The Dark Knight Rises

Spoiler alert!

You’ve been warned. If you don’t want to see spoilers, go somewhere else until you’ve seen the film.

Okay? All good? Rightio then.

The Dark Knight Rises is a difficult film to review. On one hand, do I review the film as it is, or do I look at it from the perspective of a Batman film? Ultimately, you’ll be able to find plenty of reviews that talk about the film, so I’m going the other path – how does it rate from a Batman perspective?

The answer is “It was alright”. Don’t get me wrong, the film itself is great fun, but Nolan was never a great creator of Batman films, and while his first film struck the right notes for such a thing, the subsequent two films have gotten progressively further away from the characters of Batman and Bruce Wayne, further away from the figure steeped in a long (Batman was first published in 1939) history. Gone was Batman’s rage, an essential element to Bruce Wayne; instead we were left with a resigned, reclusive and depressive figure that has enough angst to power a Twilight film.

The villains of the film – Bane and Talia al Ghul – were also divergent from their comic book origins, with Bane originally being something of a twisted mirror to Batman that broke him to establish himself in the hierarchy of Gotham’s underworld, rather than out of revenge. Talia, on the other hand, has always been a complex figure, torn between loyalty to her father Ras al Ghul and her love of Batman, but in this film we saw little of that; just a wounded girl out for revenge on the man who brought about her father’s rightful downfall. A side note here, but I had trouble taking Bane seriously; he sounded like a poor impression of Sean Connery.

And then we have Catwoman. Compulsive thief, anti-hero and mixed thorn-in-his-side and love interest for Batman, we’re instead given a thief who’s just looking for a fresh start, a wounded girl just hoping to begin over. Hathaway makes a solid performance as the femme fatale, but it’s robbed of the essential nature of Catwoman, leeched away by Nolan as much as the essence of Batman has been bled dry.

I’m being hard, I know, but I feel it’s important to express just how disappointed I was at the divergence. Something that the new Spider-man and the Avengers have both done very well is that they’ve brought a fresh look at long-time favourite heroes without changing the core essence of them. DC here could learn a lot from Marvel, and I say that as a mainly DC fan boy.

There is, I noted with a deep sigh, the splash of American patriotism which to the outsider feels unnecessarily and jarring, and the scene on the bridge where the external security forces destroy it rather than allow people to cross safely seems to rob something from the previous film, where the essentially trusting and good nature of people (as illustrated with the prisoner’s dilemma on the ferries) is championed, even though said forces had good cause for their actions, it felt something of a betrayal of the established continuity.

To the good, then. Gary Oldman continues to portray a wonderful Commissioner James Gordon, full of conflict and righteous ire, and Sir Michael Caine is a brilliantly heartbroken Alfred Pennyworth, trying to bring his friend out of his wallowing self-pity. The action sequences while odd (Batman involved in an open, large scale battle in broad daylight?) were well paced and the chant of deshi basara as Batman literally rises from a dark prison pit into the light was a triumphant scene, well contrasted against the pain and loss his friends feel with the supposed death of the hero at the end.

In summary, the villain Bane is meant to break the Batman – instead we start with an already broken hero, that is ultimately restored and healed through his conflict with Bane.

Three out of five stars. A good film, but not a good Batman film.