The Dark Knight Rises
Directed By:
Christopher Nolan
Written By:
Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David
S. Goyer (characters created by Bob Kane)
Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman,
Joseph-Gordon Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Gary Oldman, Matthew Modine, Ben Mendelsohn,
and Nestor Campbell.
Director of Photography: Wally Pfister, Editor: Lee Smith,
Production Designer: Nathan Crowley and Kevin Kavanaugh, Original Music: Hans
Zimmer
The
idea of “superhero movie fatigue” has been an issue raised by film critics again
and again for the last few years. Another Spider-Man?
An X-Men spinoff? More? Nevermind
that we had three Maltese Falcon
adaptations in less than ten years, but outside the point of all this yawning
of superheroes, sometimes it’s forgotten why they exist in culture at all.
Superheroes are myth stories. The Greeks had Achilles. Medieval times had
Beowulf. And we have Superman. Sure, when you wait only three years between a
film, perhaps not much changes in our perception and meaning of this myth. But
the point is that a superhero can mean something different depending on time
and circumstances. This is what Christopher Nolan believes. Unfortunately, I
don’t know if he knows what his heroes want to stand for.
It’s
hard not to know that this weekend sees the release of The Dark Knight Rises, the third (and final) “chapter” in Nolan’s
vision of the Batman myth. Such hype and speculation has fueled the world since
the release of 2008’s The Dark Knight,
a box office bonanza that attempted to not only take superheroes seriously, but
to extract as much “super”-ness as possible. And with Inception out of the way, Nolan, writing the script with his
brother Jonathan, has returned to make something of an epic in the Charles
Dickens sense. The Dark Knight Rises
is truly a big film—three hours long, with a good portion of the film shot on
IMAX cameras, and featuring at least 10 plots that somehow mesh together at the
end. It’s also a total mess of conflicting ideas and emotions and flat
filmmaking, marred by it’s desire to simply do too much. But it kept me glued
to my seat while watching it nonetheless.
