As usual, the visuals are top notch. A reliance on stunt-work and practical effects for the majority of action scenes makes the few uses of CGI stand out even more. The story feels a little clunkier and hammier, with more punching matches and atom bombs than ever before but this still doesn't feel like any other super hero movie. Batman doesn't even show up until almost an hour in. He precedes his entrance by using perhaps his most appropraite gadget yet, some sort of EMP gun that shuts off electrical systems. More to the point, it means he can bathe an entire tunnel in darkness before he strikes. Using magic/science to create total darkness is the best bat ability yet.
Batman seems ready to quit. Batman being a symbol more than a man has always been a theme of this series, but the last movie started playing up the angle that Batman might want to toss in the ol' cape and cowl. Not some sort of hissy fit, like Peter Parker tossing away his costume in Spiderman 2 because he's bummed that Mary Jane is getting married. This was more about realizing that no man could keep it up forever, and that the symbolic weight of Batman was more important than all the punches he could ever land.
Catwoman is a success in spite of or because of how underdeveloped she is. She is a cat burglar, she makes a few cat puns, and her futuristic thief glasses look like cat ears when she pulls them up. But this is a major step up from feline-resurrection induced super powers. Thieving, fisticuffs, and gray morality remain her stock in trade. She wears a mostly conventional cat suit, except for maybe the spiked stripper stilettos. Having Anne Hathaway bent over a batcycle racing through the city with an IMAX camera directly behind her could have been exploitative quickly (think Megan Fox in Transformers 2) but the apocalyptic tone of the movie at that point prevents most prurient thoughts.
In fact, and I mean this as a compliment, this might be the least sexy Catwoman in years, by which I mean, they remembered that Catwoman should be good at something other than being sexy. Isn’t she a jewel thief? Lets have her do that. Acrobat? Sure. Lethal? Lets have her kill a bunch of guys with guns too. Kind of a bitch? She calls herself one and that’s before she betrays Batman. Anne Hathaway captures the tone of a more practical rather than theatrical Catwoman. She can turn on and off hysteria at a moment’s notice to fool the police and she uses a horny congressman as an escape route, twice.
Her character's desire of a magic thumb drive that can erase a person’s identity is pretty stupid. I guess she wants a clean life or something. Can’t she just run away with her millions of dollars and change her name? Or does she want her old name cleared? Even if she uses a magic computer program to clear her name, aren’t actual people going to remember her? Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a pretty big stack of papers when he arrested her at the airport. Magic computer program can’t erase those. Also, his brain. He’ll remember that Selina Kyle is a sexy jewel thief even if she hacked every computer in the world to say that she is NOT a sexy jewel thief.
Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate (who is somewhat secretly Talia Al Ghul) is a mixed bag. Her plan strikes me as over-ambitious. She spends years becoming wealthy and joining the board of the Wayne Foundation so she can convince Bruce Wayne developing a MacGuffin reactor. Wayne in turn is very worried that someone could use it as a weapon. Her exact plan is to use it as a weapon, so his concern is warranted, but I guess another part of her plan is not just defeating him but sticking it to him. Using his own reactor to destroy his city and make him watch. And then at some point reveal herself so he’ll be burned by the knowledge that the person orchestrating his destruction was hiding in such plain sight that Bruce Wayne engaged in some ‘I can’t pay my bills’ fireside sex with her. And gave her a bunch of money for some goofy looking reactor. I thought the series has moved beyond villains destroying the city with somewhat-futuristic orbs or cubes.
That’s what made the Joker so great. His final plan was to get some people to blow each other up. Or to get some SWAT team to shoot some hostages. Or to make Harvey Dent go crazy. Or... That’s what was so great about the Joker. You never really knew what he was up to because he was the one supplying most of the information. He seems un-trustworthy to me. But my favorite of his many schemes was the two ships that could blow each other up. Not only is it fun to see a movie using an elementary lesson in game theory like the prisoner's dilemma to build tension in its finale, but its extra tense because somewhere in your mind you believe that a villainous plot of this scaled down magnitude could actually occur in the movie.
What I mean is, you know that Gotham wasn’t gonna get blowed up real good at the end of Batman Begins or at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. But the first time I saw The Dark Knight (and a tiny bit every time after that) I thought that one of those ships might blow up and the Joker would dance and laugh with mad glee and Batman would punch him but he’d just say ‘too late people are evil ha ha’. Of course neither of the ships actually explode. But with all the shit that had already exploded, the odds didn’t seem so crystal clear.
Bane works better as a villain. I was hoping he would do more to outsmart Batman. He mostly just punches him. I was hoping Batman would do more to outsmart him. He mostly just un-breaks his back, regains his Bat-confidence, and out-punches Bane. But his part of the overall evil plot feels stronger. He kidnaps a doctor, gets him to turn a reactor into a bomb for him, and then kills him. He gets a businessman to pay for his evil concrete and then he kills him. He uses computers and motorcycles to rob Bruce Wayne. He uses evil concrete to seal off Gotham from the outside world so it will bum out Bruce Wayne when he has to watch from a pit.
I was hoping that Bane's plan would involve turning the city against Batman, since he already ended the last film taking blame for some murders, and that part of the 'rising' would be getting the city back on his side. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why Bane does so much populist posturing, other than the fact that hearing Tom Hardy tear into the word 'corrupt' in his Bane-voice is too rich an opportunity to pass up. We see some criminals evicting rich people, but it feels like most of Gotham just runs and hides, instead of being swept up in revolutionary fervor.
Bane’s look and feel also work as a villain, particularly his upgrade from previous Bat appearance. No more luchadore mask, or Zorro accent, or magic-muscle boosting chemicals controlled by pumps, tubes, and cranks sticking out of his enlarged head. He is still bulky and intimidating, but not a Hulk-sized freak of nature. He still has a mask, a weird one with a flimsy explanation, but now it works as a counterpoint to Batman’s mask, covering just his mouth VS covering everything but the mouth.
Bane’s voice is still a little hard to understand, but my ear-gut tells me the mixing was redone, because now you can very clearly not understand him. His speech seems to echo from all corners and overpower sound effects, which works for his character whether intentional or not. What I really like about his voice is how weird it is, and how hard it is for people to imitate. If someone has not seen the film or trailer or heard the voice at all, and you try to demonstrate it for them, I don't think you can possibly accomplish that task. You’ll just sound like drunk and arrogant Sean Connery making prank calls through a Darth Vader mask. I thought I detected a slight Caribbean accent but who knows. Bane’s origin is muddled in this movie because most of what you hear about him, it turns out, is actually about somebody else.
When Gotham is sealed off, the citizenry descends into chaos, but we don’t get to see much of it. Prisoners break into rich people’s apartments, but kids living in a youth home still seem relatively safe. Even the 3000 (I think) policemen trapped underground seem like they’re just camping. They have food, water, tents, and they never even turn pale or grow beards. The best aspect of Gotham in ruins we get to see is the Kangaroo court with Scarecrow presiding atop a mound of courtroom detritus. Batman stories traditionally love to show the Joker becoming a Judge, either when society breaks down or Batman is captured by a group of villains overcome by their more democratic angels, but Heath Ledger is dead so the Scarecrow is a welcome replacement, especially with his other short cameo and his character's history of intimidating the criminally insane populace of Gotham.
I think many of the returning characters get the short end of the stick. Morgan Freeman got to say “Three button is a little 90’s” in the last movie and he was integral to the climax and the Bat-cell-phone-sonar device. In this movie he gets to shout “You have to make the truck turn east!” during the climax and climb a ladder faster than water can rise. Michael Caine’s best scene was in the trailer but not in the movie. Gary Oldman spends most of the movie bedridden, and then guilt-trips Matthew Modine into getting shot in battle.
One of the things that makes The Dark Knight so great is that it is a middle chapter. Totally unshackled from origins and conclusions, pure storytelling takes over. Batman Begins offered a detailed backstory, which was refreshing considering it remained mostly unexplored in the previous films. The Dark Knight Rises offers something unusual in a superhero movie: finality. Now in movies or comic books (and especially in comic book movies) they always say that even if somebody is dead and buried, they will still find a way to come back. About a hundred years ago, at the height of his popularity, Sherlock Holmes fell off a waterfall and was dead for ten years. But he came back.
The worst thing you can say about this movie is that its not as good as the last one. The best thing you can say is that it completes the definitive film trilogy. What else comes close? For my money, The Godfather doesn't count because the first two films are essentially one giant film split into two very long films, and then the belated unloved third chapter shouldn't really count. Star Wars and Indiana Jones got crappy bonus entries to dilute their overall series worth. Who knows how many Alien films there will be by the time I stop writing this sentence? I liked the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, but so did a lot of people, so we are getting three more films based on The Hobbit.
But how final is the ending? Will this really be a solid trilogy, or will it end up like so many others, with additional entries sullying the legacy? None of the main characters even died. We have to judge the likelihood of the franchise being over on the integrity of those involved. So, I'm pretty confident this is the end of the Nolan Batverse. The ending achieves the long time goals of the franchise and this entry. The identity of Batman has passed from one man to another, proving he is a symbol and not a man above all else, and the Dark Knight does in fact rise, throughout the movie and in the final shot of JGL being lifted towards the Batcave and his destiny.
~ Marion Cotillard's death scene is laughably hokey. People dying at will, as a sort of exclamation point to their final sentence, does not work in this movie’s universe.
~ The Empire Strikes Back features zero Death Stars and zero trips to Tatooine. The Dark Knight features no Wayne Manor, no Batcave, and zero attempts to destroy an entire city.
~ Bane gets so worked up at one point that he punches through the columns outside a courthouse and those are made of pure justice.
~ Just ten years ago, it would have been all but unthinkable that a Moroccan chant would have been a musical motif in a Batman movie. And if you're curious, my ten seconds of research tells me that the phrase is 'deshi basara.'
~ Fans of The Wire might have noticed one cast member in this film, but did you notice the second one?
~ Thomas Lennon, most familiar as Lt. Jim Dangle from Reno 911 but also one of the most successful screenwriters in the world, plays an unnamed Doctor who treats Bruce Wayne. He previously played an unnamed doctor over a decade ago in Memento, also from writer-director Chris Nolan. In an episode of the Doug Loves Movies podcast, Lennon mentions that his scene has a joke cut from it, where the doctor advises Bruce Wayne that his body is too damaged to take up any destructive rich person hobbies, except drinking. This fits in with a long Batradition, where Bruce Wayne very publicly pretends to be an alcoholic (think the headline about 'drunken billionaire' in the first movie, or the car accident in the 2nd) but is actually a dedicated teetotaler. In fact, this movie shows his continued devotion to disgusting green health shakes for breakfast.
~ This Batrilogy did fall victim to one of the traps that usually plagues longer running franchise: recasting. Rachel Dawes, a character created for the film series, was played by Katie Holmes, then Maggie Gyllenhaal, and then finally by a photograph of Maggie Gyllenhaal.
~ I might like Batman Begins a little bit more than this one because that movie has so much good Bruce Wayne stuff and that guy usually gets the short end of the stick in Batman stories.
~ Bane holds the lapels of his coat when he is waiting. I'm not sure why I like that little gesture so much.
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