Review: The Dark Knight Rises

I don't know if people remember this but apparently there was a large sort of internet coup that happened whereby anonymous fanboys would lambaste anyone who didn't give this movie a positive review. The internet is for rants and pictures of cats, so I can't argue with their zeal. However, after having watched The Dark Knight Rises, my problem with it is that it just wasn't all that good.

To be fair, I'm not watching TDKR in a vacuum. I've had the pleasure of watching Christopher Nolan work something approaching magic in The Dark Knight. The DK was the best super hero movie that we've had to date. And, as anyone who watches movies know, we've had a hell of a lot of super hero movies. The movie was buoyed by the amazing acting performance by Heath Ledger as the joker, a performance that left me feeling physically uncomfortable at its intensity and insanity. The movie itself hit at the right period of cultural zeitgeist, when the fear of a terrorist attack still felt fresh. The movie itself was also brilliant, leaving Batman to choose between the woman he loved and the icon Harvey Dent who he felt could possibly keep the city safe. I didn't know which way he was heading on his bike, and the audience was treated or tortured depending on how you feel about these things to one of those philosophical conundrums made real. The movie should have been nominated for an Oscar, and if it wasn't a "comic book" movie it certainly would have been. The point is, we've got a rather large footprint to fill.

To take a different tack, allow me the brief aside, how much does it matter how you watch a movie? It's widely agreed, and with good reason that action movies are best viewed in theaters. Besides the loud noises and car chase scenes that are given life, it seems to me that a good reason to watch an action movie in a theater is  that you can't pause it to get a drink of water and have your spouse say, "That scene was pretty cool with the plane and all, but it would have been better if we'd known who any of those people were." The thing is, you don't ask that question if you're watching in the theater, you don't wonder, at least until after the movie is over, if Bane's mask distorting half of what he was saying was such a good idea, or whether, in retrospect, giving anyone an English sounding accent doesn't wind up making them sound less villain like and more like someone who would like to serve you afternoon tea.

Try and remember what it's like to watch a movie when you were sitting next to a person who you wished you were dating, way more engrossed in the positioning of your legs next to one another's or the intake and rhythm of a breath as opposed to some, in comparison, banal plot twist. Or, better yet, when one watches a movie once you start dating, when you've basically cosigned that there is no way you'll make it through to the end of the movie, or the classic, watching a sex scene with one's parents. The obvious point is that how you watch a movie has a great deal to do with how you experience the movie. If this review has any take away point, it's that you should go back in time and see this movie in the theater where the incoherence will seem more a result of the IMAX theater than what are in fact just some weak plot points.

Interestingly, Thomas Frank, editor of Harper's wrote an excoriating essay about the violence in movies and its pernicious effect on our psyches, citing TDKR as an example of a movie in which people just run around shooting one another. (Obviously the shootings in CO make this parallel way more evident than it might be otherwise. He also dips into why Tarantino is kind of terrible, but we'll leave that for another day).

The movie occasionally broaches on incoherent, However, as action movies go, I'd probably call it good. However, to call it a good action movie rates it several miles away from its predecessor, which was, a very good Movie. This movie is simply a passable third marker in the very good Batman trilogy. It also hits at a different time in our culture, when concerns over terror are not what they were a few years ago. Right now we're more concerned about the guns we turn against ourselves or others that are in our own houses. That's why the movie doesn't seem as salient, watching a mad man running around inciting insurrection that seems to be loosely playing with some sort of 99 percent/French revolution under the Committee of Public Safety seems like a swing and a miss. Is it fun to watch a motorcycle that can turn on a dime due to spinning wheels? Of course it is. And I wouldn't argue that the movie doesn't have any pleasures, it's just that they are muted beneath the various plot contrivances that arise during the course of this 2 and a half hour movie that should have come in at much more coherent and shorter 2.

This movie starts out with an evil villain Bane running around with his mask on creating havoc and a bunch of people trying to talk Batman into being Batman. Also, their is an interim police chief who uses the term, "hothead" to describe a young cop, played by Joseph Gordon Leavitt. As if it wasn't ghastly enough that the phrase slipped past someone's red pen, JGL, is called a hothead by government agents later in the movie. Any movie that involves cops calling one another hothead's is not paying too much attention to the details, thinks its audience is extremely stupid, or is playing with the conventionality of prior forms. Anyone who has watched how deadly serious these Batman movies are knows that it's not the third. (I suspect that it was Ledger's turn as the insane joker that was really the perfect match for the intense seriousness of these movies. He managed to make the seriousness seem both silly and necessary at the same time, allowing the audience to both identify, feel discomfort, and then wish this strange conjunction of feelings away).

To try and deliver some sort of plot synopsis at this point in time would be to do the movie a disservice. The plot appeared to be a blindfolded Christopher Nolan taking swats with his camera at a Batman/Bane shaped pinata. What if we blow up a football field? What if we make some strange tie in to the 99 vs. 1 percent debate, but make it seem as though the 99 percenters are all a gaggle of innocents or street toughs? What if people are executed by walking out on ice? What if the police get caught and then almost get out, but then are shot, but then Batman saves them. What if the government tries to help, but then, someone betrays them and they get shot. What if we not only have a roving nuclear weapon, but also a bunch of trucks moving the weapon around, oh, and also the bomb is exploding no matter what happens after a period of days, maybe we should have Batman break his back and maybe he has to jump out of Bane's prison to escape, and the prisoners chant when someone tries to do it or something. I don't know. Pass me some more pills.

The plot machine that seemed inventive in "Inception" because the idea made it seem plausible is put on the spin cycle and left to go wild in TDTR. Despite that, most of the major actors, Michael Caine as Alfred, (though all I ever hear now when Michael Caine is speaking is the guys from the wonderful movie The Trip, imitating Michael Caine) a well chiseled and serious Christian Bale as Batman, Anne Hathaway as catwoman, actually do a pretty good job in the movie. The problem is that everything that is happening around them, which is usually a stadium blowing up or street toughs leaving the cities jail and waving guns in the air and vaguely trying to overthrow Wall Street is kind of meh.

The other problem is that the lead villain, Bane, has an incoherent story, a way of standing with his fingers at his jacket that is supposed to be imposing but just makes him wind up looking like he's waiting for someone to offer to take his coat. A fact, which is not aided by his English sounding accent. By the end of the movie, when you discover, after yet another plot twist involves Bruce Wayne's trusted friend turning out to be the daughter of his old arch nemesis, (I can't make this stuff up), Bane is revealed to have been her protector. At that point you find yourself wishing that he'd just take off the mask and serve some crumpets. It turns out that having someone look imposing and win fist fights while talking about how he loves the dark just sounds like a man who knows how to play a good game of Willie ghost. (Familial game, I'll explain it some other day).

I have to offer a plug to Cat Woman, as played by Anne Hathaway. Miss Hathaway managed to transform a fairly predictable role of good girl gone wrong into something approaching a fleshed out character. She also was very believable performing stunts and kicking around various henchmen, and she played the conflicted double crossing girl about as well as was probably possible given the weaker writing in the movie. She was believable as an action star and didn't look shabby in the suit either.

The movie also seemed full of incomplete gestures. The 99 percent/Committee of Public Safety was one. It's hard to avoid Vader comparisons when you make a trilogy and the lead villain wears a mask that distorts his voice, and who turns out to be the protector of the daughter of your evil surrogate father. Again, if it sounds confusing, that's because it is. But everything feels disjointed by the end. Am I to understand the governments failure to intervene as some sort of shot at bank bail outs, tax rates, or just another minor plot engine to start and then diffuse?

I feel like I'm offering too many criticisms for a movie that was probably better than most of the action fare that we see, but I might have to revise my earlier statement that it was good, and call it something approaching passable. I suppose that the context in which I watched the movie, multiple pauses in which teeth were flossed or water was gotten, points in the movie where we stopped it, so I could point out that it was Hines Ward running from the exploding stadium, probably didn't help the movie, but that's because the movie didn't help itself. It was fine in the way that many puerile things are fine, but if a movie is going to take itself as seriously as Batman, it needs to be better. The Avengers, another passable movie, is not nearly as pernicious because it was aware of its essential silliness, this iteration of Batman was always deadly serious. The stakes were always all of Gotham. And, in the end, the stakes were too high.