Batman: Dark Knight Rises

I picked up the BluRay for today’s film, 2012’s Batman: Dark Knight Rises (trailer), shortly after it hit video way back in 2012. I have neglected it to the backlog for so long because by the time I saw it in theaters I overdid it on the caped crusader’s films and needed a break. I say this because to get hyped for director Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film I watched the four Batman films from Burton & Shumacher in the weeks leading up to Dark Knight Rises and our local theater was doing a release day special to watch all three of the Christopher Nolan Batman films in a row which a friend and I did after I got done helping him move earlier in the day. It made for a long day, and while it was an unforgettable experience, it was still spending nearly half a day in the theater and I kind of associated the Nolan films with that memory for a period of time and so I needed a break from them for a bit.

Nolan was riding high after the critical and commercial success of his previous two Batman films, so expectations were through the roof for Dark Knight Rises. This picks up in the aftermath of The Dark Knight’s ending where Batman indirectly killed a rogue Harvey Dent, but him and Commissioner Gordon decided to cover-up Dent’s darker half and celebrate Dent as a fallen hero that Gotham needed to absolve its crime dilemma. It is now eight years later and both Batman and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) have disappeared from the public eye. The first act helps establish a new evil is on the rise going by Bane (Tom Hardy), who quickly accumulates power and establishes a base in Gotham’s sewers that prompts Wayne and Batman both to return to Gotham and meet his biggest foe yet.

Dark Knight Rises introduces a few other new players to Nolan’s films with the biggest standout being anti-hero master thief, Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). This was my first major exposure to her and she is flawless as Batman’s off-and-on ally. Officer Blake (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) is an up-and-comer for Gotham PD, and is one of the more proactive members of the force to react to the Bane threat and quickly gains trust from both Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) is trying to become a player in Gotham by establishing a future clean energy source. Upon this re-watch I was flabbergasted I completely forgot about Detective Foley (Matthew Modine) who is an incompetent cop who wants to bust Batman. It would be criminal if they were absent, but Nolan knew it would not be a Batman film from him without the returning affable Batman allies in tech-man Luscious Fox (Morgan Freeman) and his loyal butler Alfred (Michael Caine).

I loved the first two acts of Dark Knight Rises. Nolan does a great job at establishing the new characters with Selina taking advantage of her stealth and cunning to keep me guessing which side she is really on and Bane gradually amassing resources and power to become a legitimate threat to Gotham. I loved how it plays off the consequences from the aftermath of The Dark Knight in a big way to set up the present-day Gotham. There is a fine balance of action and exposition sequences that constantly kept me glued in for the next big set-piece sequence. There is the nice gradual build in pacing in the first two hours when there is this sudden shift into overdrive I was never fully able to settle in with to the film’s detriment.

A nice side-effect from holding off nearly eight years to re-watch Dark Knight Rises is that I recall some negative press from critics on how Nolan’s trilogy wrapped up and I wanted to distance myself from it to go into this again with a fresh set of eyes. The chief criticism I recall was there being not a lot of fans for the voice used for Bane. The Elephant Man-esque voice has been the butt of many Internet jokes in the years since. I will admit, it does not sound all that menacing, but it grew on me throughout the film and that combined with Tom Hardy’s excellent use of body language resulted in it not coming off as a hindrance all these years later.

A qualm I vaguely remembered is that even though Dark Knight Rises is two hours and forty-five minutes long, it flies by because it tries to crunch in about four hours’ worth of cinema into that timeframe. This is not knew from Nolan, and as a matter of fact he is usually pretty good at this type of filmmaking and making longer films breeze by with his brisk cinematography in mind-benders like Inception and The Prestige. However, I do not know whether if it was due to a poor script, clashes with corporate officials, budget or filming restraints, but something happened with the filmmaking here that results in many ‘straighten-your-tie’ moments. Minor-yet-pivotal points of the plot happened in a blink-of-an-eye, and there were several points where I found myself rewinding to pick up on some of these little details. This mostly breaks down in the final act where a lot happens in terms of events and time passing by. Bane pulls off a power grab at a football game in a big trailer-pleasing moment (featuring one completely unaware of his surroundings Heinz Ward) while Batman is banished to a mysterious pit. A lot of time goes by while Gotham succumbs to martial law, but the way it all plays out seems haphazard and confusing to keep up with. It felt like Nolan was told he had a half hour to forty-five minutes of cuts to make to keep the film under three hours and he chose the all-important final act to take the brunt of the cuts.

The last stretch of action also comes off clumsy and rushed. It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief where the seemingly unstoppable Bane established in the first three quarters of the film all of a sudden comes off as easy pickings for Batman and Catwoman. I get the whole ‘Batman does not kill’ edict from DC comics, but this once again leads to Nolan having to find another way for Batman to indirectly kill off a major villain for the third film in a row, but it comes off incredibly weak on-screen. Finally, there are convenient lines of dialogue thrown out for Batman somehow surviving a severe stabbing and escaping a six mile nuclear bomb blast radius…..sorry Bats, but I simply could not buy it.

The BluRay has a bonus disc that has nearly three hour of bonus features on it. Far and away the marquee extra is The Batmobile. It is an hour long, in-depth look at the history of the Batmobile from its humble beginnings in the comics and early TV serials, until it started to really pop in the Adam West 60s TV show and evolved into the elaborate designs from the last several movies from Burton, Shumacher and Nolan. They interviewed designers of the cars from nearly all eras, have a great showcase of all the Batmobiles next to each other at a vintage drive-in and it wraps up with a touching tribute by bringing the Batmobile to a children’s hospital. Definitely do not skip past The Batmobile.

The rest of the extras are divided up into three areas: Ending the Knight, Gotham’s Reckoning and Reflections. Ending the Knight is comprised of about a dozen smaller features mostly highlighting an individual action sequence or set-piece moment and how the production team pulled it off. Gotham’s Reckoning is character profiles of Batman, Bane and Catwoman and is where we see the most interview time of Bale, Hardy and Hathaway. Reflections is only a couple quick features touching on the crews memories from making three films together and putting a bow on their trilogy. I am a sucker for these, and a lot of these are well made and do not come off as quasi-trailers like a lot of other shorter, thrown together behind-the-scenes pieces on other home video releases. From this two hour lot of extras I would say the half hour of character profiles and the Gameday feature detailing the football game bomb sequence stood out to me the most. A superb collection of extra features all around; I would have been bummed with the lack of a Nolan commentary, but he is featured prominently throughout these extra feature interviews so much that it more than makes up for it.

I know it sounds like I bagged on a lot of the film, but it is mostly the last act of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises where things fall apart. Again, this is purely speculation on my part, but it mostly boils down to feeling like Nolan being told he had to cut a half hour out of the film and he decided to sacrifice a good chunk of the last act. The strong first two acts combine to make this a quality comic book movie and despite being a couple notches down from Nolan’s previous two Batman films, I would still rank it in the top third of comic book movies all things considered.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

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12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
The Accountant
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
The Avengers: Infinity War
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Christmas Eve
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Countdown
Creed
Deck the Halls
Detroit Rock City
Die Hard
Dredd
The Eliminators
The Equalizer
Dirty Work
Faster
Fast and Furious I-VIII
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Gravity
Guardians of the Galaxy
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Indiana Jones 1-4
Ink
The Interrogation
Interstellar
Jobs
Joy Ride 1-3
Major League
Man of Steel
Man on the Moon
Man vs Snake
Marine 3-6
Merry Friggin Christmas
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Mortal Kombat
National Treasure
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Pulp Fiction
The Replacements
Reservoir Dogs
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
San Andreas
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Shoot em Up
Slacker
Skyscraper
Small Town Santa
Steve Jobs
Source Code
Star Trek I-XIII
Sully
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
UHF
Veronica Mars
Vision Quest
The War
Wild
Wonder Woman
The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Apocalypse
X-Men: Days of Future Past