philosoraptor42

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Okay, this is the one we'd all been waiting for. For me, it was the one I had the highest expectations for, not only of the three major superhero releases, but of pretty much any movie release expected this year. I have followed Christopher Nolan's career avidly since his film "Memento" and when "Inception" came out I was happy to limit my review to: "It's Christopher Nolan making it. Just watch it."

I'm afraid I can't do that this time.

I'm going to start off with the bad news. The Dark Knight Rises is Nolan's worst film yet (but that's coming from someone who really really enjoyed "Insomnia", which I previously considered his worst film). "The Dark Knight Rises" is the worst of the four superhero movies I've seen this year i.e. "Chronicle", "Avengers Assemble" and "The Amazing Spider-Man" (though once again, I really enjoyed ALL of those). This is the worst film in Nolan's Batman trilogy (though that's kind of inevitable from my earlier comment).

That said, the first positive point I ought to mention straight away is that the action scenes are better than ever. Nolan has often been criticised for not being an action director and there was a film critic within the past year going into a deep analysis of the various technical issues they had with the police convoy scene in "The Dark Knight". Here though, I have to say I thought the action sequences were expertly put together and there seems to have been a clear development in the quality of the spectacular action sequences as the films have gone on. We also have the bat-bike back with some pretty fantastic manouevers in store. There's no doubt that The Dark Knight Rises is an exciting film to watch.

Before I go into more detail on the problems with The Dark Knight Rises, I want to quickly talk about a few of the old Batman movies. I decided to rewatch some recently and the only one I haven't managed to rewatch yet is "Batman and Robin".

It all started when I watched the 60s Batman movie for the first time ever. It has all the campiness I remember from the TV show (and seriously, why hasn't that had a DVD release yet?) and I don't think I'd ever been previously aware how little seriousness Adam West and Burt Ward put into their performances. In this film the Riddler's riddles are pretty much Christmas cracker jokes, yet Burt Ward's Robin states the answers as if he's an expert at cryptic crosswords. The scene of Batman being attacked by a shark or Batman running around with the typical cartoon bomb with a fuse are both hilarious and make very clear not to take this seriously. It was an absolute delight to watch this movie.

Rewatching "Batman Forever" I could see some elements of Adam West's Batman in Val Kilmer's performance and Nicole Kidman's scenes with him seemed to have a comic undertone. Heck, even Robin seems to have something to him. The villains, however, are the weak point, particular The Riddler played by Jim Carrey. Every point when Jim Carrey is on screen in Batman Forever was utter torture for me. Also for all the attempts to gloss up Batman franchise with all the guns randomly having neon down the side of them and with gangs who are covered in glow sticks, the batmobile is oddly given the tackiest fin on the back of it which wobbles as it drives along. It's interesting to see Tommy Lee Jones' version of Two Face now that Nolan has done the character. The thing is, in "Batman Forever" both Two Face and the Riddler feel like rehashings of The Joker, only the Riddler has absolutely none of the charm.

I've been pretty public about my dislike of Tim Burton, so I was worried about sitting through his original two Batman movies, but I was happily surprised. My first memory of Tim Burton's first Batman movie is it being the big movie on TV one Christmas, but then I remember coming back to it some years later and finding it rather dull. Looking back at it now, it's got a lot of charm. It seems to have a lot of Burton's stylistic touches, but it's missing the misjudged sentimentality that put me off so many of his films. This film doesn't really have much in the way of action scenes per se and the plot is thread bare (not least due to a villain with little in the way of motivation), but here the style of the film really does add something very special and overall it's just really good fun. I do wonder though, whether Tim Burton thought Batman had super strength? Not only is he able to lift a man fully off the ground, but he actually gets shot in the arm at one point (while just wandering about as Bruce Wayne at the time too) seemingly without noticing.

Batman Returns is problematic, but Burton put more action into it this time. The main storyline surrounding the Penguin just gets more and more ridiculous as the film goes on. And that's a storyline which begins with a baby being raised by a variety of penguins in an abandoned zoo which is somehow connected to Gotham's sewage system and somehow learning to make a quite technologically advanced set of custom umbrellas. Still, I've got to give props to Danny DeVito for doing everything he can to make the character feel real. It's a very good performance. Still, the parts of the film that really stick out are ANY BITS INVOLVING Catwoman. Michelle Pfeiffer isn't in many films that I really rate that highly (there's Matthew Vaughn's "Stardust" but that's about it), but I still think she's a damn fine actress. Heck, I saw "Dangerous Minds" on tv one time and while part of me couldn't help but notice that it was extremely unrealistic, even as young as I was, Michelle Pfeiffer had me going with it anyway. In Batman Returns, her Catwoman is just amazing. Also, I think Burton's quirky ideas regarding her character pay off rather better than those to do with the Penguin. I wouldn't say Batman Returns was an especially good movie overall, but I would say it has a LOT of great moments and it held a lot of potential. For Catwoman alone, the whole thing was very worth watching.

So with all that out of the way, I guess it's time to start going into problems with "The Dark Knight Rises". There's been a lot of talk on the internet about plot holes in "Prometheus" and "Amazing Spider-Man" and, I'm very sorry, but there are MUCH MORE plot holes in Dark Knight Rises than either of those. Personally I don't really think counting plot holes is very productive. If you want to find issues with a movie you'll find them and The Matrix is often a favourite for that little activity. The question is, how blatantly do these problems stick out while you are watching? For that reason, I'd say that the second half was better than the first half. The film did a much better job of pulling me along in the second half, while in the first I felt like everything was a bit of a muddle.

We enter encounter an 8 year time gap straight away. Batman has not been seen during most, if not all, of that time. In fact the supposed murder by the Batman has lead to a piece of legislation known as the Dent Act which has made it easier to put away criminals. Crime levels are apparently way down from what they once were as a result of this. Bruce Wayne has apparently been living as a recluse, rarely leaving his room at Wayne Manor. He now has a walking stick and genuinely seems to have a problem with his leg. Did I forget something really really important at the end of The Dark Knight or do we have no explanation as to what happened to his leg?

Interesting side-note, apparently Wayne Manor ISN'T filmed in the same place as the mansion in "X-Men First Class". Can you guess which is which?

Left: Wollaton Hall Right: Englefield House

The plot hole that stood out the most for me was Alfred's researching skills. Okay, so they are able to quickly work out the identity of Catwoman (which she's actually never called in the movie) based on old newspaper cuttings. Perhaps she's been to prison before and just bust out of there? But what's rather more confusing is when Alfred, as if describing things that Bruce Wayne does not know, explains that Bane was previously a member of The League of Shadows and was kicked out of the group. Now hang on a minute. The League of Shadows is an ultra-secret organisation which Bruce Wayne only discovered by virtue of being approached by them while in a Chinese prison. In the first movie it was made pretty clear that there was very little information to be found on this group, so how does Alfred suddenly have detailed insights into their internal membership decisions?

Also, people said that Peter Parker was a douche in the recent Spider-Man but I was pretty shocked by Wayne's treatment of Alfred in this film. If you've seen the previous installment, you know that Alfred received a message from Rachel Dawes in the form of a letter, which he decided not to pass on. But you'll also remember that Rachel said herself that she was already with Harvey Dent and she wasn't really interested anymore. So with that in mind, I'll limit my description of the scene in question to this: how Rachel felt about Bruce comes up in conversation and Bruce doesn't seem keen on what Alfred has to say about it. Needless to say, Alfred is Bruce's loyal terrier as always and so I find it hard to empathise with Bruce's reaction in this scene.

Getting even more vague on this next point. At one point in the film Bruce ends up going abroad. (I suppose we had that last time with him flying to China.) His mode of transport there and back was not always entirely clear to me and the timing involved in travelling seemed a bit dodgy. As always, I'm keeping the review as free of spoilers as I can, but I think this will make sense in context.

So far I haven't mentioned Bane's voice which was brought up prior to the movie as a big issue. The first scene it comes up I felt worried that they'd overdone the changes to the film. It sounds like his voice is absolutely filling the room even though you might expect it to be somewhat muffled at that stage. Still, it seems that his mask must also amplify his voice and in certain scenes you can clearly hear that his voice is reverberating around the room. There are some points where his words aren't entirely clear, but he's not the only character where I cannot pick out every word perfectly. I found that I could catch the most important lines and he is supposed to be a character with a distinctive accent. I'll look forward to trying to catch the lines better next time I see this. It should also be noted that Tom Hardy does a great deal with his face, in spite of the large mask covering a lot of it. Hardy's performance means we can see Bane as an unstoppable behemoth, on the one hand, but yet a more thoughtful and inspiring figure on the other.

Finishing off the negatives, I mentioned earlier that I found the beginning a bit muddled. The plot isn't exactly convoluted, but the way it's set up feels more puzzling that it needed to be. Also when Alfred connects something to a particular new character, I had absolutely no idea who he was talking about. Admittedly remembering names has never been my strong suit, but in previous films I didn't have the same puzzlement about how things fit together. It's easier to ignore possible niggling issues if the basic gist has been set up, but I felt that in the first half there were many points where I wasn't yet clear on the basics. It could be the script or it could be the editing, but something was making this film unnecessarily hard to follow, particularly in the first half.

So let's get back to some positives. Concerned about whether Princess Diaries girl (Anne Hathaway) can do Catwoman? Well naturally this is a different Catwoman to the one in Burton's version, but she does a great job. Her acting is fantastic and she really pulls off the moral ambiguity of the character.

Some people were a little concerned that she'd be fighting in high heels when I showed that movie poster a while back and there I'm afraid I have bad news. At the time I said that it couldn't be literally the high heels she would wear, because the heel was portrayed as a knife blade. Yep, you guessed it. Her heels are knife blades. I couldn't quite tell but I think the heels might have been retractable, but in any case the positive point here is that the knife-like heels are a quirky weapon and are used in an interesting way when Catwoman is making her way around the place. Catwoman's knife-heels are like her equivalent of Batman's batarang or bat-darts. How does a bat shaped object act as a boomerage still and why make bat shaped objects when you could just use ordinary boomerangs or darts? Well we let that go because it's a specific item used by the character and I'm afraid that's the best I can offer for why you might want to give the heels a pass this time.

Also we have yet another appearance by Cillian Murphy. The scarecrow DOES appear again and when he does I felt like applauding. Gary Oldman returns as Commissioner Gordon and gets to be more important than ever before. In the first movie I felt, "why doesn't Oldman have more to do?", but in this film he is properly a major player. I was pleased to see that Morgan Freeman's character hasn't resigned after all and is just as brilliant as ever. Also, I need to mention Joseph Gordon Levitt, who is a really good addition to the cast and gets to appear as a rather more convincing badass than he did in "Inception" (where his badassery left me thinking "where did THAT come from?").

I find myself comparing "The Dark Knight Rises" to "Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes" in a way. They are very different films and they have very different pros and cons. ROTPOTA had a first half where it had to set stuff up and you just had to ignore that James Franco has a massive house and no job all those years and yet is able to provide upkeep for a super-intelligent ape. You had to ignore that drugs tests don't work like that. And towards the end of the first half you had to ignore that ape sanctuary workers normally LOVE animals and aren't there against their will because of family connections. And then in the second half the prison break stuff starts and it goes awesome.

Christopher Nolan clearly makes this his own and it's got the same distinctive feel of the previous two in the trilogy. Yet it also has it's own theme. While Batman Begins had a yellowish tinge, The Dark Knight was mostly blue, this one feels like it has white as its colour. It's clear that there are a lot of scenes where Batman is standing around in clear daylight and I'm quite impressed by how natural this film makes that feel. I have to say, when Nolan decided to increase the number of scenes in which Batman simply talks to people in "The Dark Knight" I found it a little odd. Expecting people to be intimidated by a figure rushing in and out of somewhere, remaining mostly in the shadows, generally makes more sense than when he's standing around in a superhero costume in plain sight. Yet somehow here, in clear daylight, it works and I have to credit Nolan that he made it work so well.

Still, I'm afraid that in spite of what certain right-wing political commentators might want you to believe, this isn't a clear liberal message and the way the story arguably ties into the Occupy Wall Street ideas probably doesn't pay off the way you might hope. Still, I don't think Nolan's Batman films have ever had messages directly applicable to the political issues of the day and we are pretty lucky to now have some superhero movies that bother to touch on those issues for a change.

How much you like The Dark Knight Rises will depend on how much it can pull you in. However, if there's one thing I think this review might have helped to do, it's to lower your expectations a bit. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this film was not going meet your expectactions. I absolutely recommend seeing this film, but we've all been expecting an awful lot from this film and I'm here to break it to you: It doesn't reach those heady heights. This is a very good film overall, but I've already seen plenty better this year. Consider this to be on the lower end of a B+.

Of course the cat at Daily Mash writes a far better review than me...

Important Notice:
In case anyone isn't already aware of the tragedy that occurred in Denver today here are some links. This is absolutely shocking news and the event is made especially horrific when you look at the last excited comments from one of the victims still visible on twitter.

Twelve Shot Dead In Colorado
Terror and Confusion During The Violence
All The Details As They Appeared To The Press