“It would be extremely painful.”
The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR) is a valuable addition to Nolan’s filmography since it demonstrates the need for a strong thematic undercurrent in his works. Even a remake, such as Insomnia, takes advantage of an examination of characters who need lies to get by each day, and Nolan’s films frequently return to this issue of self-delusion. When it comes to TDKR, though, you get a weird jumble of concepts that never make sense as a whole. It is Nolan’s second-longest movie up to now, after Interstellar, but despite its explosions and special effects, it never feels very expansive.
TDKR never never come across as being especially obvious about its ideologies, in contrast to the first film in the franchise, Batman Begins, which utilizes fear as a key element to illustrate the background of Batman, and the second movie, The Dark Knight (TDK), which succeeded in conveying a story on the battle against terror into a deeper perception about the deception used to to keep this world together and pacified.
Consider Tom Hardy’s Bane, for instance. Apart from leveling Gotham, what else does he want? Even Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul expressed the opinion that burning down Gotham would serve as a purifying fire. He wanted to clean up Gotham since it had grown too corrupt, which created a compelling tension with Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman, who thought his hometown could still be redeemed.
On the contrary, Bane just chooses to cause mayhem while giving Gotham residents a fake feeling of optimism. The man’s a phony populist at best, yet populism shows up in the interaction between the rabble-rouser and the audience. It doesn’t make so much sense when the individual, who speaks about returning Gotham to its residents, is destroying bridges and holding the city hostage. Bane is a fairly unexciting villain since he has no genuine contrast with Bruce Wayne, despite the fact that his primary goal is to destroy Gotham with some sort of nuclear weapon. The only thing that helps us recall Bane is the fact that Tom Hardy provides his character a silly voice.
The fake populism in the movie is more of a diversion than a significant issue. The conclusion is simply that “class strife is a thing!” We fundamentally have Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle as a stand-in for the rage of the 99 percent, but there’s no follow through because blockbuster films normally don’t show the economic injustice or poverty in any remotely serious way. Although Hathaway provides a strong performance, the movie struggles to use her in a way that isn’t just caustic, cunning, and seductive. Similar to Hardy, the performance stands out, but the role doesn’t really advance the plot thematically (not to mention the many periods where her role seems irrelevant since there is nothing left for her to complete).
These annoyances permeate The Dark Knight Rises as a whole since it doesn’t appear to acknowledge the way to wrap up Batman’s saga. It begins in an intriguing way by asking what fighters do in peaceful periods and reveals that Batman is impaired by hopelessness and loneliness, but these emotions never amount to anything. The witty interplay between Bruce and Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth has been replaced by a string of lectures that continue until Alfred leaves the picture about the midway point and doesn’t reappear until the very end. Gary Oldman’s Jim Gordon is compelled to spend more than an hour in a hospital bed before the movie has him link up with plot lubricant Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s John Blake who is also made to act as the movie’s conscience because it also has no idea how to deal with Bruce.
The Dark Knight Rises fails by attempting to redefine Batman as an egalitarian idea, even though the movie tries to create a connection between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises with the reappearance of the League of Shadows and the turn that Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate is Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al Ghul’s. It makes less sense the harder you attempt to convey the idea that Batman might be anybody. Batman Begins demonstrates the arduous training Bruce Wayne goes through so as to become Batman, putting aside the fact that not everyone has a fighter plane. This is completely different from Spider-Man, when all of a sudden you are granted tremendous power with just a bite from an eight-legged creature, forcing you to choose whether or not to become a hero. What is the reason that Bruce needs to practice with members of the League of Shadows from the beginning, if anyone can be Batman? If that’s essential, won’t Blake be dead in 5 minutes after taking over as Batman?
The lack of a true purpose makes TDKR Christopher Nolan‘s poorest film to date. It attempts to cover a lot of ground, but nothing really comes together.
The greatest thing one can deduce from the film is that it doesn’t give us a sense of a huge book that escaped from its writer as it does like an obliged contractual duty that was phoned in. The movie’s story and themes are overextended, making it appear bloated and pompous. Compared to The Dark Knight, it isn’t even a poor movie. It’s a lousy movie overall that doesn’t appear to comprehend its main character, his or her adversary, or the conflict they are engaged in.
After watching The Dark Knight Rises for 5 times, which is equal to 15 hours sitting in front of my screen, I still feel unable to explain to you the plot or significance of it. It’s really hard to conclude a trilogy, therefore it would have been lovely if TDKR had the guts to kill off Batman instead of saying, “Nope! He fixed the autopilot and got away from a nuclear blast! That’s our Batman!” But that’s essentially the entire plot of the film—it sets up something intriguing and then falls flat.
