On July 20, 2022, Warner Bros. Pictures released the final installment of a seven-year superhero saga that felt very different than any comic book film prior. Auteur director Christopher Nolan, along with brother Jonathan Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister, brought to Batman a Gotham that felt real and grand — a thriving city with its inherent problems and crime and a hero carved from that world instead of gifted into it.
With Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Nolan gained fans’ trust, and with that trust, he released The Dark Knight Rises into the world and finished his time with Christian Bale’s The Bat. The final film came to a divisive close from critics and viewers. However, after ten years and two new portrayals of Batman, there’s still something inherently great and enduring about Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy as a completed whole of this Batman story.
The Key Players
Taking place eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, a semblance of order has been restored to Gotham. The passing of the Dent Act has cleaned up the streets, and Batman is a forgotten fugitive. Meanwhile, somewhere in Uzbekistan, the terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy) abducts nuclear physicist Dr. Leonid Pavel from a CIA plane. When Bane sets his sights on Gotham, Bruce Wayne must don his cowl once again for a battle he may not win.
Despite the 8-year gap, the film jumps in with rapid-fire pacing. In typical Nolan fashion, the first act merely sets up a chessboard of characters and conflicts before getting to a multi-tiered two-hour climax. Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) steals Bruce’s fingerprints for stodgy henchman Stryver (Burn Gorman) because Wayne chairperson Dagget (Ben Mendelsohn) wants to take over the company. We’re introduced to hot-head cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who saves Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) after an altercation with Bane’s army. And, of course, the conflict between Bruce and Alfred over whether it’s time for the caped crusader to return.
It’s a, for lack of a better word, busy introduction.
A lesser artist team would have a hard time handling the intricacies of this web. But it’s an expectation of Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter brother, with story help from David S. Goyer, to craft the pieces of the story with thought-provoking payoff. But not without difficulty.
The tragedy of Heath Ledger’s passing came six months before the release of his Academy Award-winning turn as The Joker and is still regarded as the best portrayal of the character on screen. According to his family, Ledger was preparing for Joker’s reprisal in Nolan’s third film. Out of respect for his performance, Nolan chose not to recast and seriously considered not making a third Batman film at all.
While producers hovered, throwing out ideas like Leonardo DiCaprio playing The Riddler, Nolan and team struggled with the concept. It was important to Nolan that he stay emotionally invested. After all, if he doesn’t care about the film, would audiences? After much back and forth, the Nolans got to work on the third installment of The Dark Knight Trilogy.
The Dark Knight Rises Is Ambitious and Not So Flawed
The Dark Knight Rises, however, had a lot to live up to. Is there truly a better superhero movie than The Dark Knight? Sure, some might be more popcorn-fueled films. More “comic-book” accurate. But The Dark Knight is both a superhero film and a cinematic marvel. In fact, all three films are not just modern superhero fare. They’re modern movie fare, transcending that roller-coaster adrenaline ride into feats of artistic filmmaking. From stunts to cinematography, Nolan creates a kinetic world that truly lets you lose yourself in its fantasy.
This hype carried The Dark Knight Rises through its opening weekend. The finale beat out its predecessor by $2 million, totaling $160 million domestic gross by Monday, July 22nd, 2012. But there was a symptom carried over from The Dark Knight, a film about lies and truth, chaos and order. It left audiences asking about the thematic relevance of its sequel and expecting the payoff to be worthy.
While there’s much to love about The Dark Knight Rises, many believe it’s an ambitious but flawed film, primarily in that overarching moral narrative of class warfare and overstuffed narrative. Was it a critique of the 2010s Occupy Wall Street Protests? Wasn’t Bane a working-class hero bringing down Gotham’s elite? Did we really need Selina Kyle in this?
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And while the answers vary, the truth is that the Nolans left nothing on the table and fulfilled every aspect they promised in their hectic setup. I’ve read about supposed “plot holes,” but they’re always just contrivances like “why did Gordon send every available police officer into the sewers? Shouldn’t he know that’s a bad idea?”
Except he doesn’t know about the explosives, and how could he fathom how deep this conspiracy goes? All he knew was that there was an army down there. And we know that not every cop went because some cops helped him tag the possible nuke trucks. And the bottom line is that the narrative asked for it. As they say, if you put an alligator fighting nuns in the sewer, the only explanation you need in your plot is an alligator that hates holy water and habits. Stop poking holes, and enjoy the ride.
The Dark Knight Rises’ Message
The Dark Knight would ultimately come out the sales victor in gross domestic sales, with Rises totaling $448 million against The Dark Knight’s $534 million, and showing that, in the tale of these two films, The Dark Knight reigns supreme. Where The Dark Knight’s moral compass was easily distinguished in the anarchy of its antagonist, Rises seemed to have more ambiguous messaging.
Taking from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Nolan and Goyer pit Bane’s populous against the elite classes of Gotham. However, it seems to miss the mark in creating elitist corruption. The Dent act, a symbol of oppressive litigation, seems only to have helped control the criminal element of Gotham. The only corruption is in its founding, the lie of Harvey Dent’s death, but otherwise, it hasn’t exactly turned Gotham into Big Brother.
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The benefit thrown for the elites, meant to show the wealth and detachment of high society, is explicitly stated to be funded exclusively by Miranda (Marion Cotillard), meaning the funding raised is “supposedly” going where it’s supposed to. These undermine the idea of a corrupted elite class on par with French aristocracy.
The populist uprising is fueled by a criminal class built by Bane, making it more riot than uprising. They are generally portrayed as bad dudes. So what’s the deal? Are the proletariat so awful, and their uprising so unjust? That’s not exactly the best way to get working-class audiences on board with your messaging.
But I think it’s because Rises was never really about populism and uprising. Sure, that’s the jumping-off point. A flawed revolution, ideas becoming beliefs, lies of the ruling class exposed, but that’s just the setup. The message of the film lies in something more philosophical. And with ten years of reflection, the timelessness of this messaging comes to fruition.
The Dark Knight Rises: Rebirth & Creation
The Dark Knight Rises is about rebirth and how destruction is necessary for creation.
And it’s why the film endures, and many other third films of a trilogy have failed. Rises isn’t so bad to go the way of Godfather Part III, but perhaps somewhere nearer to Return of the Jedi. It’ll never be as good as its former, but damn, does it complete the story.
The elements of rebirth are not hard to miss: Pavil’s corpse swap, Batman’s end of retirement, the League of Shadows returning, the police force rising from the underground, and the rising of the Batcave platform. We have a prison called the Lazarus Pit, for goodness sake. And in all cases of creation, destruction must precede it: a crashed plane, a worn knee, a broken back, an imploded football field, an exposed lie, a nuked Batwing.
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This kind of transformation is the building block of all great stories. The purest form of storytelling is, after all, transformation. It’s why characters have arcs instead of just remaining the same.
It’s meaningful that Gotham spent eight years without Batman and then, in time of crisis, had to survive without him for another six months. They had to embody the symbol that Bruce had been trying to create. It’s what it means to overcome and rise above the world’s evils.
Simultaneously, Bruce Wayne had to be broken before he could rise again because he had failed Gotham in his lies. He had failed Rachel. He had failed Alfred. He had failed Gordon. By the end of The Dark Knight, he had failed in making Batman the symbol of good, and he could not reclaim that right without symbolic death and rebirth. Bruce had to become Batman again before Gotham could accept the idea of his mission that began in Batman Begins.
An Epic Conclusion
While you can find many articles online espousing the number of things wrong with the film, giving you all the reasons you can adopt the explain that slight feeling of disappointment upon your tenth watch in as many years, the only thing The Dark Knight Rises really fails at is being as good as its predecessor.
Though, I would argue that in one distinct aspect, it surpasses it. And that’s the award-winning score.
Hans Zimmer outdid himself on The Dark Knight Rises. The deep, thumping, and ostensibly masculine score highlights a bullheaded Bat and his equally stubborn opponent. It swells from mysterious places to triumphant majesty while utilizing pretty much only two notes. When “Rise” comes in, with chorus vocals chanting, the chest swell evokes a musivisual symphony that cannot be ignored.
I’m pretty sure that track could save anyone from Vecna, favorite song or not.
In the ten years since its release, The Dark Knight Rises has done more for superhero films than any other (save The Dark Knight, of course) and proved to dissenting voices that comic books can be dramatic, real, lived-in, and smart. The trilogy paved a new generation to take superheroes as serious icons and not simply tween reading material. It gave us heroes that fought real villains, not superpowers or alien technologies. And it handles several seemingly erratic storylines with engaging security that, as we’ve seen, are lost on lesser productions.
The Dark Knight Rises is a marked achievement in cinema, especially considering it almost didn’t happen, and joins the echelons of acclaimed film trilogies for years to come.
