The film starts eight years after “The Dark Knight”. Since the
night Batman vanished into the darkness, he has been blamed for the death of
Harvey Dent. The leaders of Gotham, led by Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary
Oldman), has turned Dent into a hero by preventing ordinary people from knowing
that Dent had been driven mad by the Joker.
In order to preserve the hard-won order of Gotham,
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has accepted his role as the villain, hung up his
mask and has turned into a recluse. His retirement would be broken by cat
burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and the terrorist known as Bane (Tom
Hardy).
Now most people probably seen the film by now, but if you
haven’t I will say this to you; see “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” first
before watching this.
To truly understand how good this movie is, you really have
to see the first 2 films first. With this new film, Christopher Nolan completes
his trilogy and what a trilogy it is. The work Nolan started in “Batman Begins”
and continued in “The Dark Knight” (2008) comes full circle in “The Dark Knight
Rises” and the full saga of Bruce Wayne is riveting.
Christian Bale put in another good performance as Wayne but the star of the
show has to be Tom Hardy.
Now Bane is not an easy character to get right. Most famous
for breaking Batman’s back, most comic writers have a hard time writing Bane
since his debut. Most end up writing him as some sort of human monster. The
Bane in this movie is a monster but he is a weary one. Hardy’s Bane is a weary
soul who is doing what he is doing because it is necessary, not because he’s
enjoying any of it. This gave Bane a human side to his character and the movie
was better for it. When the twist came in the end, it worked but it would not
have made sense if not for Hardy’s great performance till that point. I will
admit I saw the twist at the end coming but people will little to no interest
in comics will probably get a good surprise at it.
Anne Hathaway had the thankless job of making people forget
about Michelle Pfeiffer and while she didn’t entirely succeed, Hathaway also
did a good job. Her Selina Kyle is a survivor who wants something more in life and
her desperation to get it shone throughout the film.
It wasn’t just the story that was good in this movie; the action
was there as well. From the start when Bane attacked an airplane in flight to
the war along the streets of Gotham at the
end, Nolan cranked up the pace of the action. “The Dark Knight Rises” has that
rare mixture of story and action that worked well with each other.
Of course there are some parts of the story that didn’t
quite work. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, John Blake, was one of them. How
can a guy smart enough to deduce that Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same
person be surprise at the role Commissioner Gordon had in the cover-up of
Harvey Dent's death? I mean right at the start, Commissioner Gordon gave a
speech that he “saw” Batman kill Dent. However when the cover-up was revealed
by Bane, Blake was somehow surprised that Gordon had a role in it. That just
does not make sense.
I also feel that some of the side-stories in the movie are
too long and kind of unnecessary. There are a lot of other moving pieces in
this movie and I think Nolan put in 1-2 too many. He did a good work juggling
them but I thought the side-story of Bruce Wayne's business rival John Daggett
and of Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley were not really needed.
Overall however, “The Dark Knight Rises” is a good film that
successfully concludes Nolan's Batman trilogy. I won’t say it’s the best film
in the trilogy but “The Dark Knight Rises” is an ambitious, thoughtful, action
film that ends it in a spectacular entertaining fashion. It’s a worthy finale
to the best film trilogy in some time.
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