Today, we are highlighting Dan McLaughlin’s ten-year-anniversary retrospective piece for the magazine on the 2012 election, about which I hope to say something more soon. But for now, I want to focus on another ten-year anniversary: that of The Dark Knight Rises. The final entry in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy came out ten years ago this weekend; I saw it in theaters on its opening night.
After The Dark Knight, the hype was real for the sequel. This despite the fact that Nolan was actually unsure whether he would make a third film in the series. The death of Heath Ledger, who played the Joker, The Dark Knight‘s primary antagonist, complicated things also. Nolan had to rebuff a reported studio desire to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the Riddler as a kind of “substitute.” Nolan wanted to go in a different direction. And his commercial success, unusual for a director of his artistic standards and intent, has given him the kind of authority to do such things (see also his insistence on releasing Tenet in theaters in 2020 as nationwide Covid lockdowns were ongoing, and his getting a $100 million budget for a biopic on nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer). So even when, after the first trailer, it was hard to make out what Tom Hardy’s villainous Bane was saying, I was inclined to trust Nolan.
However, I walked out of the theater ten years ago disappointed. The Dark Knight Rises, which picks up eight years after its predecessor, fleshes out the implications of Batman’s heroic noble lie by which he assumed the crimes of Harvey Dent’s twisted vigilantism. He thus becomes a martyred hero, whose legacy Gotham uses to make the city safe. But to others, it has become decadent. Bane comes to town to finish what Ra’s al Ghul, his former master, started: the destruction of the corrupt city. Unfortunately, his plan makes basically no sense. It has that in common with much of the rest of the movie, which is sustained by a series of nonsensical decisions, some useless characters, and many credibility-straining contrivances, fantastic coincidences, and unexplained resolutions that truly undermine what the movie is trying to do. (See the excellent, if somewhat salty, film critic Critical Drinker outline them here.) Those were the primary sources of my disappointment, along with a finale that, among other things, bears a strange (intentional?) resemblance to, well . . .
However, there are still things about The Dark Knight Rises that I appreciated in the moment, and others that have grown on me since. Not that I necessarily enjoy art solely on this basis, but it has to be one of the most conservative movies released in the past ten years. The story consciously invokes Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution as Bane imposes a revolutionary, totalitarian order on Gotham — an effort that has its public debut when Bane literally occupies Wall Street (less than a year after the Occupy Wall Street protests). And Bane’s Gotham is not exactly a fun place to be. Criminals rule with an iron fist; kangaroo courts offer traitors to the state (even previous allies of the revolution) the choice of either “death or exile”; and that which belonged to someone “now belongs to everyone,” as one character joyously intones. Just watch this speech by Bane in which he begins to consolidate his reign and tell me this is not a fundamentally left-wing revolutionary as an antagonist:
These reflect only some of the substantive matters with which the movie concerns itself, many of which remain relevant today: the possibility of a heroism in a fallen age, the survival and regeneration of a political order, the nature of evil, etc. It doesn’t always stick the landing, but at least it gave them a go.
So despite the many flaws of the movie’s attempt to bring the Dark Knight trilogy to a satisfying narrative and thematic conclusion, I still give it some credit. Ten years later, many of the good parts stick with me, and I still find myself quoting parts of it that have embedded themselves in my memory in random situations. And on the whole, it does not despoil Nolan’s successful effort to elevate the superhero movie to something that can be taken seriously as an art form. And that’s an achievement likely to endure for longer than ten years, even if many of the movies of the genre are eventually — and deservedly — forgotten.