The Dark Knight Rises (Post-Release Discussion) - Page 8

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When I first saw The Dark Knight, I thought it was incredible. Not very many movies are that good. That Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, while The Dark Knight was not even so much as nominated, is a crime that will go down in the annals of cinematic history. That said, I think most will agree that Batman Begins was a good film on its own but doesn't quite compare to the other two sequels. I will instead try to argue why I think The Dark Knight Rises is better than The Dark Knight. Much of this will be a series of responses to common complaints that I have heard frequently, but I will try to string it all together as best I can.

Let's look at how the two are similar. Both have near-identical openings. They start with some heist in which the villain (The Joker/Bane), disguised as a regular thug, makes his appearance and scores something big. Some have complained that Rises was just rehashing a trick from TDK. I'm inclined to forgive this for a few reasons. One, this would be worse if the movie were made by someone else, but Nolan made both movies. In other words, it's hard to get on someone for reusing their own trick only once. Maybe this concept is not one hundred percent original, but he executed the scene well in both instances, and it can serve as sort of a calling card, or parallel, something that you can only appreciate from a metacritical point of view. Sure, he didn't do it in Batman Begins, but that's because it's the first movie, which brings me to my second point on that matter.

It's a great way to introduce the villains and get them into the minds of the audience. There's no second-guessing after these scenes. The feeling from both is that the villain is very clever and dangerous and that he has something bigger in store, and there is no doubt that Batman will have to get to the bottom of this, somehow. Batman Begins doesn't do this, but then it needed to focus on getting you acquainted with Bruce Wayne instead.

The last reason I am willing to forgive this is that both were just plain, fun scenes, so don't fix what isn't broken.

Another similarity is the extent to which Bane and The Joker took over Gotham. In each film, both pull the rug out from under Gotham's feet like it was nothing. The nice part about this is that they did it in different ways. The Joker slithered his way to the top of the crime lords of Gotham by manipulating their emotions, while Bane acquired corporate and financial height through Talia before making his move. In both cases, it leaves us in a feeling of utter awe at their ability to dismantle the establishment and leave the people of Gotham in a state of helplessness. Now, Bane took it to a much greater extent by creating a literal state of anarchy, but he did so with more help than The Joker who, effectively, did what he could by himself, but that. is getting into the main differences.

That Bane needed a needed more help to do what he could probably makes The Joker the cooler and technically better villain, but the conflict that Bane creates that The Joker couldn't makes for a much more dramatic climax in the film. Granted, having greater risks and more to lose on a human scale does not necessarily make a story better, but there was more to it than that. Batman wasn't just saving Gotham from the bomb. He's making up for what he let happen while moping in his bed chambers for eight years. Whereas The Joker only tricked him into saving Dent, who became the short-lived villain Two-Face, he was deceived to an even greater extent in this many times in Rises.

I think this movie is rather appropriately titled when you consider that not only does Batman rise to the occasion to save Gotham from annihilation, but Bruce Wayne himself has to rise to defeat his long-term mistakes and personal crises. The movie starts with a Waterloo but ends with an Austerlitz. We start out seeing Bruce sad and beaten, much like Napoleon after his first overthrow. The love of his life is gone. The image he sought to create through Batman to inspire the citizens of Gotham is spoiled by the lie about Dent. His company is failing due to his depressed, unstable negligence. He is crippled from the years he spent fighting crime.

Yet someone comes and stirs him up, Selina, and this leads to him making a return, and, like Napoleon, his return ended up resulting in a much worse defeat at the hands of Bane, who was able to steal Bruce's fusion reactor because of Bruce's mistaken apathy with life, causing Gotham to fall into Bane's hands. Bruce still had another chance at that point, something Napoleon didn't, and his renewed resolve had remained undiminished. While in prison, Bruce learns about his enemy (not so much Bane but Talia) and finally develops the strength of spirit to escape.

When he returns, Gotham is in shambles. The police are trapped underground. People are being inhumanely executed. Everything that he and his father worked for has been rendered useless, and what's left is about to be erased off of the map. The Special Forces can't even stop them.

So what does Batman do? He rescues the handful of police officers left from execution just in time, helps to free the trapped policemen, takes out Bane's tanks, convinced Selina to risk her own life to save others rather than just save herself, and defeats Bane in a final fight, and he does all of this rather plausibly. He did seem to recover from the stab wound from Talia pretty quickly, at the moment of her betrayal, which is a minor flaw. Many complain that Talia ended up belittling Bane and that Bane's death was too quick at this point, but for most of this near-three-hour film, Bane was able to enjoy the spotlight, and his death needed to be quick to get this long movie over.

At last, after stopping Talia and seizing the reactor, Bruce flies with it over the ocean and seemingly dies with it, only to be revealed moments later that he lived and ran off with Selina. Compare all of this with what he had to in TDK to stop The Joker. Bruce Wayne had a lot less to overcome, physically, strategically, and internally. While The Joker's role in TDK created a psychological and philosophical crisis for the city of Gotham and ultimately made TDK's plot so powerful, his effect on Bruce in that movie, the main character, the whole point of the trilogy and all the other media in which his character is found, is not at all in line with what that role. He kills Rachel and leaves Bruce distraught, which anyone could have done, but The Joker, despite his epic personality and clever tricks, was not really able to defeat Bruce psychologically, and he ended up giving Gotham a context to round up its organized crime for good.

In Rises, we do not just see a resolution of that movie's numerous conflicts, but of the conflicts initiated by the film before. There was the stain left over from the lie surrounding Dent that blew up in Batman's face. There was the hole in his heart from Rachel's death. This was all piled on with the threat of Bane and the return of the League of Shadows, for which Bruce was to blame for letting them get the fusion reactor. He resolves all of this in one move of tactical and spiritual triumph in a realistic fashion, and ends up fixing all of his own mistakes. The most important of these is in faking his death. While covering up the circumstances around Dent worked for a while, it could not hold and eventually imploded, an imperfect lie. In faking his own death, Bruce kills his second identity, the one with which the people were familiar. Believing him to be dead, he will stand as a shining example to the people of Gotham of heroism and duty and will do what Dent's memory never could.

Many are upset that Bruce himself does not die, saying that it would have been better. I do not understand this obsession with him dying. His parents died. The love of his life died. Does his life need to be thrown away too? At the very least, Christopher Nolan gave us the experience of him dying right before Alfred saw him in France at the end. Deathmongers got their feeling of loss. Hopefuls got their happy ending, and not just for Bruce. Bruce surviving also gave Selina's character proper closure and a happy ending, and I think an alternative for her would have been harder to pull off. What's more, it was Selina who ended up getting Bruce back in the game by meeting him. The woman who revived Batman from memory is the one that got to run away with him.

And, in a sense, Batman did die. He is a character and nothing more to Gotham, even when Bruce Wayne dons him, and characters can die even conceptually. Bruce explained that Batman could be anyone and that anyone could the hero, and he set up Robin to fill his shoes, if the need should arise, while Bruce regains his life. This is why faking his death is the perfect lie: because it can be both false and true as far as the people of Gotham and the audience are concerned. This is why The Dark Knight Rises tops its predecessor. It gives a much more compelling story. It is a conglomerate of many tales; of war, of romance, of self-sacrifice, of camaraderie, of redemption, and of legacy; all creatively and ingeniously woven together into one struggle and one showdown, with a depth and multi-dimensional complexity that The Dark Knight wishes it could achieve.