The Dark Knight Rises became a punching bag for internet cynicism and that's a shame for a movie as ambitious and interesting as this one. Revisiting it for the first time since its July 2012 theatrical release led me to realize that The Dark Knight Rises, though not without its share of flaws, is a damn fine movie that deserves better treatment among online discourse. For those unfamiliar with this final chapter in Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman movies, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been in hiding since his decision to have Batman take responsibility for the murders committed by Harvey Dent in the finale of The Dark Knight. As he lies in Wayne Manor, the brawny and brilliant Bane (Tom Hardy) has begun to descend on Gotham with his own nefarious plans for the city.
With such an enemy stirring up trouble, Bruce Wayne has no choice but to suit up in the cape and cowl once again and face Bane head-on. Factoring into his mission are a pair of newcomers in the series, a Gotham cop named John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). He's gonna need them and all the help he can get as Bane proves to be a far more formidable adversary than he could have ever imagined. It's a story that writer/director Christopher Nolan (who penned the screenplay with Johnathan Nolan) has marked by the constant presence of hope. It manifests in different ways among the various cast members, but hope is always on the mind of the characters in The Dark Knight Rises.
On the side of the villains, hope is used as a cruel weapon dangled in front of people like a carrot that's used to make a donkey move. Bane explicitly says he intends to make the citizens of Gotham feel hopeful about getting the city back into their control before he uses a bomb to blow them to smithereens. Meanwhile, the pit Bruce Wayne gets trapped in for the entire second act has prisoners trying to crawl their way out of the prison to freedom, their hope always being shattered by their inability to ever actually escape. On the other hand, Bruce Wayne must learn to have hope for the future after the death of his lover Rachel Dawes while Selina Kyle is all about looking out for her own self-interests, she has no time to put her own hopes into something bigger than herself.
Even John Blake has hope creep into his storyline, sometimes in explicit terms like when he insists on not letting orphaned kids he's looking after that their doom is imminent because "Do you want [these kids] to die without hope?" Hope is a powerful element. It can be used to destroy people. It can be used to make your final moments more bearable. The Dark Knight Rises poses to both its characters and the audience one simple question: what will you use hope for? As an epilogue shows, especially in moments like the reveal that Bruce Wayne has left his mansion to become a new house for homeless kids, Christopher Nolan seems to be encouraging using hope to make the world a better place.
As Batman himself said to Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) in my favorite poignant moment of The Dark Knight Rises, "...a hero can be anybody. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know the world hasn't ended." In the wake of the success of these Christopher Nolan Batman movies, we got a lot of blockbusters that tried to ape their more realistic trappings by adhering to an exclusively grim tone. In the process, knock-off movies like Man of Steel were utterly devoid of humanity, they had no people you could connect to, no small moments of pathos that could get your tears flowing. Such films were all pouting but no poignancy.
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies could be grim as all hell but they also had interesting characters whose stories required such darkness. Plus, they weren't all darkness all the time. All three Nolan Batman movies had a number of moments of humor and were never afraid to actually pause for genuine emotion, the latter element being critical in making these more somber tones work. Whereas knock-off's of these movies were typically too busy being dark to have even a moment of emotional vulnerability, the Nolan Batman movies are full of little bits and pieces that can make you well up with emotions. Plus, best of all for a summer blockbuster, the Nolan Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises included, were so much fun to watch.
"Oh boy, you are in for a show tonight!" an experienced Gotham City police officer tells a younger cop when Batman returns to crime-fighting and such a sentiment applies to all these Nolan Batman movies that managed to deliver some truly delightful set pieces packed with impressive pieces of editing and practical stunt work. Not every aspect of The Dark Knight Rises works as well as its most ambitious action moments, to be sure. Most notably, an exploration of the financial have-and-have not's in Gotham City starts out with some interesting ideas but eventually peters out and doesn't really factor into the third act at all. For everything that goes awry here, though, there are plenty more impressively ambitious parts of The Dark Knight Rises to compensate for any of its shortcomings. It was a delight to revisit The Dark Knight Rises and discover that this is gargantuanly audacious blockbuster filmmaking you can't help but admire rather than perfect fodder for onslaughts of internet cynicism. Let's rejigger the perception of this movie on the internet right away please, a movie like The Dark Knight Rises deserves far better than that.
With such an enemy stirring up trouble, Bruce Wayne has no choice but to suit up in the cape and cowl once again and face Bane head-on. Factoring into his mission are a pair of newcomers in the series, a Gotham cop named John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). He's gonna need them and all the help he can get as Bane proves to be a far more formidable adversary than he could have ever imagined. It's a story that writer/director Christopher Nolan (who penned the screenplay with Johnathan Nolan) has marked by the constant presence of hope. It manifests in different ways among the various cast members, but hope is always on the mind of the characters in The Dark Knight Rises.
On the side of the villains, hope is used as a cruel weapon dangled in front of people like a carrot that's used to make a donkey move. Bane explicitly says he intends to make the citizens of Gotham feel hopeful about getting the city back into their control before he uses a bomb to blow them to smithereens. Meanwhile, the pit Bruce Wayne gets trapped in for the entire second act has prisoners trying to crawl their way out of the prison to freedom, their hope always being shattered by their inability to ever actually escape. On the other hand, Bruce Wayne must learn to have hope for the future after the death of his lover Rachel Dawes while Selina Kyle is all about looking out for her own self-interests, she has no time to put her own hopes into something bigger than herself.
Even John Blake has hope creep into his storyline, sometimes in explicit terms like when he insists on not letting orphaned kids he's looking after that their doom is imminent because "Do you want [these kids] to die without hope?" Hope is a powerful element. It can be used to destroy people. It can be used to make your final moments more bearable. The Dark Knight Rises poses to both its characters and the audience one simple question: what will you use hope for? As an epilogue shows, especially in moments like the reveal that Bruce Wayne has left his mansion to become a new house for homeless kids, Christopher Nolan seems to be encouraging using hope to make the world a better place.
As Batman himself said to Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) in my favorite poignant moment of The Dark Knight Rises, "...a hero can be anybody. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know the world hasn't ended." In the wake of the success of these Christopher Nolan Batman movies, we got a lot of blockbusters that tried to ape their more realistic trappings by adhering to an exclusively grim tone. In the process, knock-off movies like Man of Steel were utterly devoid of humanity, they had no people you could connect to, no small moments of pathos that could get your tears flowing. Such films were all pouting but no poignancy.
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies could be grim as all hell but they also had interesting characters whose stories required such darkness. Plus, they weren't all darkness all the time. All three Nolan Batman movies had a number of moments of humor and were never afraid to actually pause for genuine emotion, the latter element being critical in making these more somber tones work. Whereas knock-off's of these movies were typically too busy being dark to have even a moment of emotional vulnerability, the Nolan Batman movies are full of little bits and pieces that can make you well up with emotions. Plus, best of all for a summer blockbuster, the Nolan Batman movies, The Dark Knight Rises included, were so much fun to watch.
"Oh boy, you are in for a show tonight!" an experienced Gotham City police officer tells a younger cop when Batman returns to crime-fighting and such a sentiment applies to all these Nolan Batman movies that managed to deliver some truly delightful set pieces packed with impressive pieces of editing and practical stunt work. Not every aspect of The Dark Knight Rises works as well as its most ambitious action moments, to be sure. Most notably, an exploration of the financial have-and-have not's in Gotham City starts out with some interesting ideas but eventually peters out and doesn't really factor into the third act at all. For everything that goes awry here, though, there are plenty more impressively ambitious parts of The Dark Knight Rises to compensate for any of its shortcomings. It was a delight to revisit The Dark Knight Rises and discover that this is gargantuanly audacious blockbuster filmmaking you can't help but admire rather than perfect fodder for onslaughts of internet cynicism. Let's rejigger the perception of this movie on the internet right away please, a movie like The Dark Knight Rises deserves far better than that.
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