(What follows are some impressions of the movie. Part review, part analysis. Not wholly either. Also, spoilers ahead!)
The Dark Knight Rises is an enormous movie. Enormous in scale, in stakes, in action, music and themes. It’s big from the very first scene, where a CIA plane is assaulted in mid-air by commandos from outside the plane, through Batman’s brutal defeat and the occupation of Gotham, reaching maximum massiveness in the climax, a battle for the city’s very existence between seemingly every cop and criminal in the city. Throughout, it explores the power of symbols and masks, the motivating power of fear and the contrast of vengeance versus justice. And as if that’s not enough, it throws in some references to Occupy Wall Street and the One Percent. This thing is big.
This size is not just spectacle. It builds not just scale, but drama and intensity. It’s an aggressive, propulsive force, the main force that engages the audience. Many times, it works: The feeling of Batman’s eclipse, and of a powerful evil readying itself to destroy him -- and the city -- is present from the beginning. When the story reaches its climactic battle, the moment has the grandeur and terror of a civilization fighting for its life. And yet, this size is sometimes not just propulsive, but overwhelming. The scenarios, the music, the themes can be so relentless that at times it's hard to use critical judgement, as if the movie is fighting a war for your interest and all you can do is acquiesce, I'm hurled through the story without being able to really consider or absorb all that this ambition has created.
Now with some time to reflect, I wish there was more to the movie than just the world-hangs-in-the-balance scale, more clarity, charm, and human emotion. Thinking back to Memento, Inception, and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan is a fairly cold, charmless director, he has a talent for portentous scale and ideas, but not wit, humor or delicacy, and that comes through here. On top of that, The Dark Knight Rises is particularly hampered by its characters. There is no equivalent to The Joker or Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight. They did manage to bring some humanity and humor to that movie in a way that doesn’t happen here.
In this movie, the Bruce Wayne/Batman character has to provide all the human feeling, but this is hard for him to do by his very nature. Always serious, somber, even grim, he’s a difficult character to play, even going back to the Tim Burton movies. He’s so contained that he can’t explode like a Harvey Dent or be fun, like The Joker. And Christian Bale has never been able to really crack him, I think, staying within the realm of somewhat vacant somberness. Though, I do think he comes closest in this movie. There’s a touching sadness in Bruce’s confrontation with Alfred over Rachel and when he has a secret meeting with Commissioner Gordon in his hospital bedroom, there’s real delicacy and sensitivity. It's Bale's best work of the trilogy.
Thankfully, there is Selina Kyle, easily the best female character in the entire trilogy. Charming, smart and lethal, she’s the first woman to be an equal to the Bruce Wayne/Batman character. I was an Anne Hathaway doubter, but she really convinced me. She doesn’t play her as a Michelle Pfeiffer or Julie Newmar -- as a sexbomb. She’s more cynical, grittier, with less patience for sexual flirtation -- which is why the attraction she and Bruce are supposed to feel didn't work for me. (Interestingly, she has a female friend that has made some people wonder if the character is a lesbian. It would have been a great direction to go in.)
Ultimately, though, Selina Kyle can only bring so much warmth and humor to such a massive, imposing project. And even if she did, she might get in the way of what Nolan seems most interested in: The Dark Knight Rises themes, its possible politics and ideology.
Around the web, there has been a lot of wrestling, and over-wrestling, with the movie's political meaning. The Dark Knight Rises is fascist, it’s moderately conservative, it’s anti-Occupy Wall Street. There are suggestions of all these ideas, but unfortunately they don't add up to anything that makes total sense; the script is weaker than the first two movies, lacking sufficient dramatic expression in some places and creating confusion in others: What does Bane represent? When he exhorts “the people” to rise up against the city’s elites, we can’t really take that too seriously -- it’s all just a ruse for the ultimate annihilation of Gotham, where everyone, elites and the lower classes, will be killed. But then why create a nebulous connection to Occupy Wall Street and paint Gotham as so corrupt? And who are the disenfranchised “people” anyway? Sometimes it seems to be the poor, as when the orphan boy talking to John Blake implies there’s no work above ground. Other times, as when Bane blows up Blackgate prison, it seems to be only criminals. Gotham’s social character is never clarified.
Still, there are meanings we can take from the movie, especially when we look at it together with the first two. The best analysis, I think, is from Zack Beauchamp and Jeff Spross, who come to the less sensational, but more accurate conclusion that The Dark Knight Rises isn't really liberal or conservative or fascist, that it doesn’t take sides in our political debate and is really just a defense of our basic political system of liberal democracy. It certainly has elements of conservatism and fascism -- Batman takes a very hard line on criminals, going so far as to kidnap a Mob accountant from Hong Kong and later drop a Mob boss from a building to break his legs (both in The Dark Knight). But its clearest meaning is actually boringly mainstream. Batman fights for the preservation of Gotham City, corrupt and dysfunctional as he knows it is. He doesn’t believe, as Ra’s al Ghul and his daughter Talia do, that it should be wiped from the planet. His hope is that through his example the city will eventually rise up and fix itself, to the point where it will no longer need him.
For the most part, I agree with this. But there is an interesting nuance to this analysis. Batman hopes the political system will one day be strong enough to heal itself and make him irrelevant. But, as is clear from The Dark Knight Rises, this is unlikely to ever happen: the city escapes destruction only because Batman is there to save it, not because of anything its government does. In fact, it's the government’s complacency that allows Bane to take over the city.
And the reason for this seems to be the nature of society (or at least the nature of Gotham’s society): anything good that happens in Gotham creates an escalating backlash. Batman’s attempt to inspire its citizens in the first movie leads, in the second, to copy-cat Batmans and the creation of the Joker. Batman’s attempt to turn the protection of the city over to Harvey Dent leads to Dent’s death, the city’s extended period of peace leads to complacency and to its occupation by Bane, Ra’s al Ghul’s death leads to Talia’s attempt at revenge. Each good deed leads to a bad one in a never-ending cycle. And the one good result, the end of organized crime in Gotham, is really a tainted result; it’s brought about by a lie that Commissioner Gordon tells the city, a lie which is eventually undone, to the city’s detriment.
In every case, only Batman saves the city. He’s essential to Gotham’s survival -- so essential that in the end Bruce Wayne ensures that he will never be gone when he gets John Blake to take his place. Batman has become what Bruce Wayne wanted him to be from the very beginning: more than any one man, an idea, a legend.
It seems to me that Nolan is somewhat skeptical of social institutions to deal with the modern world. There’s always a Joker or a Bane out there waiting to turn everything to chaos or just destroy it all. The modern world is one absurd, corrupt event after another. But there are, unfortunately, even worse things out there, and society can’t ever deal with these things completely according to its own principles. You need someone to operate on the edge of society, an outcast, someone who can bend the rules and “make the choice no one else can”, as Alfred says in The Dark Knight.
As social analysis, this is interesting, but only up to a point. It's kind of silly to say, but there is no Batman in the real world, not just in terms of his abilities, but in terms of his ethics: For all his bending of the rules -- his use of kidnapping, intimidation, even torture -- Batman has one iron-clad principle: he never kills, not even when faced with a group of armed thugs. He is an ideal outcast, “truly incorruptible” as the Joker says of him. Though he never fully trusts society and its institutions to do the right thing, he never loses hope that one day they will.
If this person seems like an impossible ideal, if you think that anyone who is willing to bend the rules and break his legs just to get him to talk would, given the right circumstances, be willing to kill... well you're right. Of course this doesn't really cohere with the world as it really is. Batman is a comic book character and The Dark Knight trilogy is made in Hollywood, where our fantasies are fulfilled, and the true, dark nature of life is ignored.
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