Movie Review – The Dark Knight Rises

Part of a new feature that we’ll be adding to the site will be reviews for movies, games, music and anything else we feel is relevant to the interests of the community. There’s a lot more to us than just card games, and we always intended for JustSaiyan.com to be an extension of ourselves, so this feels like a natural progression for the website. Our first movie review: The Dark Knight Rises!

Warning: Minor spoilers may follow, but every attempt will be made to avoid major plot spoils and twists.

It’s been official for a while that this will be the last Batman film by the Nolan team, presumably to allow a new Batman franchise that would make more sense in a world with Superman, Wonder Woman and the like for a Justice League movie. Keeping that in mind, I went into this movie looking for some closure and a sense of completion to the saga.

I want to state up front that I liked the movie and thoroughly enjoyed it. My problem is, I can’t really figure out if this would best be described as a Batman movie or a movie that had Batman in it. As the film opens, one of the first scenes reveals that it has been 8 years since the events of The Dark Knight and Batman himself hasn’t been seen since the night Harvey Dent died. It somewhat foreshadows what you’re in for, as Batman does not appear until a good hour into the movie. And therein lies the core problem of the movie: there are too many characters, specifically new characters, that all fight for screen time when the person who dominates the film should be Batman.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at The Dark Knight. The only new central characters that were introduced were The Joker and Harvey Dent. Those characters were developed well, had ample screen time and didn’t take away much from the characters established in Batman Begins. Both were also well established characters in the DC Universe, so even if they weren’t the most faithful representation of the characters, you at least had a familiarity with them. Now look at the Dark Knight Rises, which introduces four central characters into the film: Bane, Catwoman, Miranda Tate and John Blake. Each of these characters fight for screen time, which really messes with the pacing of the movie. At least with Bane and Catwoman, you’re already familiar with the characters, which the movie kinda assumes since they aren’t really given much back story. But Miranda Tate, played by Marion Cotillard, and John Blake, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are original characters so the movie spends some time establishing them in the universe. If you could call The Dark Knight the “Harvey Dent Movie”, then The Dark Knight Rises is certainly the “John Blake Movie”.

The returning cast of Bruce Wayne, Lucius Fox, Alfred and Commissioner Gordon play their parts consistently with the first two movies. Christian Bale still talks in the throaty Batman voice that people have come to loathe, but otherwise gives a good performance. Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon seems to be the only character who has undergone any permanent change since the previous movie and while he isn’t around for much of the first half of the film, he makes up for it during the second half. I wish I could comment more on Lucius Fox and Alfred, but for the final part of the trilogy they have become little more than background characters who are absent for much of the film.

Tom Hardy as the leather clad villain with all the same skills and training as our hero but needs a constant supply of fluid to live. Also bald.

Tom Hardy as Bane was awesome as the villain, and portrayed as being more than a match for Batman in both brains and brawn. At times I had difficulty understanding his muffled dialog, and his overall plot was even more cartoony than The Joker’s was in the previous movie, but he was still a well executed villain.

“It’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you.” Unless you are a hot chick.

Catwoman (though never referred to by that name) played by Anne Hathaway was a somewhat confusing character. You aren’t ever really given any background information on her, and she does some pretty horrendous things to Bruce/Batman throughout the movie. Despite all that, Bruce is inexplicably convinced that she is a good person underneath and mentions this throughout the movie despite Catwoman never showing any redeeming qualities up to that point. Did Bruce just forget the whole “It’s not who you are underneath but what you do that defines you” mantra? Either way, she is still an entertaining character to watch during her action scenes. She did have a companion who was presumably Holly (one of the few openly gay characters in the DC Universe and a one-time Catwoman), although that character only appeared sporadically and disappeared completely by the end of the film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake is another odd character in the film. With so many supporting characters in the Batman universe, you’d think that they could just pick one for this role in the film. Either way, Blake is probably the most focused upon character in the film. I ended up liking this character by the film’s conclusion. It’s clear that he was supposed to be the “everyman” that you could relate to in a world of masks and rich business people and the insane, but I liked that. He was the man on the street and a good framing device for the movie.

As for the plot itself, it definitely had tinges of the No Man’s Land story arc. Again, I enjoyed it, just the pacing issues of going back and forth between the many active characters while ignoring some of the others distracted me a little. The film could probably have used a bit of pruning on the run time and still been alright. I found the ending to be very satisfying and a good conclusion to the trilogy.

Overall I would highly recommend the film to anyone who has watched the first two films. So far the big winner this summer for me has been The Avengers, but this is a close second. Also, I would not recommend watching this if you have not yet seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, as events in this film very heavily reference the goings on in those movies.

Later, BroZ.