A huge part of why The Dark Knight works is because, despite some inconsistencies between the two films, it flows almost inevitably from Batman Begins. That movie ended with the idea of escalation, that Batman’s presence would cause not only the mob to become more violent but for criminals to take on costumes and extreme identities like Batman. The Dark Knight might look like it takes place in a different city than Batman Begins, and we might well wonder what the Joker has been doing for the intervening year. But it takes this idea of escalation and runs with it.
Even Rachel’s death flows from this idea. If you’re going to become Batman, you’re going to have to pay a price. And the loss of your childhood friend and lifelong love is one hell of a price.
Ultimately, The Dark Knight finds that, given this escalation, Batman has to be an illegal vigilante. If he’s seen as a good guy, good people will be inspired to imitate him, which he doesn’t want. And the bad guys will have to up their game to fight him. To change Gotham for the better, Batman ironically has to be seen as a bad guy.
One film flows from the other. The two aren’t a perfect fit, but they’re of a piece.
Nolan made a lot of noise, after The Dark Knight, about how he was concerned that there weren’t an awful lot of good third films in movie series. If he was going to make a third film, he wanted it to feel like the conclusion of a single story.
In other words, the third film should take what Nolan had done to its logical, inevitable conclusion. It should flow from the previous two films, in the same way that The Dark Knight flowed from Batman Begins.
It’s no surprise, then, that Nolan returned to the League of Shadows. For Batman Begins, Nolan was especially concerned that the villain of the third act be tied to the first act, which led to Ra’s al Ghul being made Batman’s mentor. So it’s no surprise that he wanted his third film to feel tied to his first.
The Dark Knight Rises, Talia character posterBane accomplishes this quite well, and the revelation of Talia al Ghul, while not surprising to fans, echoes the revelation in Batman Begins that Liam Neeson’s character was the real Ra’s al Ghul. Their childhood stories worked for me – well enough that I found them, collectively, more interesting than either Bruce Wayne or Selina Kyle.
Bruce’s time in the same prison that birthed Bane and Talia also echoes how we first see the adult Bruce, in Batman Begins, in a prison. He’s going back to his origins, reinventing himself as Batman in order to come back stronger. Grant Morrison had Batman do much the same thing, in 52.
True, I wish the film better explained how Bane’s mask keeps him injected with chemicals to deal with the pain. We’re only told that it keeps his pain away, which isn’t enough. But Bane and Talia, like the best comic-book villains, act as negative opposites of the hero. If Batman’s a self-made man, they’re a self-made man and woman, despite her lineage.
Bane’s also a logical villain for the final film. After all, Bane was invented in the comics as the villain who was going to take down Batman – and then did, in a previously unprecedented way, in the arguably classic “KnightFall” storyline. Rises is smart to borrow from this, and it does “KnightFall” one better by having Bane take down Bruce Wayne as well as Batman.
The Dark Knight Rises teaser imageThe effect feels very much like Miller’s “Born Again” storyline on Daredevil, in which he brought that hero as low as he could go. That’s an easy model to borrow, and it’s been done plenty of times with plenty of super-heroes, even without consciously patterning the story after “Born Again.”
The Bane of the comics also has a connection to Ra’s al Ghul, having worked as part of the League of Assassins (as the League of Shadows is named in the comics) during “Legacy,” the first storyline to feature Bane after the resolution of “KnightFall.” True, Bane’s origins aren’t typically tied to Ra’s al Ghul, but that’s a logical choice to tie the trilogy together – just as it was logical to make Ra’s al Ghul Batman’s mentor in Batman Begins.
Similarly, Bane’s takeover of Gotham, borrowed from the “No Man’s Land” storyline, is suitably dramatic material for a final outing.
I also liked that Bane launches his revolution from the tunnels underneath Gotham, which for me recalled the too-often-ignored Batman: The Cult. This doesn’t mean I have to agree it’s logical to trap the entire Gotham police force down there, or that Applied Sciences is so vulnerable from below. The idea of a revolution, especially against billionaire Bruce Wayne, comes from the sewers, symbolically from the city’s untouchables, is especially resonant.
Rises even ties the trilogy together by having Catwoman steal Martha Wayne’s famous pearl necklace, another callback to Batman Begins.
And the repeated “rise” motif reverses the falling motif of Batman Begins — even if Rises fails to coalesce around this idea, the way The Dark Knight does around what its title means. There’s no transcendence here, but the themes of the series are at least superficially tied together.
All of this represents smart choices, on the part of Rises. But simply having the daughter of the villain from the first movie as the villain of the third isn’t enough to tie a trilogy together, any more than having the Joker as the villain of The Dark Knight would have been enough, on its own, to make that film feel like a logical extension of Batman Begins. That was accomplished thematically by following up on the notion of escalation, which in turn led – in a way that felt inevitable – to Batman becoming a fugitive from the law.
The idea, again, is to project the previous film(s) forward by asking where they would inevitably lead. The question is, if this goes on, what’s going to happen next?
Batman Begins ended with the idea of escalation. The Dark Knight ended with the idea of Batman being hunted “because he can take it.”
Well, can he take it? We don’t know, because he retired instead. Yes, we get one sequence in Rises, set eight years later, in which Batman flees scores of cops. But that’s not a new status quo. It’s simply a showpiece that’s quickly upturned as Bane’s threat forces the police to once again work with Batman. Why, they don’t even bother to resist the idea of becoming his cannon-fodder “army” once they’re released from their underground imprisonment.
So much for following through on what the previous film set up.
Moreover, both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight rises set up deeper questions about Batman’s mission, particularly as it relates to Bruce’s legacy and what his parents would have wanted.
There’s a subtext to Batman Begins in which Bruce Wayne is actually going against his father’s legacy, rather than fulfilling it by helping Gotham in another way. Thomas Wayne was a philanthropist who set up the city’s monorail system, which we see the Waynes using in flashback. Bruce Wayne uses this money not for philanthropy but to buy hotels (to indulge his playboy cover) and to finance his one-man war on crime. In the process, Wayne Manor and Thomas Wayne’s monorail, both symbols of the Wayne family legacy, are destroyed.
Even at the end of the movie, Batman’s more concerned with the Joker than with the thousands of innocent civilians in the Narrows who were driven mad by the Scarecrow’s fear toxin – which would almost certainly have been Thomas Wayne’s prime concern.
There’s something powerfully Oedipal here, of the son symbolically killing the father to take his place. And that’s just what Bruce does in Batman Begins.
Only it’s not at all clear that Thomas Wayne would be happy with the way Bruce chooses to help Gotham City. Thomas Wayne, philanthropist, would probably not be pleased to know that his son has chosen to help Gotham by getting into fistfights and blowing things up.
The Dark Knight doesn’t strongly echo these themes, but they’re there implicitly. Instead, The Dark Knight carries forward the idea, left at the end of Batman Begins, that Rachel represents a normal life, which Bruce might have when he’s done being Batman.
Rises takes this up by showing Bruce still mourning for Rachel, which seems to be one of his reasons for having retired. And Rises tries to conclude this theme by giving Bruce something of a normal life with Selina Kyle, although this feels extraordinarily poorly executed and rushed.
Rises tries to tie this into the Oedipal idea from Batman Begins. Alfred expresses how he wished Bruce would have a normal, happy life – and opposes Bruce becoming Batman again, although this is pretty inconsistent with his behavior in the previous two films, in which he seemed perfectly content to help Bruce become Batman and carry on doing so, even after Rachel’s death.
But through its failure to depict Selina Kyle as an adequate replacement for Rachel, Rises fails to fulfill this theme. Yes, it gives Bruce a happy ending, but it feels arbitrary and forced – not at all like the inevitable destination of the trilogy.
So too does Rises fail to take up the idea of Batman being hunted, the way The Dark Knight took up the theme of escalation. Instead of being hunted, Batman retires, and the hunting is fuel for one scene only.
Most importantly Rises fails to make good on the theme, present since the beginning, of Thomas Wayne’s legacy. True, that’s present in the third film. Because Wayne Enterprises can’t afford to fund its program for orphans, due to Bruce’s actions as Batman, he’s symbolically failed to live up to the responsibilities his father has left. We’re even told that these orphans, kicked out due to lack of funding, have joined Bane’s army.
This too gets a happy ending, when we see Wayne Manor turned into a home for orphans that bears the name of Bruce’s parents. But like the Selina Kyle ending, this too feels forced and arbitrary, rather than having the weight needed to feel like a successful resolution of these themes.
Ironically, the entire Bane plot is shot through with just the kind of concern for social class that might have made achieved such a successful resolution. After all, Bane’s army seems to represent the downtrodden. These are exactly the people Thomas Wayne wanted to help in a systematic way, and they’re exactly the people Bruce has ignored, in favor of high-adrenaline street fights.
And if you’re going to deconstruct Batman, by breaking him both physically and spiritually, as well as bankrupting Bruce Wayne and making him lose his company, wouldn’t you want to make Batman question his entire mission – his choice to become Batman in the first place?
After all, that’s implicit in the first movie, in which Batman saves the city but only by destroying the public transportation system Thomas Wayne built, in order to help the poor and the working-class.
It’s implicit in the second movie too, in which Batman’s presence has deformed the local criminals, spurring the rise of the Joker.
Would it really have been so threatening to fans, had Bruce questioned whether becoming Batman was a good idea after all? Whether he’d contributed to the iniquity in Gotham, by ignoring things like public transportation in favor of making tanks – or a cellphone-based surveillance system that was only used once?
Why, under the hands of either a more able or a braver screenwriter, the entire takeover of Gotham could have represented a real, existential challenge to Batman. Some of these disenfranchised might even have complained about how hard it is to get to work, almost a decade after Thomas Wayne’s monorail was destroyed. We could have seen how Bane’s army was composed of people like the orphans who were kicked onto the street because Bruce was too busy funding Batman.
Instead, those orphan kids are reduced to a murderous, anti-rich mob that turns people over to the Scarecrow for sentencing. And instead of questioning how he’s created the army Bane leads, Batman leads the police to war against these same orphans.
Besides being hunted by the cops, Bruce’s total failure to fulfill his father’s concern for the downtrodden of Gotham was the one thing the final film absolutely had to address, given what had been set up by the previous films. Instead of addressing this and questioning Batman (as the previous two films did), Rises plays superficially with themes (like “rising” versus “falling”
and delivers the most hostile and illogical of right-wing fantasies in a way that ridicules everything Thomas Wayne and his Wayne Enterprises stood for.
No, there’s only the pretence of deconstructing Batman here. There’s only the pretence of a happy ending. There’s only the pretence of a culmination of the previous films’ themes.
One is left to guess that the previous two films left these themes implicit because Nolan didn’t want to deal with them. And left with the challenge of concluding his trilogy, he still couldn’t bring himself to deal with them, despite setting them up in such a way that they were the elephant in the corner, demanding to be addressed.
All the ingredients are there. The chickens have come home to roost. The way Bruce has ignored the legacy of Thomas Wayne all along has created an army of hopeless have-nots, which Bane has exploited to spur a revolution.
Consequently, the film either has to deal with this – and really deconstruct Batman – or cop out and make that army an unthinking horde, a neo-con’s wet dream, so that the only solution is for Gotham to rally around an Ayn Rand ubermensch to beat up this mob and, indeed, kill them.
Talk about stacking the deck.
Talk about pulling your punches.
And talk about missing an opportunity to really wrap up a trilogy, using what you’d already established as the foundations on which to build something masterful.
But worst of all, it isn’t the conclusion of “the Dark Knight trilogy” at all. Rises feels more like a fan film, a possible ending, than something that carries elements from the first two films to their inevitable conclusion.
And it got only major praise in the reviews from my country.
