the first fight, and it was completely fine. And even if he hadn’t, it’s such a lazy plot device to have him get defeated with.
His death at Cat-woman’s hands isn’t much better.
After Talia reveals her true identity to Bruce, she tries to activate the detonator, only to find that Gordon and his team have placed a jamming device on the bomb, meaning she has no way of detonating it and so she leaves to stop them from taking it back to the generator and saving the city. She leaves Batman, now injured with a knife wound, at Bane’s mercy.
As Bane raises his weapon to kill Batman, he is blasted across the room and the camera pans over to show Catwoman on the Bat-pod, having just fired its weapons and killed Bane. To start, let me just say that I hate the trope of having the villain get abruptly killed by something off camera. It shows us a complete disregard for any importance to the villain, in favor of killing them off abruptly for shock value (or sometimes humor).
And that’s definitely what we see here, but there is one mitigating factor that makes it a little less egregious. Bane has already had his final fight with Batman, and as disappointing as Batman’s victory may have been, it did at least happen. We did at least get to see Batman rise up and overcome Bane before Catwoman dispatched him. So, while his final death is pretty weak, at least there was more to his demise than just this one moment.
So, at this point, it’s pretty obvious that Bane has been discarded as the film’s villain. He’s sidelined in terms of the plot, and he’s killed with twenty minutes left in the movie in a very abrupt way. Which leads into Batman and Catwoman chasing after Talia, who’s commandeered the truck with the bomb in it, as Gordon is trapped in the back of the truck. There’s a lengthy chase sequence with Catwoman on the Bat-pod, Batman in the Bat-wing fighting against the tumblers controlled by the mercenaries. It isn’t bad, but it feels kind of like padding, because the film knows that there needs to be a more fitting climax then what happened with Bane.
Which leads us into the last-minute, main villain change that this movie tries, and fails to pull off in its third act. Given my high appreciation for Bane’s character, changing him out for another main villain (which would, by definition, undercut what they had done with his character) was going to be a tough sell for me. However, I feel like even people who didn’t really like Bane wouldn’t be satisfied with this twist.
It’s not even because it just destroys a character who, at least to me, was a really good villain. But, on top of that, Talia isn’t a good villain at all. Her motivations are insanely shallow. While Ra’s al Ghul’s motives for wanting to destroy Gotham had some plausibility and depth to them, we never hear why she believes in the League of Shadows’ ideals, but just that she wants to destroy the city to make Batman suffer for killing her father. This relationship with her father is never explored or developed, either, which makes this feel like an even more manufactured motivation (especially since no mention was ever made of Talia up until this point). We don’t know how she felt about her father, who apparently excommunicated her lover (and possibly even her?). Did she still love him? Did she feel betrayed? Did she even stay in the League? She’s basically just a blank slate to propel the plot forward. A role that Bane already filled, and filled just fine, until they had to add a last-minute twist to the movie just to surprise people.
The heroes try to chase Talia back to the reactor room, and end up forcing her truck off a bridge. Given that she’s in the driver’s seat and Gordon is in the back trailer with a nuclear bomb, the fact that she dies almost immediately and Gordon just rolls out of the truck unharmed provides a nice moment of unintentional comedy.
However, before she dies, Talia activates the reactor fail-safe, flooding the room and ending any hope they have of defusing the bomb. This leaves Batman with only one choice: attach the bomb to the Bat-wing and fly it out of the city.
Batman has a bit of a farewell tour, as a couple of important things happen. First of all, Catwoman walks up to him and after a brief interaction, they share a kiss. There are a few things wrong with this. First of all, having Bruce move on from Rachel to Miranda was already really abrupt and felt forced. Now, mere minutes after Bruce finds out that Miranda is actually Talia, and watches her die right in front of him, he’s moved onto Catwoman. Having his lover betray him should have exacted a huge emotional toll on Bruce, which would have made Talia slightly more interesting, but having him move on so fast makes it feel trivial, just as Talia’s quick death makes her entire existence feel trivial.
Secondly, there hasn’t been enough build-up to this romance to make it believable. Obviously, from the comics, we know that there will be some romantic tension between these two. However, we get a few hints that Catwoman has some feelings for Bruce, and only one brief line that suggests Bruce finds her attractive. It’s not really enough to set up what it’s supposed to be such an important plot point (as this serves as the resolution of Bruce’s character) so it just rings kind of hollow. While I like both of these characters and am glad Bruce finally gets to be happy, it just doesn’t feel believable.
His other farewell is to Gordon, who tells him that Gotham needs to know who Batman is. Batman replies with, “A hero can be anyone, even someone who does something as simple as putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders and telling him the world hasn’t ended.” As he flies off with the bomb, Gordon has a flashback to the first film, in which he put a coat over young Bruce’s shoulders after his parents died, and realizes Bruce Wayne is Batman. While the idea that Gordon would remember this one specific interaction as the only time he put a coat around a boy’s shoulders is ludicrous, I assume that this was just his way of putting the pieces together as there’s a lot of evidence to point to Bruce Wayne being Batman.
Because the auto-pilot was never finished on the Bat-wing, Batman has to fly the bomb out himself. I have no idea why this one thing was beyond Lucius Fox when he did so much else for Bruce, so I assume he was too busy as he probably wasn’t expecting Bruce to need it soon, but then again, it seems like constructing the craft would’ve taken far more time. Batman races the bomb out of the city before it detonates.
The entire city believes he’s dead, and we get an actually moving scene for Bruce’s funeral, only attended by Alfred, Gordon, Fox and Blake. While Alfred was seriously under-utilized in this film, him telling the graves of Thomas and Martha Wayne that he failed them is a truly emotional moment. And, while I would never in my life want to watch a film where John Blake was Batman, having him take up the mantle does tie up one of the important themes of the series, namely that Batman was supposed to be a symbol to inspire others to do good. Having his actual first name be Robin might be a little corny, but I thought it was a nice tie-in to the comics.
However, the movie isn’t quite over.
Lucius discovers that Bruce finished the auto-pilot on the Bat-wing, before Alfred, while on vacation, sees Bruce and Selina together at a restaurant. The two simply nod to each other, as Alfred gets his confirmation that Bruce has been able to move on with his life and leave the mantle of Batman behind. I know some people have taken issue with this ending, but I like that we get to see this little glimpse of the life that Bruce won for himself after all his sacrifices. It provides the series with a glimmer of hope at the end, so that it’s not just needlessly depressing for three movies. It makes the end feel more satisfying and rewarding.
And that wraps up the movie and the Dark Knight trilogy as a whole. It’s not a movie that I completely despise, but it does have numerous problems, including several glaring plot-holes. A lot of the cast is under-utilized, the story feels lazily constructed, but its worst offense is how it finishes the series on such a weak note.
Batman Begins wasn’t a great film, but it was certainly a good movie, and the Dark Knight remains my favorite comic book movie of all time. The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, falls woefully short of either of those other two films. I think part of this comes from Nolan’s need to make everything as big and dramatic as possible, while missing out on the subtler, more human touches that make a movie feel more engaging. Adding in unnecessary twists just hamstrings the plot, which is already flimsy enough and it gets so far away from the source material that it doesn’t even feel like a Batman movie on any level by the end of it.
While this might not be a huge turn off for a lot of people, the Dark Knight Rises winds up feeling convoluted and mostly soulless, where it isn’t really about anything that has an emotional resonance to it or dealing with ideas that are all that complex or interesting. The pretentious air that it has, as it’s made feeling like it’s intended to be some masterpiece, just makes its poor structure all the more grating, washing away most of the good will I had for the first half by the time the credits roll.
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