Next time is the Second Coming

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2012)

I have little to say about this film because it is a good film by its special effects and by the various components it contains, from the strong and barbarous terroristic emotions to the powerful and human passions and to the political meaning it conveys.
Starting with the last point the dark knight that rises is a direct allusion to the rising of Jesus after his crucifixion and to his rising some time later to heaven. The next film will be the second coming with some self-appointed successor. That will be hard to renew the genre but I am sure they can find some authors to write the next episode.
As for the political discourse the film also presents terrorists as people who have suffered some injustice and who come back for a vengeance. They are manipulated by a slice of the top society who thinks they are going to fill up their pockets and their bags. Of course they end up manipulated by the terrorists and dead because the terrorists only have one thing in mind, their vengeance. That's the extreme right alluding to the Tea Party movement and the Tea Party Patriots with Paul Ryan who is coming from that section of society, the presentable faÃ§ade of this extreme right violence.
On the other hand the extreme left and the Occupy Wall Street movement is not very far and the discourse about a revolution to give power back to the people and to get rid of the rich, the powerful, the exploiters and the profiteers and then to redistribute the recuperated riches is common in our countries where it is easier to be unrealistic than to be sober and clean-minded. Ask Hollande how he was elected and look at what he is doing. Brilliant hypocritical demagogy.
Both movements bring armies of volunteers whose objective is looting, killing, destroying and torturing. You can have a lot of volunteers in our society. Marx called them the lumpen-proletariat, those who have nothing to lose except their chains, but not their souls because they have none. You have to add to these the anarchists who consider society has to be destroyed to liberate the collective mind and the small delinquents who find in the opportunity the possibility to steal a computer here or a telephone in some pocket or whatever can have some value or can be a trophy. In both cases these movements start with opening the prison to liberate all the prisoners who are obvious social and political prisoners. Havoc comes in both cases anyway.
Then you have the strong and barbarous emotions of the injustice suffered by those who are going to become terrorists. They are sent to prison on a whim or for some vengeance. Children can be born in prisons that are nothing but dying hospices. Then some escape. Then some are tortured to the extreme of their possibility to resist and they die during that barbaric treatment, or should I say processing, like raw meat in a butcher's shop. And you end up with a daughter and a protector and a father and a dead mother and a lot of sad horror.
On the side of human and powerful passions there are plenty too with Batman of course, an orphanage and the children there, the blind violence and fake justice imposed to anyone who is not favored by the new masters. The suspense of the bomb and the count down. The constant choice of being killed when resisting, or being given the choice by some revolutionary tribunal to die by hanging or to die by drowning when going out into exile. And some amorous passion comes up too, and the valet Alfred betrays his master.
A film to see if you like strong action. If you prefer comedies, author's films, manifesto films or hefty social and cultural stuff, abstain from this one that is none of these. But it is entertaining enough to even make you think. What did I say about Paul Ryan? Interesting, Dr Watson, interesting indeed.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU