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Film: The Dark Knight Rises

Country: USA/UK

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Christopher Nolan

Screenwriters: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

Starring: Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cottilard, Michael Caine and Matthew Modine

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From his breakthrough movie Memento onwards through to Insomnia, Inception and his first two Batman movies, director Christopher Nolan has been a director of extraordinary precision and control, even as he has navigated storylines of remarkable density and intensity while stamping  each film with his own slick but considered and distinctive visual style. He has become that rarest of Hollywood beasts, a big name director who is capable of directing blockbusters without foregoing his directorial vision. And so it pains me to point out that Nolan’s latest outing, The Dark Knight Rises, is a major disappointment that seems to acquiesce to all that is frustrating about the output of contemporary Hollywood.

I have, during my last six months as a reviewer for this paper, seen an awful number of big budget movie that attempt to cram in everything including the kitchen sink, story-wise, without ever making much attempt to construct an engaging narrative. And, entirely unexpectedly, Nolan’s latest film is more of the same. Beginning with an epic but not particularly cinematically graceful mid-air heist, the film relentlessly impales itself with action set-pieces and the sound of machine-gun fire and doesn’t let up for nearly three hours of what rapidly descends into a festival of mega-budget banality, without any real sense of the epic

The plot – for what it’s worth – centres on Batman’s previous retirement from public life after having taken the blame for the death of Harvey Dent – or Two-Face as he is more widely known. Criminal activity in Gotham has been minimal in recent years, but dark forces are stirring beneath the surface of the city, its web of underground tunnels having become home to the marginalised and the dispossessed, led by the masked Bane, who like Bruce Wayne/Batman, is a graduate of the League of Shadows. Rising from his subterranean existence, Bane claims to want to restore the city of Gotham to the people, an ambition whose nobility is somewhat compromised by the fact that he’s hijacked and weaponised a  nuclear fuel-cell invented by Bruce Wayne but put in mothballs because of its  destructive capabilities. As Bane goes on the rampage, the city is brought to its knees and civilisation itself starts to fade into an anarchic darkness.

In a way The Dark Knight Rises is Nolan’s end-times film, flirting with terrorism, massive social inequality, the brutality of a police state and the horrifically nebulous nature of nuclear power. But Nolan doesn’t use these themes to any end other than to raise the level of intensity of his chaotic narrative, which, I should also point out, is written very poorly compared to the writer-director’s previous films.

Just as Nolan has packed his film with so many tenuously connected plot strands, The Dark Knight Rises is also dense with critically acclaimed acting talent, including Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cottilard, Michael Caine and Matthew Modine. But like the rest of the film’s elements, including the Batman mythology itself, all the film’s performances are little more than fuel for Nolan’s unquenchable fire of action and destruction.

I can’t help wondering what happened here in this train wreck of a movie. Was Nolan pushed too far by the forces of commerce? Has he lost his canny ability to entertain while simultaneously creating art with a capital ‘A’? Did the weight of one of the world’s biggest and most well-loved franchises suddenly become too heavy for his mighty shoulders? Whatever the reasons, The Dark Knight Rises is one of the longest and clearly most expensive let-downs in recent cinema history. The fact that it is a product of one of contemporary cinema’s finest minds verges on tragedy.