The Broken Bat

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.

[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.

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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.