It's sad that in googling Dark Knight Rises in preparation for this post, I found the search results to be overwhelmingly dominated by the tragic news of the Aurora shootings. When I walked out of my local cinema having watched the film last friday, I switched on my phone and immediately saw the news. My parents-in-law live in Colorado so I have a feel for the place, and I often went to midnight screenings when I lived in America. There's a half-crazed air at those showings, and the thought of a sudden outburst of real violence amidst the witching hour delirium is truly haunting. And all accomplished with guns I associate with films! I still find it shocking that anyone other than farmers are allowed to not only tool up with semi-automatic weapons, but can also stockpile vast amounts of ammunition. As the Guardian put it:
It says something about America today that emergency personnel now pride themselves in coping with mass shootings.
Regardless, this post was not supposed to be about anything other than my thoughts about a new film that I saw.
There's long been a dictum stating that the third offering in a movie franchise will be found lacking in quality when compared to the previous two incarnations. Most trilogies, The Godfather, Terminator, Alien, etc. with a few exceptions, have suffered this fate. So, even with the heft of Christopher Nolan's intellect and epic vision behind it, does the Dark Knight Rises end up leaving a sour taste in the mouth? Or will the box-office behemoth leave the world foaming at the mouth for "MOAR", like the anonymous patrons of 4chan's porn .gif threads? My humble verdict would be: not exactly.
Let me explain.
I had the slight misfortune of turning up late to a packed screening filled with noisy undergrads (I live in Oxford), only to discover that the last seat was on the far right of the front row.
While I wasn't at the IMAX, which apparently the film is intended to be seen in, I was sat in front of a screen incongruously large for a high-street cinema chain. This meant I got to fully appreciate Wally Pfister's gorgeous cinematography, albeit sat at an angle that would have rendered the hidden skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors fully visible.
I'll say right away that the performances are excellent across the board; even Anne Hathaway surprised me in a frankly silly role that gave her little to do. While the late Heath Ledger's Joker deservedly dominated most of the running time in the second outing, Batman regains centre screen here, played with depth and charisma by Christian Bale. Eight years into self-imposed seclusion, in full Howard Hughes mode and sporting a cane for his ailing bones, there's more for Bale to do, and he manages to provide conviction to the character's arc, even if at times the narrative borders on the ludicrous.
Nolan's visuals retain their exceptional gloss and composition. I've long been a fan of his eye for sumptuous imagery. I have the half-formed theory that in each film he incorporates one or two stand-out images intended to leave an impression on the audience's mind that reaches beyond the immediate narrative. One might call them "non-submersible units" to quote the Kubrickian origins of this blog. In Insomnia, there was the visual motif of the blood soaking into the fabric reminding Al Pacino's weary cop of his past guilt; Inception had the spinning top as symbol of the precarious nature of reality; the entirety of Memento was in its own way a re-working of how we expect to view images unfold on screen.
In the Dark Knight trilogy, the first film contained the memorably trippy visuals brought on by the Scarecrow's weaponised hallucinogen. In the second film, the Joker's scars and make-up provided the world with a meme it's still getting over. So what do we have in the third? Sadly, the visual motifs are a little thin on the ground in Dark Knight Rises. The best we get is Bane's sleek S&M mask, whose overall look is generally striking, but ultimately a little uninspired.
His dialogue is equally frustrating, in that it is mostly unintelligible. He certainly sounded menacing, all hoarse and gravely, part Darth Vader/part Hannibal Lecter, but he could have been yelling about filo pastry or horse dressage for all I know. I felt that partly to blame for the lack of clarity was the booming score, which eclipsed most other dialogue as well. I initially thought this was due to my having sat to the right of the screen where giant speakers blasted distortion into my face, but others have picked up on it too.
As I mentioned, the narrative is a little delirious at times, juvenile even, which is a real shame given the maturity and depth that the second film achieved. The cod philosophy and patronisingly "Eastern" mysticism of the Ras Al Ghul subplot from the first film make an unwelcome return early on, then proceed to grossly overstay their unwelcome, like a sweaty overweight person who sits next to you on the train and proceeds to sneeze into your open mouth.
One misjudged interlude seems to take place in the Turkish prison from Midnight Express (sans rampant bum-stabbings), where Bruce Wayne gets treated to some inventive fist-based back surgery as well as spiritual re-invigoration in the form of reverse-Jedi bulshittery ("The reason you fail is because you do NOT fear death!" wrap your head around that one). There are problems narrative-wise right the way through; here's a spoler-heavy link to some apt questions one might have upon leaving the cinema.
The other element that had me mentally rolling my eyes in a perpetual loop was the incorporation of current events into the story, drawing uncomfortable political parallels; a feature carried over from the second film. The Dark Knight definitely had covert themes about the unfathomable nature of terrorism ("some men want to watch the world burn") and the justification of extra-judicial measures used to address said terrorism in times of crisis (the cell phone surveillance scene).
Without giving too much away, there are such undercurrents in Dark Knight Rises, mostly to do with Occupy Wall Street and clean energy. These are riffs more than outright analogies, but nonetheless, the usual intelligence of Nolan's plotting is poorly complemented by the dodgy right-wing politics on show here.
I suppose I shouldn't start nit-picking comic-book politics, as by their very nature all comic book movies serve up a libertarian wet dream of pagan and christian-tinged revenge; solitary ubermensches meting out "justice" against the dangerous radicals that threaten liberal democracy. The fact that Batman doesn't use guns is irrelevant, some deus ex machina (in this case, a woman!) will inevitably pop up to finish off the bad guy, saving Batman from having to do the dirty work his ethos truly implies. Again, I'm not the only one to pick up on this:
All these gripes aside, it's still an epic spectacle that I enjoyed most of the way through. The opening aerial set-piece is masterful, and the peppered in-jokes along the way were mostly cringe-free. As I've stated before, I'm so cynical about the state of big-budget cinema that I'm simply content not to be bored for 2 hours, so take all this with a pinch of salt. Admittedly the stakes were high given the achievement of the first and second films, but overall this doesn't let the trilogy down.
