The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan – 2012 – USA

I’m not the hugest fan of Nolan or the Batman movies, but The Dark Knight Rises, despite the lame title, is probably my favorite of both so far.  Not unlike John Carter of earlier this year, it is almost perfectly calculated to please three groups of people; casual movie fans, hardcore fans of the source material, and mainstream critics.  My reaction, therefore, tends to be satisfaction tempered by a mild resentment at being played so skillfully.  It’s somewhat of an improvement of the possibly more beloved The Dark Knight (2008) in that it feels like a cohesive story, whereas as the previous film, though shorter, felt longer, had a succession of climaxes and overstayed it’s welcome a bit.  A terrorist named Bane (Tom Hardy) has come to Gotham to exact some vengeance on the city itself and its most prominent citizen Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), a.k.a. Batman.  Meanwhile, sexy cat-burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) just wants to have her criminal record cleared so she can start fresh.  Inert for years, Wayne has to whip himself into shape to meet Bane in battle.  As much as it’s possible to treat a superhero context in an adult way and without condescending to it, Nolan does about as well as can be hoped for.  In fact, he really might be the only person to do it at all, so for that he deserves credit.  The flipside of that coin, of course, is that everything is imbued with such a heavy weight of importance that it can become burdensome in its own right.  All these criticisms are relatively minor, though, and overall the film can hardly be considered anything but a success in every way.