Fascism versus anarchy

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2013)

A few thoughts on Christopher Nolan's film 'The Dark Knight Rises'. Firstly, a positive: I'm a sucker for films which play on the audience's sense of vertigo, I thought the window ledge scene was by far the best thing of the three 'Matrix' films put together, and there's also one scene in this film that's genuinely heart-in-mouth. The others are less positive. One, the standard elements of the blockbuster genre appear to have been done to death - 'Watchmen' also featured a plot based on the misappropriation of a source of potential power, while Cat-woman here has a moment that is pure Han Solo. Two, Nolan goes to great length with his use of computer graphics to depict Gotham City, yet still chooses to demonstrate the existence of its population in the form of a single bus-load of schoolchildren. Thirdly, whatever made anyone think that Bat-man, in any form, was a story worth spending nearly three hours telling? Comic books have their place but it's not that of the epic. Fourthly, as in Nolan's first Bat-man film, there's a storyline based on a pseudo-Eastern Jedi-esque world that feels as if it's from a parallel universe to the urban world of Gotham. Finally, the message of the storyline could be summarised as, when faced with a choice between fascism and anarchy, the former is to be preferred every time. I don't think Nolan is a fascist - but that he can make a film so long and yet so simplistic is in some ways indicative of what is wrong with so many mainstream movies. And yet this is by no means the worst film of it's kind. But views that it represents some kind of masterpiece are symptoms of expectations lowered by a sea of inanity elsewhere.