The Dark Knight Rises | Little White Lies

The Dark Knight Rises

19 Jul 2012 / Released: 20 Jul 2012

A man wearing a dark mask and a fur-lined coat stands in a snowy, urban environment at night.
A man wearing a dark mask and a fur-lined coat stands in a snowy, urban environment at night.
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Anticipation.

Can Bale and Nolan bow out with a bang?

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Enjoyment.

A spectacular, towering feat of endurance cinema.

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In Retrospect.

Despite its shortcomings, Nolan’s series puts all other comic book franchises in the shade.

Christo­pher Nolan’s baroque opus is a wor­thy tril­o­gy clos­er, both seri­ous­ly epic and epi­cal­ly serious.

As the dust set­tles on anoth­er man­ic day in Gotham, a stat­ue is unveiled out­side City Hall. It is both a sym­bol of deep grat­i­tude and a state­ment of defi­ance that says what­ev­er the fate of its winged guardian – come siege or storm – Gotham will endure.

There’s anoth­er lay­er of mean­ing here, a hum­ble acknowl­edge­ment that Bat­man is big­ger than any one film­mak­er, that no man can wear the cape for­ev­er. It might be Chris­t­ian Bale’s unmis­tak­able jaw­line set in bronze, but the mould will soon be recast. For bet­ter or worse, the dark knight will rise again.

And yet Christo­pher Nolan’s vision – his hero – has sure­ly been immor­talised over the course of this out­stand­ing tril­o­gy. Not for any tech­ni­cal mile­stones the direc­tor has hur­dled or because he has made a Bat­man saga for the ages, but pre­cise­ly because The Dark Knight Ris­es is so inex­tri­ca­bly root­ed in the here and now.

Just as Frank Miller’s graph­ic nov­el tem­plate offered a response to the cap­i­tal­ist hedo­nism of the late 80s, so Nolan’s film address­es con­tem­po­rary sociopo­lit­i­cal con­cerns – domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ism, eco­nom­ic col­lapse, the decline of fam­i­ly val­ues, the dis­so­lu­tion of com­mu­ni­ty. A 20th-cen­tu­ry idol repur­posed to soothe 21st-cen­tu­ry ills.

Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, eight years since Har­vey Dent’s death ush­ered in a new era of civ­il har­mo­ny, free­dom from organ­ised crime, Gotham is wak­ing up to a new threat. Bane (Tom Hardy) is the city’s self-pro­claimed reck­on­ing, a men­ac­ing, mer­ci­less ter­ror­ist hell­bent on reduc­ing its inher­ent­ly cor­rupt cit­i­zens (as he sees them) to ashes.

Super­fi­cial­ly, Bane’s pro­lapsed face­hug­ger grill and whack­job accent make him a text­book com­ic book bad­die. Cru­cial­ly, though, his pow­ers (like Batman’s) are the result of cir­cum­stance, not some misc radioac­tive blun­der or ungod­ly genet­ic bug­gery. He’s also endowed with the brains to match his impos­ing bulk. But make no mis­take: these new­found neme­ses aren’t about to set­tle down for a game of chess. Theirs is a straight­for­ward heavy­weight slog, a good hon­est cheek-bruis­er that is thrilling and fatigu­ing in equal measure.

Batman’s great­est bat­tles, of course, have always been with him­self. Once a pil­lar of the soci­ety he has sworn him­self to pro­tect, Bruce Wayne has become a scruffy, self-pity­ing recluse, his rest­less psy­chosis com­pound­ed by the loss of the love of his life, Rachel Dawes. True to the char­ac­ter, he is again paint­ed by Nolan as a deeply flawed pro­tag­o­nist, the trag­ic vic­tim of his own vig­i­lan­tism. A mon­ster shroud­ed in myth and intrigue more typ­i­cal of his exiled alter ego.

Nev­er has the exis­ten­tial cri­sis of putting on the mask been exam­ined so inti­mate­ly. To that end it is Bale – so often over­looked through­out this series – who deliv­ers the stand­out per­for­mance, undoubt­ed­ly his finest in the role. Togeth­er he and Nolan break Bruce Wayne down, body and soul, slow­ly, ago­nis­ing­ly, until both man and moniker are ready to be res­culpt­ed into some­thing hard­er, some­thing more robust and resilient than before. In the process our hero is left open to the minxy allure of Anne Hathaway’s Seli­na Kyle, a duplic­i­tous pres­ence whose seduc­tive fem­i­nist purr is paci­fied in dis­ap­point­ing­ly con­ven­tion­al fashion.

Human­is­ing a sil­ver-spooned bil­lion­aire like Bruce Wayne has nev­er felt so per­ti­nent, not least because of the stig­ma that has become attached to the One Per­cent in the inter­ven­ing years since TDK. And yet here is a film with­out a true emo­tion­al hook. An immac­u­late­ly craft­ed, fatal­ly clin­i­cal last hur­rah that’s dot­ted with daz­zling excla­ma­tion marks, signed off with a mis­chie­vous ellip­sis and under­lined in cold-blood­ed ceremony.

Nolan’s end­less­ly inven­tive use of in-cam­era pyrotech­nics, cou­pled with Hans Zimmer’s relent­less per­cus­sive score, mean that, even at a rump-numb­ing 164 min­utes, TDKR is noth­ing less than an awe­some sen­so­ry feast. Not a dime of its esti­mat­ed $250m bud­get has gone to waste. There’s not a stodgy frame in sight. Nei­ther a sin­gle spo­ken word nor spray of debris out of place. At once seri­ous­ly epic and epi­cal­ly seri­ous, this is block­buster film­mak­ing of the high­est order, and noth­ing more than that.

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