The Dark Knight Triumphant - The Dark Knight Rises review

At the core of the Batman legacy, the very reason for the dark knight’s existence is a simple revenge story. Bruce Wayne creates an alter-ego out of rage, guilt and obsession to fight the corruption and decadence he blames for the death of his parents. Batman is an idealist. He resorts to extremes to tackle what he sees to be deforming the Gotham city that the Wayne family helped build. But, as Lieutenant Gordon so acutely notes at the end of Batman Begins (2005), “what about escalation?” The solution of Batman is merely short term, as touched on in The Dark Knight (2008) and out of his existence a different criminal rises.

"The fire rises"

Intrinsically, the reason The Dark Knight didn’t work was because it wasn’t about Batman. It was a film about modern paranoia and moral dilemma after moral dilemma. It was expertly crafted but bloated and confused. The first third of The Dark Knight Rises, a couple of marvellous set pieces aside, seems to expand what didn’t work in The Dark Knight. This is a shame because where Bruce finds himself at the beginning of the film begs the same concise deliverance of tortured soul in conflict as Frank Miller provided in The Dark Knight Returns. We are presented with the new villain Bane taking on the bankers and stock holders but are given no reason to believe why a mercenary who is said to have grown up in prison with no grounding in the world of economics and business would have any grudge towards the money holders. Perhaps aside from it being an exploitable issue rife with contention. However, about an hour in, after the advertised demolishing of the football stadium, Bane takes control, so to speak. It is at this point that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan capture something that they failed to with The Dark Knight, it becomes about Batman. It becomes about his absence, his legacy and what he is to Gotham and vice versa.

There are many loose ends in the plot that aren’t to be found in Batman Begins. Why, for example, would Bane go through the effort of releasing all of Black Gate prison and spur on an anarchist uprising against the privileged wealth when his ultimate goal is to obliterate all of Gotham with a nuclear bomb? To be totally honest, such trivialities really don’t matter when a film of such scale, budget and appeal has so much intelligence, ambition and pure cinematic craftsmanship. The film looks incredible thanks to Wally Pfister and has a perfectly attuned soundtrack from Hans Zimmer working without James Newton Howard for the third instalment. Free from any auditory gimmicks found in The Dark Knight and Inception (2010), the soundtrack works organically with the narrative and in the end creates an epic backdrop suiting the films epic scope. 

 

Bane gears up for war. With jazz hands.

Nolan manages to make every character relevant, which is quite a feat considering how many new faces there are, while still maintaining the fact that it is most certainly a Batman film. Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Bane has aroused the most controversy due to his muffled, unreadable and bizarrely posh voice. He has also been said to lack character and charisma found in Heath Ledger’s barnstorming but misused Joker, but such criticisms are largely unfounded. Once attuned to his voice you come to notice the subtleties to his performance: the bob of the head, widening of an eye or, more overtly, the great physical presence he commands. He is also given the vast amount of killer lines in the film (“when Gotham is ashes, then, you have my permission to die”) making him more of a horrendously cool force that Batman can’t seem to break. This is what Nolan gets so right in The Dark Knight Rises that he missed in The Dark Knight: all of Batman’s villains are the other side of the coin; in their being they say something different about the caped crusader. Bane is physically superior to Batman, as with Killer Croc and Solomon Grundy, The Riddler is more intelligent than Batman (at least he thinks he is), Ra’s Al Gul is more resourceful than Batman and most crucially, The Joker is more insane than Batman. At no point in The Dark Knight did it play of the balance of insanity between our bat-eared protagonist and the clown-faced antagonist. This is touched on in the interrogation scene but never used as a vital plot dynamic. Bane works so well because he is a force Batman has got to navigate around using his other skills. This gives us more of a threat than the death of civilians, Rises gives us the very tangible threat of Batman being broken, hope being destroyed (something Bane seems very fond of) and at first he is. While clearly taking story elements from the most well-known Batman/Bane story arch Knightfall (and lines and references to Long Halloween and The Dark Knight Returns for the Batman devotee), Nolan manages to bring entirely his own Batman universe to an appropriately grand close.

Nolan’s last two films (The Dark Knight, Inception) have followed a rigid three act structure, both films would have done well to ditch one. As much as Inception plays with levels of a dream its construction was never more than incredibly formulaic. In Rises, he lifts this structure over his head and drops it on his knee. Whilst not quite so dramatic he certainly mixes things up. Having, for example, our hero defeated in the first hour only then for the story to really flourish is, for those uninitiated to hard-core Batman lore, a bold statement. Furthermore the emotional core is stronger than ever but manages to never feel arch or overwrought as it subtly plays on the bonds that have been running through the trilogy. 

And it has an ending. A definitive, brave ending. Such a closure has occurred multiple times in varying comic threads but for the Batman that all the world will see, it’s a brave ending. The ending is left open to interpretation, this is undisputable or there wouldn’t be so many flame wars over explanations and theories. However you choose to take the ending, and there is a more rewarding way, the film remains a testament for the validity and accessibility of the industry level of filmmaking. Batman Begins remains the crown jewel of the trilogy and a veritable benchmark in cinema but as a trilogy, as a vision, Christopher Nolan has created something of such exhilarating scope and intelligence the likes of which is virtually unheard of. The Dark Knight Rises concludes a towering cinematic achievement. 

The legend ends.

A Savage mistreatment of cinema - Savages review

Taken was, amazingly, a film headed up by French creatives that also managed to be downright racist to any character not firmly rooted in America. It is also in high competition for the worst film of the new millennium. Now, Oliver Stone’s attempt to be edgy and relevant throws Taken some very strong contention. Savages, in the most childish, ham-fisted way imaginable, tries to cover near-every possibly controversial or delicate subject you care to think of. You’ve got drugs, the cartels, immigration, war, three-way relationships, torture, rape, corruption, even cancer makes an offensively inconsequential entry in an effort to leave no ethical rock unturned. 

When within the first five minutes of a film a character says the line “I had orgasms, he had wargasms” I should have understood that as Oliver Stone kindly beckoning to the doors and saying “please leave, this is only going to get worse”. However, I sat through the following unintentionally funny first hour and the plain aggravating and boring second. The film opens with Blake Lively’s character, O, spouting a moody monologue attempting to set up the protagonists’ loving three-way relationship and layering on foreboding of their future sanctity. The film pooters along feeling like an unholy union between late Tony Scott films and Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. It is the very definition of thematically inconsistent while trying to hold up plot strands besieged with torture and high end drug running then having Benicio Del Toro play no less than an actual moustache twiddling cartoon villain who wouldn’t be out of place beside Bugs Bunny and also doubles up as a sadistic maniac and rapist.

Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson prepare for war

When the two male protagonists, Chon and Ben’s, ethical pot empire is picked up on by higher powers they politely refuse any form of partnership, resulting in kidnap and payback on all fronts. The couple of action scenes are, well, they’re fine. Said set pieces seem to be conceived with great care and thought by the two, calling in allies from the boys’ days in the army. Though, the scenes of action seem to amount to no more than donning silly masks and blowing up and shooting everything and everyone in sight. The choice of shots in these sequences feels very gamey (focused on POV violence and lack of in-combat reason aside from ‘kill everyone’). In fact any gamer that doesn’t instantly cast their mind to Army of Two in these scenes needs to wake up (though no blame to anyone who decided to grab some shut eye by this point). It says a lot about both Savages and the rapidly advancing validity of games that the likes of Uncharted 3 can create action set pieces with far more creativity and emotional engagement than an Oliver Stone film.       

Ultimately the film is summed up quite nicely by its own ending. Stone had so many ideas he wanted to tackle in Savages that he simply decided to cram them all in. It isn’t really a spoiler to say that the film has two endings of sorts. Many internet threads argue which ending was better and why the film should have stuck to one of them but this argument is totally invalid and unneeded because really, both endings are just terrible. Boring and confused, the ending struggles to eek out theorems on love and violence that don’t amount to anything. Lastly, any film without the confidence to let the narrative validate the title instead of using the words ‘savages’ or ‘savage’ over half a dozen time doesn’t deserve an audience's intelligence.