For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - The Dark Knight Rises
The Impression:
Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film is as a big a
superhero event as any to ever grace the mush-filled brains
of fandom. Everything leading up to this moment has
indicated that The Dark Knight Rises will conclude
the Nolan’s brooding trilogy of Bat-films with a similar
level of grace, seriousness, and wow moments as the two
prior films. My only worry is that The Dark Knight is
such a perfect film, that perhaps nothing can live up to it.
The Reality:
I sat through The Dark Knight Rises (all three hours
of it) struggling to come to grips with the wave of
disparate emotions co-mingling in my gut. I wanted, if
nothing more, than to love The Dark Knight Rises with
all of my superhero-loving heart. The Dark Knight is
as close to credible reality as we’ll ever get with a
superhero film, and Nolan somehow manages to take the idea
of a man dressed in a rubber Bat-suit and turns it into a
thrilling thematic character study, more a psychological
analysis of good and bad, then a big-budget actioneer. Thus,
it strikes me all too strange that for The Dark Knight
Rises Nolan seems to step away from his dislike of comic
book conventions and instead chooses to dive wholeheartedly,
head-first in to them. Every moment of the film drips with
the sort of comic book shenanigans one would be hard-pressed
to find in say the first two hours of The Dark Knight
(‘cause you all know the end of that movie steps just a
little bit over the line) - underground armies, Bane, a
daring and sexy super thief (Anne Hathaway stealing nearly
every scene she’s in), superheroes fighting back-to-back,
etc. And it just goes, and goes and goes from there. As if
Nolan was holding back on all the epic, cartoon-y comic book
shit so he could deluge his audience with it this go around.
Nolan has always struck me as a clear, crisp storyteller,
cutting away at the plot until he has a smart, simple
storyline that he can hang his masterful visuals on, but
The Dark Knight Rises is all over the place. No less
than three new major characters are introduced in this film
(with mixed results) plus the three to four distinct
storylines winding their way through the film plus the
back-and-forth weaving it takes to bring all of these
together in one flash-bang of an ending. The film is
overstuffed and feels so, the strong performances at times
hard to pick out amongst the rest of the ruckus. No more
does the film feel more overdone than in the music, a
bombastic mix of classical and something my girlfriend
thought sounded like "super Enya", that unceasingly fills
the background of what feels like every single moment of the
film. At times I actually missed dialogue because the score
was too loud, which may be a fault of the strange sound
mixing (Bane’s jaunty voice sounds recorded on a tape player
and played from speakers in his pocket while other
characters voices sound like unintentional whispers). Toss
in poor pacing, a story that relies on narrative propulsion
rather than description and discussion, and a bad guy is
biggest ability is, well, punching and you’d think this is a
film that left me unhappy and cold.
But it wasn’t. I walked out of Christopher Nolan’s final
jaunt in to Bat-land with a huge smile on my face, the
enormously fan-pleasing ending a warm dot in my stomach. As
a longtime, no dormant comic book fan, I can’t think of a
trilogy of films that lays more respect on how the character
inside and outside of the mask learns, grows, and evolves.
From minute one of Batman Begins I was already sold
on the story of Bruce Wayne and his pointy-eared alter-ego
and as the credits rolled on The Dark Knight Rises I
was immensely satisfied with the journey Nolan has taken
these characters, and we the audience, on this past decade.
And the farther I get away from the specifics of the film,
the happier I am with just that, the dot of nostalgic joy in
seeing the story of a childhood icon treated with such
respect.
The Lesson:
I never need another Batman film again. Ever.
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