Come with me. Save yourself. You don’t owe these people any more. You’ve given them everything.
Not everything. Not yet.
I have found myself in the same place again and again while on this Christopher Nolan project: the image I want to use selected, the quote I’ve chosen to represent the film typed in italics, staring at an otherwise blank screen, with so much to say that I have no idea where to start. For this final film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, let’s do something crazy. Let’s do something Christopher Nolan has rarely done. Let’s . . . start at the beginning.
The bravura opening set-piece here is clearly born out of the desire to top The Dark Knight in terms of spectacle, in terms, I should specify, of practical spectacle, to do something really magnificent and breathtaking that would dwarf the truck flip in The Dark Knight. This isn’t a terrible desire, but it becomes a compulsion as the film progresses, an impulse that becomes a negative force on the movie in just about every way. But in this opening scene, it pays off. It really is a jaw-dropper and I had carefully avoided seeing it before I went to the theater to see the movie. It’s just full of amazing moments; the first jaw-dropping moment is when the wings just shear right off the plane and then it has the perfect ending as we get a patented “Portentous Bane Line,” “Now is not the time for fear. That comes later,” as we see the plane just drop out from under Bane and Pavel. It’s one of the great cold-opens of all time. But it’s a quiet moment in this cold open that really underlines the problems with this movie. As Bane and his henchmen prepare to abandon the disabled plane, he tells one of his men that the manifest indicates one of Bane’s employees on the plane. And as that guy straps himself into a seat (setting Bane up for another “PBL,” “Yes, the fire rises”) the camera lingers on him long enough for us to register what he’s feeling. It’s exultation. It’s pride that he gets to die for Bane. That’s a knock-out moment for me because I remember thinking in that moment, “Okay, that’s what this movie is going to be about, the passion of the fanatic.” You can read the Joker in The Dark Knight as an exploration of terrorism and I thought this movie was going to be more of that, but an exploration of a different aspect of terrorism.
So, that opening leads us right into the problems with this movie. Because here’s the thing. When this movie ends, we have no more of an idea as to why someone would be fanatically devoted to Bane than we do at the beginning. At one point, Ben Mendelsohn’s character questions this devotion. When told that one of Bane’s henchmen has been captured, but that he will die before he betrays them, he mutters, “Where does he find these people?” Where indeed? I suppose the movie expects us to just buy the handwave that it’s the League of Shadows, but, look, bringing the League of Shadows back was the lazy choice here, a way to make a movie about fanatics without exploring fanaticism. The League is one of the weakest parts of Batman Begins and, frankly, they work even less well in this movie.
But, you see, this is a script dedicated to the lazy choice. I’ve watched some of the behind the scenes stuff on the making of this movie and, let me tell you, it is about as breathtaking as most behind the scenes stuff is on a Nolan movie. Did you know that during the scene where the Batplane is flying down at close to street level at the end, they actually put the plane on a rig on a truck and actually drove that truck down the street with the plane’s movements on the end of the rig being controlled remotely? So, during those crazy Tumbler vs. Batplane chase scenes, there was actually another truck with a full telescoping rig on the back of it driving down the street. The digital effect in those shots is painting out the truck, not adding the plane. That is ******* insane and super-cool to see in the behind the scenes features. My point, I guess, is that the technical production of this movie was not lazy. Nolan went as all-out as he ever does. The problems here, like the problems with Inception, are on the script level, for the most part.
This laziness impacts the script in a myriad of ways. And I’m not going to get bogged down discussing plot points. If I started that, I’d be here all day because this script operates on a level of coming up with plot points and then trying to handwave them in the most ridiculous and lazy ways possible instead of actually trying to come up with something smart. Let me just talk about one and let that stand in for all of them: The movie needs John Blake to know that Bruce is Batman. So, instead of coming up with something clever or realistic, they just say that he saw Bruce Wayne one ******* time and just intuitively knew that he was Batman because Blake also puts on a persona at times. That is the laziest, stupidest **** imaginable. I mean, you want to show that Blake is the “Robin” of this Gotham’s Batman and that he’s worthy to step up and be the new Batman at the end? Then come up with some super-cool way that he came up with it as a theory and then how he investigated it and was able to prove it to himself. Have him literally outsmart Batman by finding a flaw in the carefully crafted deception. But no, he’s just like, “I’m used to pretending to be someone I’m not when it’s convenient too.” Wow, guess who else is? ******* LITERALLY EVERY OTHER PERSON. All it takes to figure out who Batman is in this universe is understanding the concept of a persona. ******* ridiculous. My God. That **** would not pass in a college freshman level creative writing course.
You can apply this to everything from the movie every single cop in the city into one convenient location (and none to the big football game where one might logically expect a terrorist to strike) to the contrived way the movie bankrupts Bruce Wayne to the reason there just happens to be a loose nuke floating around Gotham. And let’s not get into Talia either because I could write about five paragraphs about how stupid that all is and how easily it could have been done well. But the thing is about the plot problems is I suppose your average blockbuster has this kind of **** in it. But I think the lazy writing is so jarring because Nolan’s films typically have incredibly precise writing. A lot of his movies feel like there’s meaning behind every line; there’s no room for dialogue tossed off without thought in a movie like The Prestige or Memento. But the big reason this movie flops for me isn’t purely logistical; it’s in its muddled and confused thematic content.
I’m no fan of the Inception script, right? We’ve established that. But there’s a reason that I still have to rank Inception higher than The Dark Knight Rises and that’s because, whatever scene to scene problems there are, however clumsy the exposition is, however inconsistent the worldbuilding . . . Inception is a movie that knows what it is about. It’s about ideas. It’s about the mind as a trap, about the subconscious and the past as sources of danger. It’s about reality vs. fantasy. It’s about the catharsis of emotional connection. It’s a movie that has themes and has things to say about them and ways to explore them. The Dark Knight Rises has none of these things. It has things that it kind of feels like it wants to explore, but it never really does. You get references to fanaticism, fascism, the inescapability of the truth, suffering, class warfare, hope, despair . . . But this movie has nothing to actually say about these things. It doesn’t “discuss” them or “explore” them; it, you know, “brings them up.” “Fanaticism. That’s pretty crazy, right? Yeah, I know. Anyway, have you ever noticed that some people are rich and some are poor? *long pause* Hope. That’s a concept. Or is it an emotion? Doesn’t matter.”
Let me just wrap up (lol gonna be at least two more paragraphs!) by talking about a few of the more technical aspects of the film. I briefly mentioned the desire to go “bigger” than The Dark Knight and, except for that opening scene, that really doesn’t work. Hans Zimmer turned in one of his best scores for The Dark Knight, but the score here is maniacally over the top and not good. And some of the previously good performances in this franchise go right past “over-the-top” and into ham territory. Michael Caine isn’t good as Alfred; he’s saddled with that horrible speech that sets up the ending and his weeping at Bruce Wayne’s graveside is way over the top. Likewise, Oldman doesn’t fare well in this movie either. He’s very good in two scenes, the scene near the beginning where he plans to read the speech telling the truth about Harvey Dent, but decides against it and a brief, very quiet scene between Gordon and Bruce in Gordon’s hospital room. But by the time he’s screaming at Blake about rules becoming shackles, he’s crossed over into bloviating mode and it isn’t pretty. Even Bale has lost a step here; his Batman growl has gone off the deep end and, while it mostly works in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, it’s impossible to take seriously. I’m likewise pretty cold on Hathaway’s performance as Selina Kyle. The fact that I haven’t even mentioned her yet in this review doesn’t mean I like her; it means I hardly care about her at all. I do find it refreshing that the bulk of the movie doesn’t even treat her femininity as worthy of comment; and then I find it doubly annoying when, after two and a half hours of platonic respect, the movie tries to suddenly flip to a romantic connection between Selina and Bruce. And Nolan is probably the only director who has directed Marion Cotillard, a truly magnificent actress, to give not one, but two, really awful performances. Like with Inception, I think the fault lies with the writing of her character. She’s not good as Miranda Tate; it’s a disguise and it comes off like one. It’s a shallow performance that has no real life to it. When she’s revealed as Talia, she has a little more energy, but we know nothing about her and so it’s hard to buy into the reveal that a character as compelling as Bane is really nothing less than a doting sidekick. His loving gaze isn’t earned because of the way the reveal is done; we have even less reason to understand why people would be devoted to her than we do to understand why people would follow Bane. I really don’t understand why Nolan didn’t reveal her earlier in the film, so we could actually know something about her by the time we got to the climax.
While we’re talking about performances, there are a couple of things I like about the movie. Tom Hardy’s performance as Bane is really great in my opinion. Yes, the voice is weird, but it works. It is funny sometimes, but it doesn’t take away from his menace. Bane is truly frightening, but in a different way than the Joker was in The Dark Knight. His body language has a raw power to it, hidden in a confident ease. He’s unhurried, but resolute, an unstoppable force. The best action sequence in the film is absolutely the first fight between Bane and Batman. Nolan films it well and it’s well performed by the actors. While we get that Batman is older now, it’s still downright shocking and terrifying to watch Bane just take him apart piece by piece, not blocking or dodging Batman’s punches, but just letting them land and not caring. It’s like he’s made of rock in that scene; utterly calm, very still, but absolutely unstoppable. And I will give the script this: Bane is one of the most quotable characters of the decade. It doesn’t have any idea of what to do in terms of fleshing his character out and making him either consistent or believable, but, damn, that dialogue. Part of that is down to Hardy’s vocal choices, of course; it’s been nine years and I still drop a Bane impression on probably a weekly basis. For all the problems I have with this movie and even with Bane as a character, he’s instantly and indelibly iconic. And I do like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance as Blake. He has the closest thing to a believable arc in this movie, going from a resolute policeman to a guy who finally understands the way blindly following orders can lead to bad things; by the end, I genuinely kind of do buy him as a guy who could be the new Batman. He even comes close to making that absurd scene where he reveals that he knows Bruce is Batman work with the sheer force of his sincerity.
Anyway, I’m honestly ending this review with this next topic, okay? I started at the beginning; where else would I end up but . . . that ending. That ending. But in order to understand why that ending is so dreadful, we have to go back to the real beginning. Batman Begins, in fact. Watching this entire trilogy over a compressed period of time, I did pick up on an interesting throughline that was far more pronounced than I remembered. It’s the way the movies depict Batman as a figure who truly does what he does for the city of Gotham. That’s always been a part of the character, but I think this trilogy leaned into it far more than any of the other movies. Each movie kind of revolves around a sacrifice Bruce makes for the good of the city. In Batman Begins, it’s being Batman in the first place that is the sacrifice, a kind of death in a way, the death of the wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne might have been. In The Dark Knight, it’s a moral sacrifice; he takes the sin of Harvey Dent. There’s a line in that final scene of The Dark Knight that seems to get lost in the discussion of that scene and that’s understandable since, you know, every line in that scene is a great line. When Gordon tries to dissuade him from taking the blame for Dent’s crimes, Batman responds, “I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.” It is, in many ways, the death of Batman the hero. This movie almost gets that thread right. I get chills when Selina tries to get Bruce to just leave Gotham with her at the end of the film; “You’ve given these people everything,” she says. “Not everything,” Bruce responds. “Not yet.” That’s, full stop, the most badass and most Batman moment in this movie.
I’d love to believe that Nolan’s version of Batman just continues on forever, like Batman can in the comics, but I think that the natural ending to this trilogy is that final sacrifice, Batman returning, one last time, in Gotham’s hour of need. To make final and literal the metaphorical deaths he has experienced in the past; to give, finally, that last full measure of devotion. It’s what this Batman’s story arc has always been, it’s what both of the previous movies have been: one man’s sacrifice for his city. If this movie had seen that through, it would have mitigated a lot of of the bad stuff in this movie by at least really sticking the landing. But, no, at the end of the day, when it comes time to finally do the deed, somebody blinked; I don’t know if it was Nolan, for misguided artistic reasons, or the studio, for financial reasons, but somebody decided that you just can’t kill the Batman. But that misses the point; no one kills him – he lays down his own life, just like he always has. It’s always been his life on the line; and what this movie posits is that when the debt gets called in, there’s a way out. I don’t buy it. I hate it, in fact. This movie wants to have it both ways. It wants to see Bruce Wayne change, in a way that he’s changed in both of the prior movies, level up as it were; this time, it’s to the status of icon, a monument, finally, fully more than a man, as Ducard told him all those years ago. But it wants that to happen and then to tell us that this time, there wasn’t a cost involved; this time, Bruce pulled it off without losing anything, without really sacrificing. And it doesn’t work. It wants to have its cake and eat it too. And it eats it all right. It eats pavement right in front of you. Not every Batman needs to die; but this one did. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – Nolan’s laziest, shallowest script has a bad plot, weak characterization and nothing to say of any consequence, plus it has an absolute disaster of an ending; Bane’s pretty scary though. 1 ½ stars.