The Dark Knight Rises — And doesn’t know when to quit

Did anyone else watch scenes of crowd violence in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises with jitters in their legs?

The movie’s unfortunate cross-pollination with recent real-life murder can’t be that easy to shake, especially when the film drags on—and on—and up, and down, for nearly three hours.

So this is the central, numbing fear of America and Americans: Terrorism on home soil. How very old news.

The villain takes out a sacred football stadium—just after the national anthem!—and we see the yellow ‘n’ black Gotham City crowd shaking in their boots.

I couldn’t help but think about all the bombs the U.S. military has dropped on civilians in dirty wars all over the globe. It’s never other people’s fates that engage compassion, I guess, only threats to our own.

Faulty real + fantasy mash up

I get that this is Batman — AKA “The” Batman — and we are living in cartoon-world. So why the sell-out references to the nasty ‘people’ who Occupy Wall Street? Why the references to other real locations in the world? Why not complete the cartoon world?

Must be because, zillion-dollar budget aside, the imagination of the film’s makers cannot stretch as far as creating a truly seamless doppelganger for planet Earth.

Instead we have “Gotham” and “Prison.”

And, oh, do we have Prison.

Our hero whiles away the second half of Act 2 and the first part of Act 3 in a prison of Sand People, whilst the secondary characters run around with walkie-talkies chasing dump trucks and worrying about bombs.

Toothless villain

Once Wayne finds his way back to Gotham, the action starts again. But then the scary villain turns out to be a softie, not a sociopath at all, oh no. And after more hand-to-hand combat than is strictly necessary, he is shot dead. Hm. Why didn’t anyone think to do that earlier?

His eyes well up with tears. He isn’t the ringleader at all. Just another soldier.

Now we’re presented with a twist that doesn’t ring true. We see that the nefarious plans that have been driving the plot, given what we now know about the true villain, could have been carried out with the press of a button.

We learn the real villain held the keys to the bomb the whole time. Bruce Wayne gave them to her. So why all the theatrics? If you’re going to put in a twist, fellas, can you make sure it makes sense overall and doesn’t just allow you to stretch out Act 3?

And how did the bad guys find all the zealots to people their army? There were so many starry-eyed tough guys ready to die for a cause that remained completely unspoken.

Is this how we are meant to read our real-life enemies—as inexplicably driven? As mindless drones? That ain’t the way to win the war on terror, and it isn’t the way to save Gotham.

I hate how superhero action pictures must always telescope the personal into the societal. Even though the stakes are HIGH — an atom bomb will take out Gotham! — the motivations to both save and destroy come from the same origin: Everyone’s fucked up past in the League of Shadows.

So the citizens of Gotham are just so many set pieces while little childhood dramas are reenacted using interesting technological gadgets.

I like Christian Bale. What a waste that he is tied to this material.

What a waste that we see him try to escape the prison not once, not twice, but thrice — or was that four times? Reminded me of the endless montage in Inception — remember when the white van was going off the bridge while that fellow was rounded up floating people in an elevator? Remember how many times Nolan kept cutting back and forth, back and forth, when we already KNEW what was going on?

In Rises, we get repetitive references to ‘auto pilot’ in the whiz-bang new heli-machine. For no reason. Autopilot never becomes a plot point.

What is it about Christopher Nolan?

Does no one in the studio have the balls to say ‘no’ to him?

This movie had the usual continuity flaws — we go from day to night in a TIMED span of nine minutes, for one. It’s a glaring flaw, but no one—no second-unit director, no on-site production official—stopped Nolan from making it.

Worst of all, Nolan condescends to the audience. He shows us things two and three times that we only need to see once to register. It’s like being yelled at for being slow, when the only thing slow is the film.

The heart of the movie — Robin’s story about being an orphan, about meeting Bruce Wayne, about knowing he was The Batman — is washed aside for an unsatisfying trip down someone else’s memory lane.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda — Next!