With the exception of one lengthy detour, the action mostly sticks with Gotham this time around, and the fictional city-- an amalgam of New York's skyline, Pittsburgh's rivers and Chicago's highway tunnels-- comes alive more vividly than ever before. The dazzling IMAX photography certainly helps, using both wide aerial shots and ground-level street scenes to plunge the audience into the grandeur and mounting unrest in the city that's so obviously worth saving. Even Bane says that he is Gotham's reckoning, not Batman's, and populated as it is by such interesting people-- Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox, Michael Caine's Alfred, and Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate also being part of the equation-- it's easy to be invested in Gotham's salvation, even when the man in the bat suit charged with saving it is less engaging than he's ever been.
As the conclusion to a genuinely game-changing trilogy The Dark Knight Rises is appropriately big and ambitious, and it's unlikely we'll see anyone make a superhero movie with Nolan's sense of scale and devotion to old-school, captured-on-film razzle-dazzle. It has moments that are captivating and special, but also lines of dialogue impossible to swallow, plot developments that meander, and a commitment to real-world political overtones that don't quite line up with the story. It's sprawling but undeniably engaging, not quite the blast of clever mayhem The Dark Knight was, but no slouch either.
Batman will live on beyond Nolan, and hopefully with a filmmaker who finds him a bit more interesting, but the world he inhabits will never look quite the same, and short of someone letting Nolan make his series of Gotham movies without the Bat, it's probably the best we'll ever see this city. No one goes into a superhero's movie to explore the world he lives in, but Nolan dares us to do it anyway, and his willingness to challenge his own genre makes The Dark Knight Rises, like all of his Batman films, unmissable.
As the conclusion to a genuinely game-changing trilogy The Dark Knight Rises is appropriately big and ambitious, and it's unlikely we'll see anyone make a superhero movie with Nolan's sense of scale and devotion to old-school, captured-on-film razzle-dazzle. It has moments that are captivating and special, but also lines of dialogue impossible to swallow, plot developments that meander, and a commitment to real-world political overtones that don't quite line up with the story. It's sprawling but undeniably engaging, not quite the blast of clever mayhem The Dark Knight was, but no slouch either.
Batman will live on beyond Nolan, and hopefully with a filmmaker who finds him a bit more interesting, but the world he inhabits will never look quite the same, and short of someone letting Nolan make his series of Gotham movies without the Bat, it's probably the best we'll ever see this city. No one goes into a superhero's movie to explore the world he lives in, but Nolan dares us to do it anyway, and his willingness to challenge his own genre makes The Dark Knight Rises, like all of his Batman films, unmissable.