The Dark Knight Rises Review!

The Dark Knight Rises is an amazing movie. Not that it’s like the best movie ever or anything, but it’s a thrilling and magnificent spectacle of  a film, and in some ways is better than its predecessor.

I’ll start off by saying I really didn’t like Batman Begins. The action scenes were unwatchable and the spraying gas to make people go insane plot is laughable. I really liked The Dark Knight, of course. This film is structurally and stylistically more like TDK, although it has a lot more to do plot-wise with Begins, with multiple mentions of Ra’s Al Ghul or whatever the hell Liam Neeson’s name is, and not one mention of the Joker. I’m not really pointing to this is a good or bad part, I’m just saying.

The film takes place 8 years after The Dark Knight and both Batman and Bruce Wayne are dormant. A mercenary named Bane is doing stuff and so is a burglar named Selina Kyle. I was kind of amazed by how bad the first few minutes were. The opening scene in the plane just didn’t work for some reason, and the film didn’t really pick up for a while. There were a lot of one-line cover-ups, the Harvey Dent Day scene in particular. The theme of the first twenty minutes or so appeared to be tell, don’t show. Luckily things picked up.

My favorite character in the movie was Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s dude, a young and good-natured police officer. The film really picks up when he’s introduced, and then we’re given time to learn more about Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy’s weird voice. Overall I’d say the first half was kind of weak, but things got much better.

Bane runs an underground army that has plans to take over the city. The film is pretty vague about what Kyle has to do with this, letting the suspense build. Bruce Wayne’s transition back to Batman is a slow one, and one with genuine emotion, which is always nice to see. There’s a lot of emotion to this movie, and even more character development than the previous two films. Alfred and Wayne argue constantly over whether or not he should be Batman again, for instance.

There are some good action scenes in the first half and my favorite scene of the entire movie was probably Batman’s first appearance. It was following a stock exchange robbery and the reason why it worked so well (despite an out-of-left-field day to night transition) was because there had been action and crimes committed before that Batman did not come to. It made this one special. He’s of course wanted for the murder of Harvey Dent, so the police chase him and Bane gets away.

Bruce Wayne winds up losing just about everything and his relationship with Selina Kyle becomes more prominent in the film. She wants something that may or may not exist, and Wayne wants her to take him to Bane. He gets his wish and there’s our first Bane-Batman fight.

One thing I liked about this film is that Batman’s injuries seem to mean something, for once. In the previous film he wanted to have armor that protected him from dogs, but it was really not much more than a minor complaint he had. Here we see his pain and suffering and it has great effect on the film; he must overcome all this, gaining his strength from within all over again. It’s a good portion of the film, but to me, it’s far more interesting than the entire Batman Begins film, which was all about that.

While he’s recovering, all hell is turned loose on Gotham. It makes all of what the Joker did in The Dark Knight look like nothing more than a Sunday afternoon. Bane and his minions run the city, trapping the cops underground and keeping all outsiders out. This does unfortunately include the ridiculously stupid football scene, featuring for some reason the Pittsburgh Steelers as Gotham’s football team. The field blows up while Hines Ward returns a kick for a touchdown in what’s easily the worst scene of the film. I guess the only positive is that Ben Roethlisberger was killed and billions of women are now safe.

The police become an underground movement, more or less, which is one of the more interesting concepts of the film. It becomes like a futuristic dystopia film, and it’s fairly believable. It’s every bit as effective as The Dark Knight’s whole every cop but Jim Gordon is corrupt and working for the Joker universe.

This film made good use of its locations, as the previous two did in Chicago. Here, most of it was filmed in Pittsburgh, hence why the damn Steelers are playing in what is obviously Heinz Field. But since this is a much bigger film than the other two, it has plenty of shots of the skyline being more or less destroyed, what is obviously Manhattan. It all works well.

The final showdown once Batman is back reminded me a lot of the opening scene of Gangs of New York. It really didn’t disappoint, but then there was a twist that I didn’t really like. I know it’s keeping true to the comics and everything, but it felt like an excuse to throw in another climax, really. Like The Dark Knight, it has quite a lengthy climax that excites while it happens but leaves you kind of exhausted afterwards.

I’m not going to spoil anything, but I did notice a bunch of similarities to Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities. It’s not just that I’m a literature nerd; I’ve since read that it was a huge inspiration for the film. There’s a storming of a prison and release of its prisoners, there’s a character named Stryver, a bunch of characters who have a flawed view of justice, and the protagonist rising from a dark place to rescue those he cares about (not alcoholism this time, but that wouldn’t really work in a Batman movie).

So in conclusion, the movie was quite good, certainly a spectacle. It had its issues and I couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t one moment that I totally loved. Yet when it was all done I thought it was a damn good movie. I’d give it a B+.