Why I’m like increasingly disappointed with The Dark Knight Rises, not to mention kind of confounded by the general public’s seemingly-gushing reaction to it

Please note: the following is like rife with spoilers, bad language, and all around curmudgeonly sentiments.

 Batman Begins floored me, quite literally. I went home after seeing it, sprawled out on the floor of my bedroom, and sort of just let my brain unfold in reverse-origami fashion. I’ve had this reaction to other movies: Amelie, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream, and Memento, to name a few. I won’t make claims of superior cinematic achievement for any of these films (I’m no movie critic, and kind of a cinema-hater in general), but will posit that they’re all extremely sound w/r/t form & structure, and that they’re all incredibly earnest. They fight to earn your trust for every minute of their total runtime, and when the credits roll, there’s the sense that your trust has been rewarded in full. So to return to BB and yours truly kind of like incapacitated and supine on the floor, you could sum up my reaction as a kind of exaggerating geeking-out over a movie that proposed a frame, stayed within that frame, and attended in earnest to you and your established expectations for its duration.

                I saw The Dark Knight in the theater five times, a personal record, which is actually kind of weird considering I didn’t actually like the movie as much as BB, which I saw in theaters only once. While darker, better-acted, and more ambitious, the movie kind of fell outside of its own lines, and not in that intentional-art-house kind of way but the oh-shit-we-ran-out-of-screen-time kind of way. It felt more piecemeal, a bit less whole, and seemed sort of like strained under the effort of packing in all of its content.

                Walking home from The Dark Knight Rises, my general reaction was more or less, “Okay, the movie was fine in most ways, but in some ways, it was really kind of a piece of shit,” which is unfortunate, seeing as how I was pretty sold from say the 40 percent mark – where Batman gets his body, brain, and soul positively smashed by Bane – to the 85 percent mark – where Batman makes his march on Bane and the “war” for Gotham begins. I found the pit-of-hell prison itself as a pleasant and unexpected surprise, and it housed some of the more earnest attempts at Batman’s character in the movie, much more so than the cardboard-cutout of a reclusive martyr presented to us at the movie’s inception and the cardboard cut-out martyr/just-kidding-not-a -martyr hoisted up onto a gleaming black pedestal at its finish. Also, Bane’s Gotham was in and of itself pretty fascinating, presenting some pretty solid social commentary (“Oh what’s up Occupy Movement”) and philosophical ponderings, not to mention succeeding as a character all its own. But then there we are at the 85% mark and Batman is shrieking “WHERE IS THE TRIGGER?! WHERE IS IT!” and I’m like, “Oh, shit, I’ve seen this movie and I’m like fucking dying to pee over here, is this thing over yet or what?” Which, okay, each of the three movie had its laughable lines/moments – but honestly, I was ready to get out of my seat not only due to an almost-insatiable need to urinate, but because I was just sick and tired of Batman at that point.

                On that note, let me say here that my overall reflection concerning TDKR since seeing it is that I enjoyed the movie least when Batman was on screen, which sucks considerably seeing as how I was in the theater in the first place to see Batman. Bale’s acting could be critiqued, sure (we’ve all seen Terminator: Salvation), but I don’t hold him accountable as much as I attribute this feeling to laziness in writing and direction.

To best illustrate this point, let’s take a look at two very similar scenes in BB and TDKR – Batman skulking through the dark to eliminate his foes. In BB, this scene takes place in the shipyard – in TDKR, it takes place when Batman and Catwoman team up to clear a tunnel-route to Bane. In the former, we understand that Batman is hard to see/kill via a focus on his enemies & their terror. We watch them sweat, switch paths suddenly, spray bullets at passing glimpses of black. In TDKR, we see Batman weave toward the camera across a series of strobe-light shots. The main difference between these scenes could be boiled down to this: in the first movie, Nolan proves to us that Batman is fucking scarily efficient. In TDKR, he just assumes we get it, that we’re like onboard or whatever. But I argue that it is always an author/director’s work to prove to us what they are trying to convey. This is why the admittedly stale epigram of “show don’t tell” gets so much play in the writing world – it’s simply accepted that the author needs to earn our trust, and that they need to work to maintain it. Great books/movies/TV shows earn out trust in each & every word/shot/scene. There is always an element of proof, an appeal for just a little more of your trust.

This is, I think, why Bane was pulled off & executed so well – obvious effort was invested in proving him as a character to us, the audience. It wasn’t assumed we’d accept & understand him from the get go – the team that made TDKR worked for it. They earned his success and our belief. This, I think, is my main beef w/ the movie, as all of my other gripes feel like an extension of this main critique. “Oh, you liked what we did with the Batmobile, eh? Then you’ll love this motorcycle w/ like its like flip-floppy tires or whatever, and you’ll go straight-up-bananas for this flying scarab thing.”

Okay, maybe I’m overly-biased about the flying scarab, but to make a more concrete point, take a look at the opening minutes of TDKR, which is more-or-less a straight rip-off of TDK’s start: a seemingly straight-forward high-tension situation unfolds into unexpected complexity, our main baddy appears disguised as one of his common thugs, and the thing ends with an intricate and kind-of-neat getaway twist. The general sentiment of TDKR’s opening five minutes was something like, “Y’all liked this sort of thing in the last movie, so guess what! We’re doing it again!” Except what made it work the first time around was that so much more effort & thought went into making it special, unique – into proving to you that you gave a damn about what was unfolding onscreen.

And honestly, I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. This sentiment is embedded in the way people talk about the film. “A great capstone to end the series,” or “flawed, but completes the saga.” I can’t help but get the feeling that the general consensus is that because TDKR is connected to both a great and a very good film (and please feel free to take your pick as to which is which), it’s good by association. That is has the right to stand on those films’ shoulders. Sure, the movie is fine, but it’s also kind of a piece of shit, the way I’ve had to admit to myself in recent years that Return of the Jedi is fine, but also kind of a piece of shit. And really, did we know the “saga” needed ending before seeing TDKR?  Sure, I get that most people don’t like unhappy endings, and that I’ll continue to be alone in feeling just fine w/r/t the idea of Batman being forever the fall guy in Nolan’s universe, but I don’t think any of us were kicking around thinking, “You know, that League of Shadows thing kind feels like it’s just hanging open w/ a lot of unanswered questions. Who was Liam Neeson referring to when he said he lost a woman he loved?” TDKR was extremely successful in terms of graceful writing to fit with its predecessors, but let’s not confuse grace with necessity.

Anyways. I don’t think TDKR was a bad movie. It’s fine – it’s got great elements & moments – but I would argue that on its own, it wouldn’t really be much of anything. And I don’t think I can say that of TDK, which stands just fine on its own, without its predecessor. The third film in the Bale/Nolan rises, sure, but it never manages to get wings of its own.