Knight of the long knives
Many critics have been scathing about The Dark Knight Rises. But others are hailing it as cerebral and cool, writes Rene Rodriguez.
THREE is the hardest number. Francis Ford Coppola tripped on it ( The Godfather Part III). So did George Lucas ( Return of the Jedi), David Fincher ( Alien 3), Sam Raimi ( Spider-Man 3) and the Wachowski brothers ( The Matrix Revolutions).
Peter Jackson pulled it off with The Lord of the Rings, but all those movies came from the same book and were shot back to back.
One of the most striking things about The Dark Knight Rises, the third (and, without question, last) entry in director Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies, is how bold and confident and precise it is – as if the film-maker had always known how the story that started in 2005’s Batman Begins and continued in 2008’s The Dark Knight would turn out.
The truth is Nolan was making it up as he went along.
‘‘I’ve always thought of this trilogy as Bruce Wayne’s story, and every story has a beginning, a middle and an end,’’ he says. ‘‘The ending is the most important part to me: that’s the first thing I had
uses high-minded film-making techniques to turn out a rare successful final movie in a trilogy. for The Dark Knight Rises. The trick is to know it on a subliminal level – have the idea of it – but not write it down and make it concrete until you’re ready.
‘‘I’ve had the luxury of working on these movies for nine years and letting things grow naturally, knowing the feeling of what I was going for but allowing the narrative to come into focus over time.
‘‘You have to live your way through stories to discover what they are. I wasn’t already planning for this movie when we were making Batman Begins, because I’m superstitious, but I was always hopeful I would get to tell the whole thing.’’
Set eight years after The Dark Knight, the film catches up with millionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) as his fortune is dwindling, his body is battered (he has a limp and walks with a cane) and his alter-ego of Batman is still at large and wanted for the murder of Harvey Dent (played in the previous movie by Aaron Eckhart).
The crime rate in Gotham City has plummeted under the watch of Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), who continues to feed the lie that Dent died a hero, using him as a martyr to help keep the peace. Then the terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy), a masked thug with a penchant for brutal violence, emerges from the city’s sewers. He brings an army with him.
The Dark Knight Rises borrows elements from two classic Batman comic-book storylines – Knightfall, in which Bane snaps the hero’s back, and The Dark Knight, Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel about an ageing Batman forced out of retirement by a crime wave.
But the film’s screenplay, which Nolan wrote with his brother, Jonathan, charts its own narrative path, throwing in a curvaceous cat-burglar (Anne Hathaway), an idealistic police officer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a philanthropist (Marion Cotillard) who helps Wayne with his finances.
When the $250 million production began shooting, the large number of new characters worried fans, who speculated that Nolan might have fallen prey to the ‘‘more is more’’ approach that had mired the 1990s Batman film franchise in campy excess.
The third movie in every trilogy is supposed to go into the toilet, says Michael Caine, who reprises his role in The Dark Knight Rises as Wayne’s faithful butler, Alfred. ‘‘But when I read the script for this one, I knew it would be special – and I’m not just saying that because I’m in the movie. Christopher is an incredible caster of actors, he’s an incredible director and an incredible writer. He’s all three of those things, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before in this business.’’
Unlike most makers of bigbudget blockbusters, Nolan writes his own scripts ( Inception, Mem-
‘When I read the script, I knew it would be special.’ MICHAEL CAINE
ento, The Prestige, the only exception being 2002’s Insomnia, which was a remake of a Norwegian thriller). His canvases are enormous, but he can work his personal obsessions into them.
When his planned biopic of wealthy recluse Howard Hughes was derailed by Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, he simply incorporated aspects of Hughes’ life into The Dark Knight Rises, turning Wayne into an eccentric hermit who rarely leaves his mansion and has started to go a little batty.
‘‘I always loved the relatability of Bruce Wayne,’’ Nolan says. ‘‘He is not a superhero in the usual sense. He wasn’t bitten by a radio- active spider and he wasn’t born on Krypton. He’s just a guy who’s done a lot of pushups. His only real superpower is his extraordinary wealth.
‘‘He’s someone who suffered enormous trauma as a child – his parents gunned down in front of him – and what he’s carried with him all his life is an extraordinary level of rage, sadness and all kinds of angst.
‘‘All these negative elements in his soul are pushing him in a certain direction, and he’s desperately trying to turn that into something good. That’s why his best adversaries are the ones who represent some other, darker direction he could have chosen.’’
Geoff Boucher, founder of HeroComplex.com, says the heroes and villains in Nolan’s trilogy are often two sides of the same coin.
‘‘Gotham City is an affliction: it changes people,’’ he says. ‘‘These characters, in a way, are all the same person: Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon, Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson’s villain from Batman Begins), the Joker, Harvey Dent. They just made choices that led them down their various paths.
‘‘You could argue that the title of The Dark Knight Rises refers to [four different characters] in the movie. That’s just Nolan being a lot smarter than the rest of us. He likes the complexity and ambi- guity of things like Blade Runner, which he cites as his favourite.
‘‘ Inception and The Dark Knight were unlike any summer movies we had ever seen. They were cerebral and complex and throwbacks to another time. They reminded me of A Clockwork Orange. The Dark Knight Rises does too.’’
THE haunting final shot in Kubrick’s Inception was a spinning top, wobbling ever so slightly, the implications grave and deep. There are moments in The Dark Knight Rises that generate a furious surge of emotion that The Avengers and The Amazing SpiderMan combined couldn’t muster. But even at its most heated, the movie remains elegantly cool.
‘‘There’s something consistently dark and either blue or grey – something overcast – to all of Nolan’s films after Memento,’’ says Peter Debruge, of Variety. ‘‘I associate the word portentous with his work – this sonorous undertone that rumbles underneath his movies.
‘‘He’s a very classical director, which makes the Dark Knight films stand out from other comicbook movies. Those rely more on visual technology and effects. Nolan is grounded in an old-school aesthetic, even though he’s making these huge films.’’
Nolan, who turns 42 on July 30, admits to having been influenced primarily by 1970s cinema. But although he works in the Hollywood blockbuster arena, he doesn’t cite the expected names as inspirations – no Spielberg, no Lucas.
‘‘The great film-makers of the past – Terrence Malick, Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg, all those guys – created very experimental and interrogative works that pushed the grammar of film forward.
‘‘I’ve been inspired by some of the more outrageous cinema I’ve seen, but I have found a way to use that influence in a much more mainstream way. I was talking to Christian Bale, who is making a movie with Malick right now, and I joked that whatever Malick is up to, I’ll be ripping it off in five years, but making it really understandable to people.
‘‘Kubrick was inimitable: you can’t really try to do what he did, because it was very abstract and unique. But he had a way of calmly achieving an image that expressed a lot of emotions without firing in too many directions at once. He inspired me to always find the simplest, most direct way of getting an idea across.
‘‘It’s a cliche to say you steal from the best, but there is some truth to the idea.’’
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