The Dark Knight Rises

The final part of dark Chris Nolan‘s trilogy stays true to his style and comic book story, but I expected more. 

Director: Christopher Nolan | Stars: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway

Budget: 250 million | Box office: 340 million (1 week)

IMDb: 9.0 (#10) | Metacritic: 78

It‘s really hard to tell something about The Dark Knight Rises without spoiling it, but I‘ll try to be careful. It‘s safe to say that after surprising new vision of Batman Begins and totally gripping masterful The Dark Knight, third part was one of the most anticipated films in the recent memory. And in general it really delivers it‘s promise, but somehow for me it was not so pure and concentrated, as pushing you over the edge as the last movie. Of course, sadly that had to do with Heath Ledger‘s tragedy, but still Dark Knight Rises tries to weave a bit too much stories into one.

The movie had to be about final confrontation of fallen, hidden from life Batman and one of the most dangerous and cold enemies in all his universe – Bane. Thankfully, the most important role was given to a really perfect actor – Tom Hardy. I guess that Nolan spotted him in extremely violent biopic of the most notorious British prisoner – Bronson (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn!) and then first offered him a role in Inception. It‘s tough to act without basically having your face, but Hardy‘s posture, strange digitized voice and convincing eyes are really spot on. You can believe that he will not stop at anything and his plan for Batman and all Gotham are really grand. It‘s great that Nolan based his main plot around the comic story arc Knightfall and stayed true to even the most painful events. But still I expected more. And the actually quite unexpected big twist made it worse for me.

Other characters for me were a bit unnecesary distraction from the main idea. I have this strange dislike for Anne Hathaway, but I must admit she played out well as a Catwoman. She took it seriously and it feels natural. But she gets too much attention and with little actual impact. The same about Joseph Gordon Lewitt and his role as a usual cop, getting involved in unusual situation. As a plot tool it works well, but again in the end I had much different vision, which actually the film leads you to.

Production-wise Dark Knight Rises is absolutely brilliant, even epic. It really has those hard to describe moments of total immersion. But not as a whole movie. Obviously majority thinks otherwise, considering ratings.

Now it will be really interesting what happens next. Just recently there was new Batman picture listed in Darren Aronofsky‘s profile, so it would be amazing to see his vision, which was actually refused by Warner before Nolan took over. Maybe now is the right time?