The Dark Knight Rises

(Movie Review)

The Review
I'm not sure this movie was quite as good as everyone had been saying it was (another victim of high expectations), but it was nevertheless a solid film.  There are enough plot elements and characters to keep the attention. And Christopher Nolan's direction expertly builds the suspense in a number of scenes.

Links
For my reviews of other films in the Christopher Nolan trilogy, see some thoughts on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  I mentioned in both reviews my mixed feelings about an adult movie which features a grown man running around in a giant bat suit.  To quote from myself : the idea of a guy running around in a bat suit seems perfectly natural in the world of cartoons and comic books. But the more serious and realistic Batman's surroundings get, the more he himself seems not to fit in with his own movie.  I especially thought Christian Bale's husky "Batman voice" was a bit over the top.  Maybe this is a sign of growing up--when you finally get to that point in your adult life where you look at costumed superhero movies and suddenly think: "Wait a minute, this is all ridiculous!"  But, it has always struck me most about the Christopher Nolan Batman in a way that never really bothered me about all the other superhero movies I've seen lately.  I think the huge rubber batsuit in particular looks more ridiculous than other superhero costumes.

External Links
Cinema Sins Everything Wrong with the Dark Knight Rises Here. (I know this guy makes a career out of exploiting every nitpick he can about movies, but at least a couple of the things he mentioned here also bugged me while I was watching the movie.)
Avclub review here (I know I'm becoming a bit predictable by always linking to the avclub, but they do good work.)
Avclub says of the politics of this film: There’s a catchall quality to the politics of it—the Occupy movement could be viewed here as unifying force or order-upending menace—but Nolan seems content to let his popular entertainment double as a Rorschach test.

Yes, the politics of this film seem...problematic.  I know it's always been a part of the given Batman mythos that there are always lots of psychotic criminals wandering the streets of Gotham, and that the solution is always to lock as many of them up as possible.  (This is, after all, a comic book world).   But nonetheless, I was a bit uncomfortable at the beginning in how clearly the movie seemed to be praising a prison-state world (where the movie--or at least its main characters--openly praise the new laws that have locked up more people and put more police on the ground).  Is this movie advocating fascism?
The reviewer at Salon.com wrestles with the same question: It’s no exaggeration to say that the “Dark Knight” universe is fascistic ... . It’s simply a fact. Nolan’s screenplay... simply pushes the Batman legend to its logical extreme, as a vision of human history understood as a struggle between superior individual wills, a tale of symbolic heroism and sacrifice set against the hopeless corruption of society.
But, he goes on to conclude:
But if “The Dark Knight Rises” is a fascist film, it’s a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It’s an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft — but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Rating:
6 out of 10 Stars

Link of the Day
The Biology of Language