A satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

Rating: 8/10 (23 July 2012)

If ours is a troubled age, it's also an astonishing one. We live in an era of cohesive blockbuster multi-movie projects that would have been inconceivable in any earlier era. The monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy; a great Avengers movie built on the foundation of half a dozen set-up films, all of good or excellent quality; and now Christopher Nolan's completed Batman trilogy, which is unlikely to be excelled as smart superhero myth-making in the near future.
This isn't to say that the Nolan films are without flaw. It took a great deal of squinting to buy the League of Shadows' supposed motive for wanting to destroy Gotham in Batman Begins -- an ideology that seems just as cartoonish in its even more ambitious encore appearance here. I was never quite able to buy the towering Moses-like importance of Harvey Dent that the second film ultimately revolved around; that plot line makes an encore appearance here too, though it's mercifully minor in the grander scheme of things. And if you found the supernatural effectiveness of the Joker's scheming in TDK a bit hard to swallow, that's nothing compared to what Bane pulls off here. (Don't think too hard about just how many exits a modern sewer system is likely to have, for instance.) There's one other flaw, too, or rather a difference in interpretation of the character that I find puzzling. Throughout all three films, Nolan is content to represent Batman largely as a science-ninja-hero. While this of course is great stuff, it does seem to have rather gone by the wayside that this is also a character who is meant to be a great *detective*. If I could spot the ending plot twist in TKDR coming from two hours away, I find it disappointing that Batman himself should be unable to figure it out.
Having said all that: Nolan has big ideas, and a verve of execution, that compensate for these flaws.
One thing that's notable about the Batman trilogy is the uncanny accuracy it has in tapping into the most primal fears of the age. Batman Begins exploited a fear of corruption in high places. The Dark Knight turned the Joker into a demonic, nihilistic avatar of the terrorism threat. And in the Dark Knight Rises, the villains are stand-ins for (and consciously utilize) an even more primal and pervasive dread: the fear of popular uprising and revolution. There's a lot to be said about the basically reactionary take these films deliver on each theme -- and the ways in which their treatment of the ethical questions and their portrayals of real evils are actually stunted -- but nevertheless their evocation is supremely effective as entertainment, giving the work a vividly frightening psychological core.
As in the previous films, the plotting is tight and clever provided one is willing to squint at certain things, and there's a tremendous amount of immensely satisfying material: * Bale's work as both Batman and Bruce Wayne is as solid here as ever, and Michael Caine's work as Aflred is brilliant and very moving, marking out a perfect emotional trajectory for the character. (It's great that we see the first really serious questioning of the whole role of masked vigilante in this film, and that it's Alfred who explicitly brings up the obvious: why not use the vast resources of Wayne Enterprises to build up the community instead of running around in a cape and socking people in the jaw?) * Anne Hathaway blows her doubters and detractors out of the water quite thoroughly in the role of Catwoman, whom she delivers as a fully realized and convincing character in a way that we haven't seen on the big screen before. She fits in the setting, she's critical to the plot, she's impressive in action and has a sultry seductiveness in her arsenal to boot. In a way she's a less camp version of the iconic Julie Newmar Catwoman, and that's to the good.
* Tom Hardy's Bane is as deliriously over-the-top a villain as one could wish for, serving up immense quantities of ham in almost every appearance (my personal favourite line: "Ease has robbed you of your strength! Victory has defeated *you*!") combined with a kinetic, clinical brutality that makes him as fearsome as he is entertaining. The reinvention of the character through a tie-in with the League of Shadows mythos is quite ingenious.
The rest of the cast perform as admirably as ever, and the resolution of the most apocalyptic let's-try-to-blow-up-Gotham-one-more-time plot yet is quite excellent. The call-outs to the past films are masterfully done, and despite the awesomely grim material, there is no shortage of wit and humour in the script either.
All in all, a great conclusion to a great trilogy. Worth getting out to a theatre to see it, definitely.