Powerful and engaging, made so if only for its sub-text; The Dark Knight Rises is what it is at its heart, but that heart is wholly in the right place.

Rating: 7/10 (2 August 2013)

Do not think that by conquering the enemies inherent in the Middle East during that conflict for long enough, you have conquered 'terror'. It was four years between Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, wherein an enemy epitomising 'terror', from cyber to the kind that targets the mass destruction of iconographic structures, in The Joker, was vanquished. The time in the fictitious American city Gotham ever since has been relatively calm, almost eerily so – were the sporadic reigns of terror that befell this poor city from the odd assortment of criminal masterminds finally over? No, for the threat of terrorism at home is still, and always was, as prominent-a threat as an I.E.D. was for a soldier in Afghanistan. One day, the War in the Middle East will end but the likes of Britain; France; America; Australia and Holland will always be on the brink of facing a threat: that of domestic Islam and the ever-growing appetite for the power they crave. It is in The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan's 2012 film and last in trology which began quite innocuously in hindsight, that this eerie subtext (nay, warning) has been placed for the mainstream to digest.
Nolan and his brother, co-writer Jonathan, are English, but they are located in America out of a combination of business and what appears to be politics: they see what's happening to those in the U.K. and their designs on getting involved are expressed via a multi-million dollar film. Credit to them in this regard, and for once it isn't deemed good enough to walk away from a summer event-movie having enjoyed the visuals a bit and felt relaxed for two hours. Living in his huge manor house is Bruce Wayne (Bale), a character epitomising your bog-standard white Western shut-in who stays away from the approaching storm on the outside, a person of whom is later forced into standing up and being counted when inaction only leads to a disturbing changing of the guard through war and street conflict. Filmically, Wayne is shut away out of having conquered his nemesis and lost the love of his life and so long has he been in there that it has been eight years since anyone last saw Batman.
Tom Hardy has come a long way in his ability to play the villain; especially when one remembers the snivelling, almost pathetic, performance he gave in Star Trek: Nemesis all those years ago, of which carried no menace nor conviction. His villain is Bane. Aggressive; provocative; anonymous; powerful and with a large following, Hardy is essentially playing the physical epitome of Islam – his disturbing origins in this unspecific, desert-like locale and now seemingly prominent stature in The West serves only to confirm it. Bane leads a ragtag crew, most of whom look Muslim in ethnicity, seeks to raze Gotham City (here representing the Western world) to the ground so as to create a new order of rule: a Caliphate, one that resents Capitalism and everything in place now. His methods are brutal, his ways unflinching. He kills those who were once aides to his cause when they expire because, at the end of the day, they were always his enemy. Much like Islam in the West, when there are enough of them and they are able to garner enough control, they will conquer their leftist "allies" with similar clinical methods as they too, at the end of the day, were always Caucasian and very rich.
Tossed into proceedings is Anne Hathaway's Catwoman, although I devilishly read that at no point does anyone refer to her as "Catwoman" – only "Selena". Somewhat oddly, her presence is ultimately superfluous; her scenes constructed with too much of a nudge and wink, they are too self-conscious – this is The Dark Knight Rises, not The Sting. Hathaway plays a thief, a cat-burglar. There is what seems to be a sly nod to Burton's "Returns" early on, when we witness her "work" as a submissive maid to a rich Western male. We recall how life started for Pfeiffer's Selena Kyle, a coffee maker and dogsbody, before the character study branched out and she became the opposite. When Kyle here tears away the insignia that signals her role as a maid, the 'reveal' is made and we acknowledge that Nolan wants to hit the ground running in a way that is the polar opposite to before.
But the film is Bane's and the subtext that comes with him. Sequences towards the end of the film wouldn't be so hideously frightening if they weren't so truthfully prophetic; Bane's mock-court room, where those privileged are sentenced to death, is the bringing to life of what an Islamic Sharia court will look like when those charged with being guilty of not already having converted will face. What we see are essentially sequences of ethnic cleansing, something which is already going on under a more subtle guise in most Western nations; the punishment for those opulent enough to be guilty a sort of spin on the Quran's many ironic tortures awaiting the non-believer in Hell. Nolan suggests, through a police commissioner who must take over when Gordon (Oldman) sustains injury, that limp-wristed and liberal attitudes to quashing the early signs of the takeover will be useless. Additionally, he has Bane launch his official "Islamic" revolution at an NFL game, a descent into carnage and terror when, poignantly, the American national anthem (something patriotic & nationalistic) has concluded and ultimately signals the end of an era. The film carries with it weaknesses, of course; its core ingredients of character and story cannot equal its substantially dangerous subtext. Narratively, it is little more than a film about an evil guy with a big bomb looking to blow up the world (city), thus the film isn't any more or less challenging in that regard than something like "Moonraker". What it does have, however, is a warning through a sub-text and boy what a subtext.