Revisiting The Dark Knight Rises

Growth is scary, but it's an inevitable part of being a movie critic. With that growth comes the inevitability that you will sometimes read your older reviews and take issue, if less with your initial final grade, then more with the criteria you used to get there. Hyperbole isn't an uncommon trait of movie critics when they first start writing, and my original - and I believe overly-negative - review of The Dark Knight Rises is littered with it. I just happened to be poorly mimicking Bane's voice the other morning, and that particular review sprang to mind, along with a famous, much-memed line of dialogue from another superhero movie; perhaps I treated you too harshly.

The Dark Knight Rises is strange for a superhero movie, and in a genre often defined by conventions that are the unfortunate equivalent of a neutral-brown shade of paint, eccentricity goes a long way. Gone are infinity stones and threats of a conquered universe, replaced by a peculiar, almost news headline-adjacent realism that you won't find in nearly any of its genre-mates. This movie is an uncomfortable blend of Eastern European terrorism, the French Revolution, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it brings that devastation and subtle allusion to controversy to the shores of America in ways almost taboo for a superhero movie. It stops just short of using the word communist in reference to Bane and his followers, whether they be fellow European terrorists with a penchant for high explosives or ordinary but dissatisfied citizens of Gotham City. Granted, The Dark Knight Rises is not a particularly controversial movie in the grand scheme of things, but the subtle digs at leftism are there to be read into, further grounding it in some uncomfortably apt realism.

One could say that this trilogy is a tale of three villains, and Tom Hardy's Bane is a formidable one, both physically and ideologically. If Scarecrow tested Batman's understanding of fear, and Joker tested his moral framework, then Bane tested the limits of his physical and emotional strength. His theatricality is second to none, like a militant Robespierre with a nuclear bomb. He exists to punish the protagonists of this finale for their well-intentioned lies in the previous chapter, and punish them he does, brutally. If The Dark Knight was the cause, then Rises is its tragic effect.

Speaking of tragedy, The Dark Knight Rises is more emotional than either of the other two chapters, which were more concerned with broader philosophical ideas. It's the most empathetic and stirring of the trilogy, but the trade-off is that it's neither as philosophically sound nor as subtle as the movies before it. The Dark Knight was an impossibly high standard for this movie to live up to, and maybe I'm unfairly disappointed that it doesn't. A bit more ineffectually, it's also bigger than either of the two movies preceding it, likely an inevitability given wonderfully unambiguous Bane's fondness for big explosions and grand speeches, and it occasionally loses itself in its budget and spectacle, at least more than the movies before it did. I occasionally missed having something more thoughtful than my nerves and heartstrings tested.

Still, The Dark Knight Rises is the most technologically proficient of the three films. As flawlessly structured as The Dark Knight was, its editing was occasionally choppy and unwieldy. Not so here, and Rises is visually a far smoother ride through Hollywood-manufactured chaos. The cinematography of this threequel is regularly spectacular, and the IMAX sequences are the most visually impressive out of any of the three films in the trilogy. This movie is also the most VFX-heavy of the trilogy, though still sparing by superhero movie standards, and the computer graphics look incredibly realistic precisely because they're used sparingly.

Mix all of these elements together, as imperfect as they can be, and you get a superhero movie that feels more urgent, more grounded than almost any other. We're all aware of the legacy of this trilogy, and even if it's The Dark Knight that ultimately made it as legendary as it was, The Dark Knight Rises is a worthy final act. It's a very solid action movie and even a political thriller, and thoughtfulness like the kind we see here from Christopher and Jonathan Nolan is rare in this genre, even exceptional. The more movies I watch, the more I realize how special this trilogy really is. Growth is scary, but this movie proves it can also be fun, at least as fun as a populist coup can be.

A couple of years ago, I gave The Dark Knight Rises a fundamentally positive yet verbally negative review. A couple of years ago, I was also a very different person. This finale to Nolan's lauded trilogy was given the unenviable task of living up to the stellar The Dark Knight, and so it will inevitably and even unfairly be compared to it, even if it truthfully doesn't live up to the near-impossible standard of its predecessor. Nevertheless, it continues the intriguing tradition of finding a personality distinct from that of the film before it. If Batman Begins was a thinly veiled psychological drama, and The Dark Knight a near-perfect crime thriller reminiscent of Heat, then The Dark Knight Rises is A Tale of Two Cities featuring a hero and a villain who both have a flair for the dramatic.

It has its problems, namely a sometimes unwieldy screenplay and one supporting character who doesn't match the charisma of the rest of the cast. However, The Dark Knight Rises is still an excellent superhero movie, even if it isn't really a superhero movie at all.

The Dark Knight Rises - 8/10

2 Peter 2:1-9