The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect the late attorney's reputation and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years later, Batman encounters the mysterious Selina Kyle and the villainous Bane, a new terrorist leader who overwhelms Gotham's finest. The Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.
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Nolan is something of a purist, evinced in his shooting and editing entirely on film and resisting the cash-grab allure of 3-D in favor of a nostalgic harkening back to the cinematic past (he has cited both Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago as major influences here).
Inspired by Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (also a tale of a resentful underclass incited to violence by a sort of monster) and Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" (Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow leads a French Revolution-style kangaroo court), the movie — operatic, imposing, built to awe rather than seduce — barrels over its plot holes with the massive tread of one of Lucius Fox's Bat-vehicles; thank goodness for the light-footed and light-fingered Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), who steals scenes as well as pearls.
But it’s visually enthralling, especially the scenes of urban chaos that call to mind Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Nolan, the most daring and imaginative studio filmmaker working right now, modeled "Dark Knight Rises" after both the silent classic "Metropolis" and "Bladerunner," using London as the hub of a metropolitan hell hole where Bane rules like Satan in the Underworld.
The screenplay by Nolan and his brother Jonathan takes inspiration from A Tale of Two Cities and Metropolis (not Clark Kent’s, Fritz Lang’s) in depicting the levels of society: the 99% versus the 1%, the skyscrapers down to the sewers.
The opening of the second film recalled Michael Mann’s heist thriller Heat and here Nolan casts Ben Mendelsohn of Animal Kingdom fame as a white-collar villain up to his neck in shit.
The storyline - which essentially follows Christian Bale's Batman as he tangles with a fierce villain called the Joker (Heath Ledger) - has been augmented with a whole host of subplots and subcharacters, as Nolan's efforts to replicate the style and tone of such gritty forebearers as Michael Mann's Heat and Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy ensure that's there's a lot going on within the final product's 152-minute running time.
A sprawling crime epic evoking Michael Mann's Heat and Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City , the film saw Batman tussle with arch-nemesis The Joker (a stunning final performance from Heath Ledger) while corruption spread like a virus through Gotham's corridors of power.
And he all but admits the association by having Selina Kyle make a knowing reference to Mann’s Heat when she tells Batman that he should meet Bane: “You two should exchange notes over coffee.”
Director Christopher Nolan ("Inception"/"Insomnia"/"Memento") completes his superior Batman 'Good vs. Evil' trilogy that started with “Batman Begins” (2005) and “The Dark Knight” (2008).
Nolan does fall back on his "Inception"-like tics, overloading exposition into the dialogue and explaining too much of Bane's back story.
While it never achieves at the level of a film like “Inception,” “The Dark Knight Rises” is full of reminders that it is a film made by one of the industry’s greatest visual directors.
Because this director puts an individualist’s stamp on all his movies, from “Memento” to “Inception” to the two films preceding this one, “Batman Begins” (2005) and “The Dark Knight” (2008), he’s that very rare creature, a blockbuster auteur.
It's the world from "Inception," imposing and silver, dizzying and impersonal, but not without beauty.
Tom Hardy, who starred in Nolan’s overrated “Inception,” does his best to bust that ghost with his menacing take on a guy who knows exactly what he wants and is willing to kill anyone to get it.
Where most trilogies end on a weak note (witness the likes of “Return of the Jedi” and “Spider-Man 3”), “The Dark Knight Rises” succeeds as an epic triumph that scales the rare heights of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” making it the crowning achievement of the Batman trilogy and the biggest, best, most exciting Batman of them all.
Remember when Billy Boyd sang with boyish vulnerability in The Return of the King , while we watched Middle-Earth falling to pieces?
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Where most trilogies end on a weak note (witness the likes of “Return of the Jedi” and “Spider-Man 3”), “The Dark Knight Rises” succeeds as an epic triumph that scales the rare heights of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” making it the crowning achievement of the Batman trilogy and the biggest, best, most exciting Batman of them all.
This isn’t so much a comic-book call for upheaval in the style of V for Vendetta (the Alan Moore vision, at least) as it is a reflection of how these things tend to go in reality: Class inequality is exploited by those interested in nothing but power, resulting in short-lived spasms of violence and looting that leaves the mob back where they started.
It's something of a warped mirror image of the equally dark but ultimately more hopeful adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.
They were deep, rich motion pictures - films that could proudly stand alongside any serious Oscar contender released in November or December (although, inexplicably, The Dark Knight was snubbed in the Best Picture category, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button getting a nod instead).