The Dark Knight Rises: a comprehensive review

Robbie Collin reviews the third and final instalment of Christopher Nolan's Batman films The Dark Knight Rises.

There are heroes and there are superheroes, but the line between the two is not as clearly drawn as you might think. Men with snug costumes, anguished childhoods, flash gadgetry and cackling nemeses tend to place in the latter category, but in his 2008 film The Dark Knight, the British filmmaker Christopher Nolan grafted Batman, a comic book hero with all four of the above, into a lucid, sinewy, and emphatically real-world crime epic, closer in spirit to Michael Mann’s Heat than the computer-burnished exploits of Iron Men and Incredible Hulks.

In this third and final instalment on his Batman trilogy, Nolan goes even further: for the most part, The Dark Knight Rises is a superhero film without a superhero.

“As a man, I can be ignored and destroyed, but as a symbol I can be incorruptible, everlasting,” gushed Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in 2005’s Batman Begins, and seven years later he has got his wish. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman is less a character than a cipher, and later, an icon; and swaths of the film pass without our hero appearing on screen in his caped crusading regalia.

Eight years have elapsed since the Joker’s spree, and Wayne (Bale) is shuffling around a mothballed mansion, “holed up with eight-inch fingernails and peeing into Mason jars”, as a Gotham congressman indelicately puts it. Nolan has long harboured an ambition to make a Howard Hughes biopic: consider all this a dry run. Swingeing zero tolerance laws have made the city safe, and costumed crimefighters are surplus to demand. In fact, Bruce is only spurred back into action when a cat burglar called Selina Kyle (a shrewdly-cast Anne Hathaway) infiltrates Wayne Manor and swipes his late mother’s necklace (Nolan’s script, co-authored with his brother Jonathan, never deigns to use the c-word: Catwoman).

But beneath the streets a fire is rising, stoked by Bane (Tom Hardy): a gas-masked revolutionary with the build of an ox who paints himself as “Gotham’s reckoning”. As a villain, Bane might lack the Joker’s iconic quality, but Hardy still commands attention in a film groaning with attention-commanders, and the Vader-ish wheeze in his voice has been wisely dialled down since early test screenings.

Bane is introduced in a dizzyingly ambitious gambit: while he and his cronies are being extracted from central Asia by the CIA, a second aeroplane swoops down and plucks them from the sky. Like all of the action sequences in The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan shoots it with a minimum of artifice, fuss and computer graphics; a technique that gives some fairly far-fetched scenarios in this film a chilling ring of plausibility. Around half of the picture has been shot on 70mm, with the multi-storey dimensions of an IMAX screen in mind, and you can tell Nolan dreams in the format: its cold, crisp precision is a perfect match for his strictly ordered, analytical worldview. In an IMAX cinema the set-pieces deliver an extra vertiginous rush; on a regular, letterbox-shaped screen, you can sense Nolan’s vision straining against the boundaries of the frame.

There’s a topical edge to Bane’s bombast, too. His call to arms goes out not to fellow terrorists, but Gotham’s recession-struck underclass, to rise up against the businesses and institutions that grew fat at their expense. For Nolan, the average citizen is the most dangerous, powerful figure of them all. Fortunately, one of those everymen is John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a beat cop whose integrity impresses Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and who becomes a key figure in the fightback against Bane’s citizen army. The Dark Knight Rises tells Blake’s story as much as it does Bruce Wayne’s, and while to say much more would spoil the fun, Gordon-Levitt’s character arc is perhaps the juiciest and most compellingly plotted of the trilogy.
Nods towards the two most recent Batman films are everywhere (an enormous bottleneck dungeon in Africa recalls young Bruce’s discovery of the Batcave in Batman Begins) but Nolan is clearly emboldened by his broadened palette and spiralled budget. His film riffs, both visually and thematically, on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein’s October, two more granite-grey, deadly serious revolutionary epics. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is also in there: Gotham’s Blackgate Prison is stormed like the Bastille, with Bane a kind of steroid-pumped, morally curdled Ernest Defarge, the mob urged on by Hans Zimmer’s pounding, hortatory score.
Nolan’s sheer audacity makes the stakes feel skin-pricklingly high. If he is prepared to go this far, I often found myself wondering, just how far is he prepared to go? Well, the answer is further than any other superhero film I can think of: after a breathless, bravura final act, a nuclear payload of catharsis brings The Dark Knight Rises, and the Batman legend, to a ferociously satisfying climax.