Warner Bros.
I didn’t think it would be appropriate to get high today. Well, actually, I got high last night and went to a midnight screening, but doing a sort of jokey review seems a little callous, so I went back this morning and saw The Dark Knight Rises again. I wanted to anyways, because my first impressions weren’t very good. Unfortunately, a second viewing didn’t help.
I’ll be honest: the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, despite being the best Batman movies made so far, still aren’t as good as they could be. They skate by on great visual design, awesome cinematography and impressive performances, but everything the dude makes is just overlong and flabby. The Dark Knight got lucky in that it started with that incredible bank robbery sequence, which still remains (in my opinion) the best thing that Nolan has ever filmed. It was intricate and well-observed, but it was also basically a puzzle box, a self-contained little unit. It’s when he starts trying to put those boxes together that the movies fall apart.
The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t have anything that’s as good as that scene. It does have some incredible visuals and great acting, but it’s all in service of a plot that really doesn’t work. Spoilers ahead, so be warned.
When we open the movie, it’s eight years after The Dark Knight. Batman is retired and Gotham is a police state. What made the Caped Crusader hang up his cowl? Is it because crime has been eradicated? No, it’s because his girlfriend died in the last movie. Uh, I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t skip karaoke night for that if I was Batman, let alone quit everything entirely. Batman’s whole deal is that he doesn’t quit. But then a new danger arises – Bane, a masked Russian psychopath who wants to tear society down and piss on the ashes. So he comes out of retirement only for Bane to basically totally own him, break his back and lock him in prison.
With Batman out of the picture, Bane enacts his master plan, and that’s when everything goes off the rails. Dude blows up all the bridges and tunnels out of the city and puts a nuclear bomb in the football stadium. A bomb that has five months before it goes off. I don’t know about you, but five months isn’t really panic-inducing to me. I’m sure the entire population of Gotham City could Boogie Board to safety in that time. There’s some good stuff in this bit with the return of the Scarecrow from the first movie and some impressive scenes of anarchy on the streets, but what exactly is Bane trying to do? What is his endgame? It’s never really made clear, and he already beat Batman, so why is he sticking around?
Batman’s recovery from a broken back is similarly silly. The movie seems to take forever depicting his escape from the cylindrical well prison in India, but when it comes time to pop his vertebrae back in place, a little tap from a chiropractor and he’s right back on his feet in a couple of weeks. Magic! This same sort of “nothing really matters” thing happens later in the film, when the nuclear bomb explodes right over Gotham harbor. Guess what? If it was that big, hundreds of thousands of people would be dead from radiation poisoning! Magic!
The big problem with The Dark Knight Rises is that Christopher Nolan’s just trying to do too much. The movie is almost three hours long, and it doesn’t need to be. Whole swaths could be edited out without doing any damage, and it’d be a better film for it. There are great parts in this – the hijacking scene is awesome. But it’s just such a mess at the end (especially with the multiple cop-outs) that I can’t help walking away disappointed.
