Oh boy.
Okay.
Here we go.
I’ve discussed my fair share of controversial movies in the
last few months, but never has my own opinion of a film been more difficult to
pin down than in the case of The Dark
Knight Rises. I want to like it;
I really do, because The Dark Knight is
one of my favorite movies ever, and on top of that, I absolutely adore Batman.
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| [citation needed] |
In fact, I saw the movie on opening day, and as I walked out
of the theater, I thought it was Bat-mazing. But after I went home, and I started
to mull things over, it all began to unravel. First came the little
observations: things that just didn’t add up. Then there was the issue of
complexity for its own sake: twists and turns that made the film seem more epic in scope – and certainly
made it longer – but didn’t get us anywhere a straight line couldn’t have.
Worst of all, try as I might, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what the movie was
trying to say; be it about Batman, about heroism… about anything, really.
It took two full years for me to watch the movie again – because,
honestly, who has that kind of time? – and on my second go around, I was fully
prepared to hate it. I caught the tail end of a rerun on HBO, and much to my
surprise, I found that it worked a lot better than I remembered. Then I watched
it a third time, actually starting
from the beginning, and got all kinds of confused.
The things I take issue with in this movie aren’t even
complaints that would come exclusively from a Batman fan. They’re simply the
complaints of a person that enjoys coherent, consistent storytelling and
characterization. To be sure, there are all kinds of nitpicky surface details
that are just terribly handled in this movie – weird editing choices, horribly
clunky exposition, Bane’s voice being mixed as though we’re listening to him
through headphones – but I’m going to overlook those for the most part, and
really just focus on what’s wrong with the story.
In the interest of fairness, The Dark Knight Rises isn’t necessarily a case of Nolan and Co. balking
on a slam dunk*. From the first second the film was announced, TDKR found itself in a very tricky
position. It was, after all, the long-awaited conclusion to an extremely
popular, extremely well-received, and extremely influential trilogy. So riddle
me this, true believers: which word in that sentence would you say is the
source of the problem?
* I don’t sports.
If you guessed ‘conclusion’… then, wow. Color me impressed,
because I was really going all-out on the misdirect there. But you are correct!
In my humble Bat-pinion, Batman just isn’t the sort of hero that lends himself
to finality. He’s driven by rage, but it isn’t targeted at anyone or anything
specific. His only long-term goal is ‘abolish crime,’ something even he knows
is functionally impossible. He has over a dozen iconic, fantastic villains, but
he refuses to kill any of them. And unlike his fellow hero Green Arrow, who
considers street-level crime to be a symptom of a larger social disease, Batman
is more than happy to treat every symptom that he comes across, with extreme
prejudice. Everything about the Batman premise is tailor-made to never reach a
satisfying end. I don’t mean to suggest that Chris Nolan was wrong for wanting to put a nice little
bow on his Bruce Wayne saga – I definitely respect the desire for dramatic
catharsis. But in making that choice, he was forced to retroactively turn the excellent
yet episodic stories of his first two Bat-films into the beginning and middle of one big story, something that
proved surprisingly difficult, or at least difficult to arrive at organically.
Looking at them from a strictly functional standpoint, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have almost no significant relationship to one
another. We have an origin story, culminating in a villainous plot… and then
another, completely different villainous plot. The only thing that really
carries over from one story to the next are the characters, which is fine, if
not outright preferable, but it also means there are no fruitful plot threads to
stretch across a whole trilogy. It seemed like things were going to start
picking up speed at the end of The Dark
Knight, but the third film, incredibly, starts up a full 8 years later, an
endlessly frustrating choice that brings any possible momentum to a screeching
halt. By the time we learn that Bane and Talia’s goal in the third film is
basically to re-do Ra’s al Ghul’s plan from the first one, things start to feel
really muddled. If the franchise had been longer, the bookends would have felt
like a nice callback, but with only TDK to
fill out the middle of this League of Shadows sandwich, hindsight makes it hard
not to view the second film – undoubtedly the series’ best – as unnecessary
filler. And while I get that the intention is to come full circle, when the
circumference of said circle is that small, it really just comes across as a
retread. We already watched Batman beat this level on Normal. Cranking the
difficulty up to Hard Mode doesn’t make the objective any more interesting than
it was the first time. You can’t squeeze Bat-blood from a Bat-stone.
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| What the hell is he talking about? |
Now, most of that could have been fixed by making TDKR a third standalone story, or at
least by following up more actively on the events of The Dark Knight, but even then, there’s still that ugly word that
we have to deal with: Conclusion. It was known pretty early on that Chris Nolan
and Christian Bale wouldn’t be making more than three Batman movies together, and that’s perfectly understandable. As
more and more news came out about the film, though, and certainly by the time
you were sitting down to watch it, it became evident that when they said they
were done, they meant that they were done.
One way or another, Bruce Wayne would not be Batman at the end of this
movie. In fact, Bruce Wayne isn’t even Batman at the start of this movie. And that’s kind of a problem, because as Man of Steel showed us, the context in which a film’s core conflict
is presented can dramatically change the stakes, and make the overall movie
less engaging. Seeing Batman brought to his knees while he’s at the top of his
game is visceral and horrifying, but a Batman that comes out of retirement for
the sake of the painfully cliché ‘one last job’ dilutes that drama quite a bit.
The question we ask ourselves isn’t “can Batman ever hope to bounce back from
this?” but rather, “can Batman do this one important thing before he goes back
to not being Batman?” While the answer to that first question is “probably, but
maybe not fully,” the answer to the second is a straight “yes.” And that’s boring.
I want to take a minute to talk about the whole retirement
thing, because it’s quite possibly the part of the film that bothers me most.
Any Batman fan will tell you that the real Bruce Wayne would never retire
willingly, and if he did ever have to
leave the crimefighting game, it would be out of a physical inability to
continue*. The fact that Batman retires not once, but twice in this movie is inexcusable to me. There’s a full half-hour
stretch at the core of the film that focuses on Bruce pushing himself as far as
his body can go so as not to abandon Gotham. But then, once Bane is taken care
of and the city is safe again, he totally
abandons Gotham by faking his own death. It turns a moment of total
selflessness into one that is, at the very least, a little selfish, and is
completely out of character for not only the Bruce Wayne of the comics, but
also the Bruce Wayne of the previous two movies, and even the Bruce Wayne of the first 160 minutes of this movie.
* See Batman Beyond for
a good example of that, or this movie for a bad one.
I’m not one of those people that thinks having Bruce survive
in the end is a cop-out. Secretly fixing the Bat-autopilot to fake his
Bat-death is a totally Batman move. But I dare say, if I may hazard a
Bat-guess, that instead of using that fake death to get out of the game, the
real Batman would use it as a means to get back into the game, this time as an even more terrifying presence than
usual. After all, the only thing criminals would fear more than the Bat is the ghost of the Bat. If the final shot of TDKR had been a slow pan over the Gotham
City skyline, coming to rest on the shadowy figure of the Batman, ever the
watchful protector, even in death, everything that was stupid about that bomb
plot* would have been forgiven. Sure, he does leave John Blake behind to take
his place (I refuse to call him Robin), but that guy doesn’t have a fraction of
the training or resources that Bruce had. I think we can all agree that he’ll
be dead within a week. I bet you it’s not even a criminal that does it. He
probably breaks his neck trying to glide off a rooftop or something dumb like
that. What an idiot.
* a.k.a the entirety of the bomb plot.
As far as the first retirement
is concerned, that’s written off as a result of the citywide manhunt at the end
of The Dark Knight, and the need for
Batman is later negated by a long stretch of tranquility in Gotham. I think
both of those reasons are a load of guano – there’s no level of crime that
Batman would consider “acceptably low” – but whatever. What I simply cannot get
over is the fact that Bruce’s health problems in the film are completely
disingenuous. We’re told early on in the movie that Batman retired literally moments
after Harvey Dent’s death, which – and I hope you’ll forgive me for harping on
this – is itself a hugely wasted opportunity.
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| "We'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Unless he decides he doesn't want to be hunted and just disappears. In which case, I guess that's fine." |
And yet, the Bruce Wayne we see at the beginning of TDKR is in much, much worse shape than the one in the final scene of The Dark Knight. What the hell happened
to him in the meantime? Because according to this film, the answer is nothing.
Bruce’s limp and physical weakness are clearly shoehorned in as an attempt to
stack the odds against him once Bane arrives, but the thing is that Batman
doesn’t need to be at a disadvantage to lose to Bane. Bane can just be better
than him. Bane is better than him.
That’s kind of Bane’s whole thing – he’s the one who broke the Bat. By forcing
qualifiers onto that fact, you change Bane from a terrifying, brutal force of
nature into some weird-voiced, civics-obsessed asshole that just likes to kick
people while they’re down.
Of course, as you may have guessed, Bane has his own share
of problems aside from that one. Even though the first two Nolan Batmen weren’t strictly connected, they
both found a thematic richness by exploring exactly what it means to be the
Batman. Batman Begins, for instance,
featured the Scarecrow as one of its main villains, prompting a comparison
between himself and Bruce in terms of the way they each use fear as a tool. Following
that, The Dark Knight delved into the
questions raised by Batman’s moral code, placing Bruce and the Joker at
opposite extremes, and allowing Two-Face to split
the difference between them, as it were.
Heh.
Finally, The Dark
Knight Rises has Bane, whose whole shtick really is, as I said above, just
kind of being better than Batman. (And also having a life-threatening dependency on a super-steroid. And also looking like a luchador.) That wouldn’t allow much of a give and take
with Bruce, though, so Nolan and Goyer decided to give their Bane ties to the
League of Shadows – a move that does have precedent in the source material – and
a tendency to speechify about anything that pops into his head at the moment.
Hope, despair, sacrifice, torment, darkness, dishonesty, vengeance, citizenship…
the list goes on. Through Bane, the movie becomes about so many things that it
basically fails to be about anything, or at least not anything quantifiable.
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| "I will destroy you, Batman, and everything you hold dear… But first, I'd like to shay a few words about the Social Contract." |
Bane’s ideological grandstanding does make sense from a
character perspective, if we’re being charitable. He wants to prove that Gotham
is a bed of degeneracy before he destroys it, which is in keeping with what we
know about the League of Shadows from Begins.
But, wait. Why is Gotham still on the League’s hit list all? After the Dent
Act put away all of the city’s high-ranking mobsters, crime rates dropped so
low that the police force was barely even needed anymore. Normally, I wouldn’t
buy that claim for a second, but that’s what the film explicitly tells us, and
within its first ten minutes, at that.
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| Pictured: All crime in Gotham, apparently. |
I think the reason this all sits so poorly with me is that
Bane turns out to be right. Without
their police force – which was described just over an hour before as glorified
babysitters, mind you – Gothamites resort almost immediately to looting and
murder. Is that really the kind of place
we even want to see saved? Granted,
it’s possible, because the movie evidently has no desire to make this clear,
that all the dystopian stuff is coming at the hands of Bane’s men and the
Blackgate prisoners… but if that’s the case, isn’t he cheating? Either way, it
all rings false, and the film’s third act boils down to a lot of
wheel-spinning, all couched in themes that it doesn’t even come close to
earning.
Honestly, the only logical way I can manage to read Bane is
as someone who’s self-important and principled, but not all that bright,
intentionally spewing out shallow, conflicting rhetoric in an effort to appear
authoritative. That’s disappointing, because the character was conceived by his
creators to be a legitimate genius, and if there’s one thing Bane should never,
ever have to resort to, it’s posturing. Still, I don’t see any other options
here. He is, at the very least, proven to be a liar when he claims that he
didn’t see the light until he was already a man.
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| Seems legit. |
Ultimately, that’s what I think this whole film is:
posturing. It works like gangbusters the first time around, but when it’s all
over and we’re able to look back at the big picture, all of its drama – and a
not insignificant amount of its logic – starts to fall apart.
That’s heartbreaking to me, not just because I love Batman,
but because there are moments where greatness genuinely starts to shine
through. The film’s version of Selina Kyle, for instance, is a fantastic
interpretation for this more grounded universe, and is fantastically acted by
Anne Hathaway. Sadly, she’s largely pigeonholed into the film’s pointless B (C?
D??) plot, in which the Wayne fortune is stolen out from under Bruce’s nose. The
whole thing is a convoluted mess of reasoning and motivational gymnastics that
culminate in Bane gaining access to the generator/bomb, but I feel like that’s
something that he easily could have achieved by force, and if you watch the
scene where it actually happens, he pretty much does exactly that. If it weren’t
for Selina, I wouldn’t be able think of a single justification for leaving any
of those scenes in the script. Even her relationship with Bruce is
underdeveloped; it seems like the only reason he comes to her for help over
anyone else is because she’s Catwoman. Still, she’s electrifying every moment
she’s on screen, and while I guess it’s neat that Goyer and Nolan created an
entire subplot for her, it’s disappointing that they couldn’t be bothered to find
something a bit more straightforward and important for her to do.
So, I hope it’s come across at least a little bit that I am
genuinely conflicted about this movie. On the one hand, it’s a moving story
about a hero past his prime who returns in his beloved city’s hour of need,
giving everything he has to rid his home of the demons that he himself
inadvertently created.
On the other hand, it’s about a crazy retired vigilante who
un-retires, fails miserably, hangs in a sling for five months, flies around in
a plane for a few minutes, and then re-retires.
The film isn’t unsalvageable by any stretch, but I honestly wouldn’t
go so far as to call it entertaining, and it certainly isn’t as successful as
its Bat-brethren. It’s very, very close to good, but it’s completely in the
dark about what it wants to accomplish thematically, or even how to finish its
own story. And boy, is it long. It is too gorram long. It is, like, a full hour
too long.
Speaking of which…
I will wrap this up now, but I want to go out on a positive
note, and that means talking about the one part of this movie that made me
happier than any other.
This Guy
I freaking love what the Nolan trilogy did with Jonathan Crane, because its treatment of him felt like one of the few genuine depictions
in a movie of how comic books actually utilize their characters. He just won’t
go away! He brings nothing to the plot in any movie besides the first, but he’s
still there, committing crimes, because he
is a career criminal. Supervillains don’t invest all their energy into one
evil plan and then give up. They keep coming back, even after Batman no longer
considers them a threat. Sure, Goyer and Nolan could have had Batman bust
Oswald Cobblepot at the beginning of The
Dark Knight, or have Edward Nigma preside over the kangaroo court in TDKR. That would have been amazing, but
they didn’t do that. They also could have had nameless thugs in both roles,
which would have been disappointing, but they didn’t do that either. Instead,
they made it the Scarecrow, and I really, really love that they did.
Well... that’s it, true believers. With this post, the Summer
of Superheroes is officially over. The blog will keep going, but it will be
returned to the hands of CineMike Matthews, and will no longer update on a
weekly schedule. As for me? I’m going to take a page out of Bruce Wayne’s
playbook and go spend some time in Italy canoodling with Anne Hathaway. Thank
you so, so much to everyone who’s followed along this summer – it means a lot
to me. And don’t worry. I’ll be seeing you again soon: same Bat-time*, same Bat-URL.
- SuperMike Matthews
* Actual Bat-time TBD.
