The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is arguably the best Super Hero trilogy of all time. Not only does it present the audience with the right amount of spectacle to keep the engaged, but it also presents a compelling story with a character arc spanning three films. Where the Dark Knight and Batman Begins have story though, The Dark Knight Rises misses out. Sure, the story does complete Wane’s arc in a very good way, but, it suffers a similar problem to Spider-Man 3. Too many new characters were introduced in this one film, and the studio expected the audience to care for them. One interesting thing I found with The Dark Knight Rises, is that it truly isn’t a Batman movie. In fact, Batman is hardly in it, and Batman is certainly not the protagonist. I believe that this film did something quite creative in, there is no protagonist. This film represents exactly what Nolan wanted from Batman, for Batman to act as a symbol, not just a character. The story itself is quite weak though, if that is due to the lack of the protagonist or not, I’m not quite sure, but it just didn’t seem that there was enough weight to everything going on. There was so much going on at the same time, and I’m not sure why. I believe that this film could have benefited from ditching Bane, sorry Tom Hardy, but nobody wants to hear you promoting a new candy store. Rather, this film could have used one of the other five main villains that this film focuses on, personally, I’d choose Anne Hathaway’s Black Cat, or even the girl who initially got out of the well. The Dark Knight Rises does suffer a fair amount from Bane, which is unfortunate, the character’s backstory could have been used to the advantage of the film, but the character just kind of walked around in a trench coat shouting “I’m gonna blow up the city, and kill all the rich people first.” The Dark Knight Rises is full of weak dialogue like that, I’m not sure if that was actually in the movie, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Also, the so called “twist” at the end where it turns out the one cop was Robin all along was way too predictable. If that reveal happened much earlier, it wouldn’t leave the audience thinking that there would be a fourth movie, and the movie would have had that protagonist the movie was lacking. All of that being said, the film looks great. It’s clear that doing Inception changed the way Nolan directs movies. Every shot in this has compelling colours, and creative angles, and I am fully supportive of that. So, in general, the film looks great and it’s a fitting ending to the character, but the film didn’t need to be 3 hours long, along with the lack of certain basic story beats. 6.8/10