Note: This appeared in the print-only TV Guide of The Marshall Independent.
“The Dark Knight Rises” is the final installment of the Batman trilogy, preceded by “Batman Begins” (2005) and “The Dark Knight” (2008) by the family team of Director Christopher Nolan, his brother Jonathan Nolan co-writer, and wife Emma Thomas producer.
They make a great team. The trilogy is tightly plotted with a coherent vision and it ends on a win.
Comic books like movies are the creation of many different specialists working under one man’s creative vision. The Batman was among the few surviving characters of the Golden Age (conceived in 1939) whose creator Bob Kane continued to have some input up to quite recently. Kane (1915 -1998) had some role, if only a symbolic laying on of hands, in the original TV series (1966-1968) cartoons, and previous movies.
Kane out of the picture might have been a Good Thing. The TV series was done as cartoonish high camp, and typecast Adam West forever after. Michael Keaton tried to play The Batman more-or-less straight, but by his third outing the series had reverted to camp. Later Batmen Val Kilmer and George Clooney couldn’t break out of the stereotype.
Nolan’s Batman (Christian Bale) is rationalized myth. His original motivation, the murder of his parents, is expanded to saving a civilization represented by a city. Impossible super heroes and villains are left out. The Batman’s advantage is brutal training (Bale trained in the unorthodox Keysi Fighting Method) backed up by a modern weapons lab.
The explanation why police aren’t given these tools is plausible, they’re expensive. Same reason soldiers still wear kevlar rather than the much more effective Dragonscale.
And why would a masked vigilante chose to use only non-lethal weaponry and renounce killing entirely?
Author Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter) pointed out that while vigilantes arise in response to lawlessness, in the long run they always become murderers. The Batman must renounce killing or face the corruption that befell crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, “Two Face.”
Eight years after “The Dark Knight.” Bruce Wayne is a recluse in Wayne Manor, broken in body and spirit by the physical toll of being The Batman, and the death of his love Rachel Dawes at the hands of The Joker. His reputation is in the sewer after taking the blame for murders committed by Dent.
Gotham City itself is relatively crime-free, though Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is himself burdened with guilt for allowing The Batman to assume the blame for Dent’s crimes, and his family has left him.
But the hour of danger for civilization comes when long periods of peace and prosperity make people complacent and discontents breed. Then the weary and broken guardians must arise once more, and recruit new guardians to be their successors. One of whom is young and still-idealistic cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)
A new villain has arisen, led by the offspring of R’as al Ghul of the League of Shadows. Like R’as, they are determined it is time for a corrupt and decadent society to fall. This time they are encouraging society to destroy itself, and this is where the concept gets bold and controversial.
Villain Bane (Tom Hardy ) takes Gotham by brute force, then uses considerable rhetorical gifts to foment a Jacobite reign of terror by the mobs against “the rich,” very much in the spirit of the French Revolution, with show trials judged by The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy.) To underscore the point, there is a reading from Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities” at the end.
Think the Occupy Movement – with guns and tanks.
Against them The Batman rises once more, aided by Gordon, Blake, master of armaments Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman,) and sometimes helped, sometimes betrayed by a beautiful cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) in a crucial role.
Kyle has capabilities much like The Batman, but uses them for personal gain. She justifies this with rhetoric like Bane’s, to whom she’s in thrall. She’s seeking a new start via a device that erases one’s entire criminal history from all the world’s databases.
As sometimes allies, sometimes adversaries, Selina and Bruce Wayne learn together that a new start has to be earned, sometimes at a terrible cost. Gordon, Wayne, and Wayne’s all-but-father Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) discover even well-meant lies corrupt.
And when the chips are down, civilization has to be defended by men who are fallible, corruptible, often broken, but who find it in them to rise one more time. And if they do, no guarantees but just maybe there’s a way out of the cold and dark to the other side.
Go see it. Kids 10 and over I’d say.