Darkknightnews.com have posted a small handful of reviews for The Dark Knight Rises & all of the reviews, with no offense to my peers, have basically said the same thing. They also have not really wrote about any spoilers for the film either. This is a good thing for anyone who has not seen the film. However, it ha s been a good bit & I do not necessarily feel the same about the film as my fellow authors. So let me make this as clear as crystal… this review / discussion about The Dark Knight Rises WILL HAVE SPOILERS &&& if you are one of those who cannot read criticism about the film, you really REALLY need to stop here.
Oh, one other thing, I had written a 9000+ word review on the film on my mobile phone, but unfortunately I lost it & was devastated by this. I did not have a working computer at the time so that is why it was written on the phone, but now that i have a computer again, I am trying to piece that review I had written before back together, starting with these first two posts.
So, without further delay, let’s get started!!!
I want to first say that The Dark Knight Rises is NOT a bad film. However, it is also not a very good film either. I loved so much about it, but there were parts that I arguably felt unforgivable.
As I am sure you have heard, The Dark Knight Rises is not really a Batman film. He is not really in a lot of the movie. But, I saw this as an acceptable part of the story. It works & it works quite well too.
Nolan’s Batman trilogy really is more about the evolution of both Bruce Wayne & Gotham City than it is about Batman. I like to look at it like The Walking Dead. Although there are many zombies & zombie deaths in the show, & even though zombies are apart of the title, the show is really about the characters, not the zombies.
This is like The Dark Knight Rises. Even though Batman is apart of the title, the story is more so Bruce Wayne’s & Gotham City’s. If you are going in expecting to see Batman as the center of the story, you will be very disappointed, as the site Collider.com was.
With all of that said, I am going to start with the characters of the The Dark Knight Rises.
Bruce Wayne/ Batman: As we all know the film is set 8 years later. Bruce is still the shattered mess from the death of Rachel Dawes, and now employs a cane to help him hobble around. We learn later in the film that the reason he does use the cane is NOT from the fall at the end of TDK, but it is because of the collection of injuries he has sustained during his year or two as Batman.
I saw this as a great touch by Nolan & co. Rather than giving him no repercussions from being Batman, or from just that last fall, Bruce’s body has felt the toll to be paid from crime fighting. He did have to take on a BIG dog.
So now Bruce is a gimp with a cane. But that is not all that is wrong with him. He has also become a present day Howard Hughes (not the same person as Hugh Heffner). I do not want to say he is agoraphobic, but he certainly does not make it out to play a weekly round of golf either.
Let’s move back to this not being ‘Batman’s’ movie. I also saw that Bruce Wayne does not act like Bruce Wayne throughout the film either. Even though Wayne does not have the cape and cowl on for most of the picture, Wayne might as well. You do not really ever get that billionaire playboy either (back to Heffner again). When we see Wayne in this film he normally has the Batman mentality going on in his head. He is very serious, not bullshitting around, aggressive, and focused. Much of the reason we do not get to see him in the Batsuit is because he is busy being the Batman in the Wayne suit. His scars from TDK have made him lose that playboy philosophy and take his life more seriously. Another reason for the lack of suit is because it is taken away from him during much of the 2nd act. This is his prison sentence and as I said, he might as well be in the Batsuit because he rips off that Wayne suit. Before I move on, I have to ask… what unlucky mercenary had the job of stripping Mr. Wayne out of his Batsuit & into the rags he wears in the prison? I guess someone just drew the short straw there…
Alfred Pennyworth: In the previous two films Alfred has always been the person to make us laugh. Of course his primary reason for existing is because he is one of Wayne’s moral compasses, but he was also the comic relief. Well in this film, even though he does have a few funny moments, (like ‘it takes a little while to get back into the swing of things) much of his screen time has been changed from laughter to tears. Michael Caine is very good at crying.
Much of this is because the moral compass is now pointed in the direction of swaying Wayne from a new form of self abandonment. We have previously seen Wayne put himself in harms way, both recreationally & with crime fighting, but now Alfred senses Bruce just wants to die. & he is right.
This is a theme of The Dark Knight Rises. He no longer sees any reason to live since his two loves are taken from him.
I am going to go off on a side tangent quickly here. Why the shit do we not see Bruce visiting his parents grave in this movie??? It would have been such a beautiful scene!
Ok, back to Bruce & Alfred. To sum this up, we have some very touching speeches by Alfred about Bruce’s new mentality. Most of the time he ends up crying, but this really does well to show how much he cares.
There is also mention in one of these speeches about an Italian Cafe that Alfred used to visit on vacation. He always hoped to see that Bruce was OK there. This is because Alfred, unlike Bruce, knew that Bruce has no life to live in Gotham. But Alfred said he never got to see him in any visit of the Cafe. More on this later…
John Blake: AKA Robin 🙁 Putting the ending aside, there is not too much else I would like to say about John Blake. I enjoyed his character up until the final ten minutes of the film, but there is something critical that Nolan and company wanted to translate across to the viewer about these Batman movies & that is that anyone can be Batman. Anyone can be this legend that he stands for, but the honest truth is, no. Almost no one can be Batman. It takes a very driven, highly trained, multimillionarie to be Batman.
Even with inheriting the Batcave & all of its goodies, John Blake really does not have a chance at being Batman. He has no vehicles, no applied sciences, no Mr Fox, and not too much motivation, at least on the level that Bruce Wayne had as Batman.
There is another point that they wanted to get across with John Blake, a point that in a way coincides with the first point I wrote. They wanted Blake to be this everyman, but he did not even feel like that. He is essentially stuck between two poles. One being Batman & the other everyman. Not good enough to be Batman & too good to be that everyman.
However, I did say that this was the only thing wrong with Blake. He did make a good cop, he did make a good sidekick to Gordon, and he did make a good reference point or relateable point for the viewer. (we all see ourselves better than what we are don’t we?)
Commissioner Gordon: In The Dark Knight Rises Gordon has really transformed. Over shadowing Mr John Blake, or Robin if you want, it truly seems like Gordon is the Robin of the film. He assists Batman & Wayne in every way possible & without Gordon, Gotham would be ashes (giving Bruce Wayne permission to die). Although he acts more like a superhero than a police commissioner, it was rather refreshing to see Gordon stepping up to the plate. In fact, I cannot really remember a time in which I got to see Gordon juking and jiving. I know that it really is not the job of the commissioner, and I also know that they are essentially glorified supervisors, but you cannot tell me that watching him take down the baddies and holding his own against whatever is thrown at him was not memorable!
Lucius Fox: I really see this as the biggest waste of a character in this film. This guy should have died so many times over. He really was not necessary. And the MOST UNNECESSARY SCENE OF THE WHOLE FILM centers around Mr. Fox too. This scene I am talking about is the one where the reactor is flooding and Mr. Fox is trapped down there, having to climb a ladder to safety. What the shit was the point of this scene? I could understand it if he died here, but he did not. All they did was show it flooding and him escaping. It was a waste of money, which would have been just as effective if only spoken without showing Mr. Fox at all.
Of course Morgan Freeman is Morgan Freeman in this movie, but I did not like the character. I did not like how he influenced Bruce Wayne to become Batman again. Not because of the act of doing it, but how he did it. I felt a sense of arrogance and cockyness, “now you are just showing off” to him. And worse yet, I felt a literal sense of stupidity of our Mr. Fox in this film too… …REALLY! Why would you keep every dangerous weapon that Batman would use, that every single terrorist in the world would give their left nut to have, all in one room? One room that could be so easily broken into??? Instead of keeping it how it was, spread out throughout the world, with only one dangerous thing here and there, you put them all in the same room??? You reasoning for this too was that you did not want one of the other deposits to be broken into, but yet your giant room was broken into… Thus, all of those other locations were actually safer than what you did in the end.
It is these moments with Lucius Fox that really bothered me in the film. And as I said, it would have been an effective motivation for Batman to come back in the game, for Batman to escape the prison, or for Batman to fight on at the end, if Mr. Fox had died. It would have given Batman that emotional force he lacked, rather than just keeping it with a city pride & city saving force for Batman to fight on. Keeping it as just both of these made the motivation feel very one dimensional, like Mr. Fox’s character…
Mayor Garcia: Very quickly, did no one care that the mayor of Gotham City was murdered? He is there one minute, dead the next. But it was never once talked about in the film. Could he have been that shitty of a mayor that no one ever once speaks about him? He doesn’t even get a funeral from what I understand. Poor guy!
Juno Temple’s Character: I liked how she did not have a name or even a back-story of any kind. I think that is added a great deal to her character, and the movie, by not littering the audience with so many names and histories to keep track. I found her character to be pivotal in the film because she is what kept Selina Kyle grounded. She humanized Selina Kyle and because of that humanization, she gave Kyle a lot more depth as a character. For that reason, I am keeping her in the Protagonist category.