The Dark Knight Rises over the usual mediocrity of comic book-based blockbusters

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2012)

Let me be clear: "The Dark Knight Rises" is not among my most favorite Christopher Nolan's movies. I value his "Inception", "The Prestige", or "Memento" higher than any movie of the "Batman"trilogy.
Having said that and not being by any means a Hollywood history expert, I am still compelled to argue that it is probably impossible to find any comic book-based movie that even remotely approaches the quality and the scale of the Nolan's "Batman" series.
No matter what the public thinks, there are objective laws of the art of the cinema, laws that cannot be changed by any amount of the public opinion. By these highest standards, "The Dark Knight Rises" might very well be considered the best comic-book based movie ever to date. Any attempt to put it in the same league with the primitive, shallow, formulaic, and mediocre "The Avengers", "Thor", "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Spider-Man", or "Superman" is nothing more than laughable.
In "The Dark Knight Rises", drama and action almost perfectly supplement each other with the latter tastefully illustrating and animating the former. Sometimes it feels like the drama becomes a little constrained by the simplistic superhero movie format. In certain scenes, the movie gasps for more depth just as a drowning person gasps for more air. Even under these unfavorable conditions, even with these severe limitations, with his hands half-tied by the movie format Christopher Nolan was able to achieve surprisingly good results.
Unlike the many other comic book-based movies, "The Dark Knight Rises" has a coherent, reasonably thought provoking, with hints of depth story that features major plot twists, more than one dimension and also something quite rarely heard of in a superhero movie – a substantiated, valid, well-depicted character development. As the captivating story unfolds, at least three characters experience significant transformation – Bruce Wayne, Selina, and Alfred.
I hope it goes without saying that the acting in a comic book-based superhero movie cannot be too deep or nuanced - that is simply the nature of the beast. On the other hand, however, we still expect the acting to be professional, reasonably powerful, and convincing enough, in other words we expect it to be quite unlike the pitiful acting disaster that we have been cruelly subjected to enduring in many recent blockbusters.
"The Dark Knight Rises" provides us with an ample opportunity to enjoy several strong acting performances, the most significant of which are Anne Hathaway ( Selina), Christian Bale ( Bruce Wayne), and last (but not least) – Tom Hardy (Bane).
My personal favorite is Bane – the ultimate villain and the ultimate victim at the same time. Bane is deceptively calm, immensely charismatic, and very real. That explosive combination makes him far more frightening than all those supernatural fairy-tale monsters with very scary looks and a very weak link to reality.
Bane is a true Nolan's masterpiece, a result of the extremely complex effort that combined the clever script, the impressive acting, the costume design, the makeup, and even the sound effects into a dynamic multi-dimensional character of an unbelievable power. Not to mention that due to the imaginative major plot twists Bane keeps revealing new facets of his very complex character almost up to the very end of the movie.
To me that makes Bane a truly unique villain character, a character possibly superior to even Joker. While Joker was notoriously scheming and unpredictable, his motivations were pretty much transparent and obvious from the beginning. Bane on the other hand keeps his surprising secrets almost up to the movie climax. Only then we begin to see a tragic figure behind the ugly mask, only then we begin to understand what his deep motivations were, what stood behind his horrible choices and what ultimately led his tragic life to its logical end.
As I mentioned before, unlike most other movies of a similar genre notorious for their striking hollowness and thoughtlessness, "The Dark Knight Rises" is both thought provoking and thought conveying.
In my opinion, the first important thought that "The Dark Knight Rises" tries to convey to the public is that however corrupt and unjust a society order might be, anarchy ( Bane's bitter medicine) is never a good solution. The chaos of anarchy inevitably leads to far more blood, death, and suffering than the unjust social order that it replaces. The longer the anarchy continues, the dangerously closer the society approaches to its ultimate destruction and annihilation.
The second important thought is that society needs its anonymous heroes, heroes armed with true superpowers – love, caring, and compassion, heroes who will "learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause." (Isaiah 1:17). As Batman says in the movie: "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a little boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended."
Finally, "The Dark Knight Rises" makes people think about something that many of us fear to think about and therefore prefer not to dwell upon too long – so-called "American Dream". Is it still alive? Was it indeed created by the oppressors of generations, the rich, for the sole purpose of keeping people down with myths of opportunity as Bane boldly proclaims in the movie?
Nolan intentionally does not offer any ready answers, just prompts the viewers to take a fresh look at the familiar cliché and possibly re- evaluate its meaning and its role in the modern world so powerfully symbolized by the dark, unjust, corrupt, cruel, essentially hopeless and balancing on the verge of destruction sober reality of the Gotham city from "The Dark Knight Rises".
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