The Dark Knight Rises (To the Everest Base Camp)

Gather round, kids, and let me tell you the story of how one of the most iconic movie trilogies of its time ended. The second part of the trilogy was one of the greatest, most beloved movies of all time, and great expectations rested on the shoulders of the third - the epic conclusion! The creative force behind the trilogy decided he wanted to close with a bang. He lined up the biggest plot device he could imagine and did everything right... but ended up with a conclusion that was ultimately less loved  than the second part - even though it was crafted with precision, it got accused of being a color-by-numbers predictable ending. Oh, and the big plot device, was a lazily reused Death Star...

You probably guessed right: the trilogy was Star Wars, the conclusion was Return of the Jedi, and the year was 1983.

But hang on you say... wasn't this blog about The Dark Knight Rises, you ask? Well ok... tell you what... go reread the opening paragraph of this quasi-review/ pseudo-rant. Just replace "Death Star" with "Nuclear Weapon", "Star Wars" with Chris Nolan's Batman Trilogy, and 1983 with 2012. Go on... I'll wait...

Listen, I really liked Return of the Jedi, OK? I didn't even mind the damn Ewoks. What let me down was Jabba's palace, and the fact that from the mid-point on, the movie was on a creatively lazy auto-pilot. I love the fight with the Emperor taunting Luke and Vader on... but we knew Vader would turn in the end. Didn't we?

Before I go into spoiler territory, let me then say this about The Dark Knight Rises - and in the process stretch my analogy a bit. This is a good movie, but it is not a great movie, as it was built up to be. The platform was there - The Dark Knight was a great movie, just like The Empire Strikes Back. It packed an emotional punch. It ended on a note filled with potential. And the conclusion turned that note (Han Solo in carbonite/ Batman a fugitive) into more or less a sideshow.

Everything beyond this point is going to be spoilerish, so if you haven't watched the movie and don't want to be spoilt, stop now. Skip ahead to the end, where I write a Conclusion...

NO really, stop here.

You've been warned.

Text search for "The Conclusion" before ye go further...

What I loved...


Every appraisal must needs start with positive feedback. Well, here's what I loved about this movie.

Bane - I thought they got him note perfect. The physical menace just oozed from him, and the voice was the stuff of nightmares. The mask as morphine drip thing worked. The origin story, told in fragmented flashback with unreliable narrators worked brilliantly. Tom Hardy acted despite the mask. You could believe that he "broke the Bat".

Talia al-Ghul - Bravo! Believe it or not I had guessed a few days before I saw this movie that she was in this movie, and that Bane was on her short leash. Still, it was a great twist. That said, Miranda Tate? Really? "There's a storm coming, Mr Wayne"? Please... any half-decent fan of Shakespeare should demand that Bane be renamed Caliban for this movie - and Ra's is Prospero, naturally : )

The Set-pieces - Amazing visuals! I was slack-jawed from the opening sequence all the way to the big bang with the football stadium and the police stuck in tunnels bit. Loved the Tumblers deployed against the Bat, loved the plane, loved the Bat-pod with the Cat on it. Nice!

Action - No geek can complain about the action and the scale of the action in this flick. The Breaking of the Bat was visceral, and of course it was a fist-fight between brawlers. You could see Batman using all his tricks - but all his theatricality and deception just washing off of Bane like so much water on a duck's back.

The Acting - was of the highest order. I thought Bale, Freeman, Cotillard, Caine, Hardy all outdid themselves. Hathaway was a little underwhelming, but in my mind, Catwoman will always be Michelle Pfeifer, and that is an impossible standard for the Princess Bride to meet.

The Grip - It didn't feel like a nearly three hour movie. I was (for most of the time) in the movie world, enjoying my popcorn, and digging the visuals. Then the continuity problems and plot holes killed the experience for me...

What I Hated...

Lazy Plotting - Really, a nuclear bomb? That's the extent of your imagination, Nolan? This is worse that fricking Lucas with his fricking recycled Death Star!

Tell you what... close your eyes and imagine this... the Villain, is really a henchman for - and in love with - the Villainess (who has had a troubled childhood and daddy issues). He has taken a nuclear core which is about to go critical. He leaves the Hero in spinal duress as he hurtles towards the climax of a stupid, convoluted scheme with the weapon, and oh... by the way... the man can feel no pain. Open your eyes now and tell me which movie you saw in your head - was it "The World is not Enough" with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and Robert Carlyle as the man without pain? No? Why not?


Here's a last one - the hero is flying a nuclear device in an aircraft away from a city, despite it being a suicidal act of bravery... Agent Vinod, anyone?


Listen - using a nuke as a plot device is like making a Hindi movie about identical twins separated at birth all right? It's lazy. We expect more from Nolan.


Catwoman - Sorry, Anne Hathaway. You are #fail. I see your:

Curvy curves and immaculately undisturbed salon coiffure

And raise you:

Me-fricking-yeow!

Plot Holes so wide, you could fly a Batplane through them... Me? I was jolted out of slack-jawed existence and began questioning everything after the stupid-ass Bane dumps Wayne in the prison bit...


To wit, please to be explaining:

• How Bane finds the time, in the middle of holding a city hostage, to fly a broke-back Wayne to a prison, leave him in the care of a disloyal prisoner, and fly back? 
• How does Wayne, in turn, manage to travel to Gotham (without a passport, among other things, unless Bane left it for him in a care package/ fanny pack) and get into the city in the middle of winter, with no special equipment or helpers, when by the way the city is cut off and surrounded by the freaking Army?!
• Why wait for 45 days to blow up the bomb? This is worse than a villain monologue-ing until the hero can successfully disable a weapon (that happens too!). If Talia/ Bane's end-game was always to blow Gotham up and complete her father's work - why wait 45 days? Her old man was ready to vaporize the water supply on Day Zero! Have Bane/ Talia really never read the Evil Overlord List?
• Why would Talia/ Bane pretend to care about the 99% v 1% shit? As nihilists bent on destroying Gotham with a working nuke - you really think they need something to distract the cops (who are all buried anyway)?
• What American Army - hell what American, period - will be content with surrounding New York if it were held hostage, for 45 days? If Bruce Wayne can come and go as he pleases, why can't Navy Seals/ FBI/ NSA/ Special Forces? This is not an embassy in Iran - this is NYC, for god's sake. They'd rain down upon it like nothing else!
• Why did Bane break open the prison? Why was the prison necessary when he had mercenaries? Only as a place to stow the Catwoman until she was needed again? Hey - where did the orange Kalashnikov crew go in the end?
• If Gotham is going boom boom, why would Talia care to denigrate Harvey Two Face? Just get to the boom boom!
• Did a imaginary ghost really explain a major plot point to the protagonist in a drug haze just there? Really? Even if this was Qui Gon Jinn (who has a record of teaching Yoda to become one with the Force from beyond the grave) - that's a stretch.

Internal Consistency (lack thereof) - I want my superhero movie to be internally consistent. That is not too much to ask for. I'm not saying realistic - Nolan is, but we'll let that pass for a minute - I want it to make sense in-universe. Sorry, this one just doesn't. The Avengers does... The Amazing Spiderman does... The Dark Knight does (although now I think about it, Heath Ledger distracted us from noticing the awfully contrived hostage situations in that movie)...Hell, even Super-Emo Returns made sense, right until the end when Supes lifted the Kryptonite continent and... Sigh... OK, I take that back. Nothing in this movie was that god-awful.

Predictability - You knew as soon as the movie took off that it was going to end with Arthur watching Bruce Wayne across several tables with a girl on his arm. Nice homage to Inception there, but come on! This is just one example, of course... the bigger example is this: every movie about a nuke either resolves the weapon with a distant mushroom cloud (True Lies) or a last minute countdown abort (Insert generic action movie name here). Arrrgh! You made Inception and The Prestige, Nolan... class it up man!

What made me go "Meh!"...

Robin - Really? You're going to set up a big pre-credits reveal and then say you don't want to make sequels? This after denying explicitly that Levitt was Robin? Bad monkey!

Batcave 2 - Nice homage to the Adam West TV show, but where the freak did Wayne get the money to build a second cave? Isn't he pretend dead? Why abandon the mansion? What's his plan when it comes to... oh I don't know... doing groceries?

The Conclusion

I liked this movie - but I wanted to love it. I waited to watch it in IMAX, I stayed completely spoiler-free. Of course, as someone familiar with the comics, I was never going to be completely spoiler-free - I knew Bane would break the Bat, I knew Talia was out there... maybe that diluted the movie for me, I'll never know. It was also brilliant on my part I thought (yes, I'm immodest) to have guessed the plot twist beforehand... 

My wife hadn't, and she has never read any Batman fiction (or seen the prior Batman movies) and perhaps as a result, she had a better time of it today than I did. Among other things, she didn't keep comparing Hathaway to Pfeiffer, and didn't groan I knew it! and figure out the plot twist the minute Wayne was done with (as Sheldon would put it) coitus.

The thing that leaves the sour aftertaste for me however is not that predictability - nor am I a case of "they spoiled my treasured comics childhood" kind of a fan. I'm OK with drastic changes to comic canon.

No, what disappoints in this movie is Christopher His-self Nolan putting the movie on auto-pilot, much as Batman did the Batplane. I expected more from the man who made Memento and Inception and Insomnia. Not to mention, The Dark Knight...

I will watch this movie again, almost certainly... and perhaps I am being too knee-jerk in dissing it now... but here's the honest truth I'm feeling in my gut: 

The Dark Knight Rose... but didn't quite make it to the summit!