The Dark Knight Rises Breakdown

TDKR has a lot going for it. The cast is phenomenal, it's beautifully shot with fantastic use of space, light and visual metaphor, and the very iconic soundtrack make for a wonderful viewing experience for our third and final Nolan Batman film. But, unlike The Dark Knight, TDKR's storyline falls drunkenly on its face several times from the opening scene to the closing scene. TDKR plays out like a half assed excuse to appease the trilogy gods and give a great cast some more screen time rather than a chance for the audience to see an iconic super hero go through the final stage of his rebirth to dramatic screen legend. So what could have gone wrong between TDK and TDKR?

The answer is incredibly sad and ultimately frustrating for both fans and the creators of the films; they chose not only to NOT recast the Joker but also to COMPLETELY remove him from the film universe. This is the first and most important and ultimately fatal mistake that lies at the heart of TDKR's storytelling failure.

You do not need to see a character on screen for them to influence a narrative and in TDK The Joker was EXTREMELY influential; so much so that, even as a sequel to Batman Begins, they chose a totally different title. While we are following the same characters from the first film, The Dark Knight was a separate narrative in every possible way. A villain that embraced chaos and the cold logic of insanity much the same way that Batman embraced theatricality and the law of might makes right. The Joker went out of his way to convince people that he had no plan and that all of his insanity was random and he was riding the wave like everyone else, but if you stepped back and looked at it EVERYTHING he did required incredible amounts of forethought and planning. But he kept people focused on the insanity of what he was doing and if your victims believe there is no logic to your behavior they stop looking for logical solutions. The Joker needed to be involved in TDKR for all those reasons, but NEVER on screen. There are many ways to accomplish this and the Batman universe has nearly an infinite number of possible solutions.

So let’s take a look at the plot of TDKR, I am disregarding the 8 minutes of footage they put before Mission Impossible 4, it's pointless, I never saw it and if it meant anything to the story they should have kept it with the feature film. We start eight years after the end of The Dark Knight.

A man waits next to a tiny plane on an airfield in Somewheresville, Nonamistan. A truck pulls up and delivers four men, Three with bags over their head and handcuffed and one without. We find out the free man is a scientist of sorts and the airplane man is very excited to have custody of him. The other three are said to work for 'the masked man'. And Airplane guy says “Bane!” and gets a little wet in his pants. He then takes all four men onboard. Here we come across our first bit of illogical behavior. You are trying to transport this very important scientist for very important reasons to someplace very important and there are three men who have already been caught and captured trying to kidnap your scientist. KILL THEM, problem solved. You're in Somewheresville, Nonamistan why the fuck are you taking these guys onto your tiny plane? The only reason this guy didn't leave them behind is because one of them is Bane and Bane needed to be on the plane. This is stupid, not smart, not intelligent, not crafty. It's fucking dumbshits on ice and so is everything that follows afterward. You try to threaten three guys for background information about a character we're about to see anyway? Why not try and find out why they wanted the scientist? What the hell does the mask matter at all? Was getting caught part of your plan? These questions are pointless and stupid used only to pinpoint how stupid this random dude is, because the plane is then attacked by a bigger plane. So the bigger plane drags the littler plane and the wings fall off like one hundred miles away from where the plane drops straight down into the earth like a lawn dart from hell and no one ever mentions this event ever again ever.

Batman has taken an eight year hiatus, Jim Gordon has been overseeing a city seemingly at peace and thus is about to get fired cause that's what you do when a man takes a metropolitan hellhole and cleans it up. You fire him. Also Bruce Wayne has a leg injury and has been holed up in one wing of his new house alone and sad for a really long time. Gordon feels that it is time to out the lie he himself created about how awesome Harvey Dent was because this will...do...something, for the city of Gotham...yeah. Anyway he has this big speech which could basically be summed up as “I told you a lie about a white guy so you would all behave and be awesome and it worked for eight years, btw all that shit about the white guy was a lie...um...sorry?” And understandably Gordon feels bad about his lie, it cost the city their Batman and presumably his marriage which we get sorta as a side conversation between two other characters. Gordon is done carrying this burden. But Wayne, well Wayne is apparently having fun being an eccentric broken rich dude and is not at all shocked when Catwoman steals pearls and his fingerprints from his house. He doesn't seem to care much right now about the fact that he gave EVERYTHING he worked for up to protect a pointless lie designed to save the face (HA!) of a dead man. He doesn't seem to care that he has let his body fall by the wayside. If they explain his injuries in the 8 minute thing then I hate this story even more. He doesn't even seem to care that honestly the city is NOT safe or peaceful it's only free of super villains which could have been an interesting idea to explore (I.E. The hero’s most powerful tool is completely removing themselves from the city thus avoiding the creation of a power vacuum that is filled by an equally powered enemy created much the same way or BY the hero himself.), but they completely ignore that idea and move onto Batman just decided to stick his head in the sand and wait for his prom.

Ultimately the opening the film makes two things abundantly clear. Gotham city has calmed down. Police corruption and organized crime, which were major plot elements of the first two films are not only no longer an issue in this film, they have ceased to be a concern of any kind to anyone of importance in story. Gordon and Batman/Wayne have carried the pointless burden of Harvey Dents legacy for far too long, for no reason easily discernible to the audience. We are left with two strong men, capable of great deeds as we have already seen, suddenly broken and tired for reasons left almost entirely unexplained.

Enter Catwoman - a criminally under used element in the story. She has a great introduction with stealing from Bruce Wayne repeatedly and building a rapport and then we have a great conversation with Selena Kyle and Bruce Wayne concerning the inequality of lifestyle and the 'storm' that's coming for the rich and powerful and she has this great speech and then....nothing. She literally does nothing for the rest of the film other than betray Batman to a scarier villain and then walk through the rest of movie all mopey for being a wasted character. Not one single element of the bond that develops in the first hour of the film between Wayne and Kyle is built upon. Not one single iota of her threat to him at the party is of her own doing, she in no way is part of the plan to bring chaos to the city, she merely sits back and watches it happen, and they never even give a reason for her to be aware of what Bane is planning to do.

Bane is easily the most interesting character in the film, not because of the background they give him or the character build they give him, but because he is one of two main characters that are doing SOMETHING REASONABLE. Banes motivation makes sense, his actions make sense. His secret base at first doesn't make any sense until it turns out that it's literally right under Wayne Enterprises applied sciences secret piggy bank of toys...wtf? Why is Fox's secret base literally on the first floor directly above a massive sewer room? Your secret 'off the books” hiding place is bad and you should feel bad! From the point that Bane connects directly the rest of film he ceases to make any sense what so ever. His plan is pretty and diabolical but doesn't make even one tiny amount of sense. See, Bane kidnapped the only scientist in the world that figured out a way to turn the ONLY perfectly stable fusion energy system on the planet into a very, very, VERY slow fusion time bomb. How slow does it have to be to say very three times? FIVE MONTHS. Yes the bomb will explode in five months if not stopped by any one of the 625,000 people in the city of Gotham. Bane is hoping that fear will keep them from banding together and stopping it. BTW I’m using the population of Boston ‘cause I felt like even though they used New York for distance shots of the city, because Boston’s population was a more reasonable number to cling to.

Before I get into the rest of the film I would very much like to know why the scientist who figured out how to turn the possibly not even real fusion energy system that Wayne Corp owned into a fusion bomb (every thermonuclear bomb/missile in existence today is a fusion weapon.) So this scientist has figured out how to turn something of which there is ONLY 1 of on the earth to something of which there are THOUSANDS of. Why couldn't this guy turn every fusion bomb into one of these Fusion energy systems? And getting beyond that, why did Bane need some extremely convoluted plan to get the Wayne Corp fusion system when he could just get literally ANY ONE of thousands of thermonuclear weapons from around the world? Why was the Wayne Corp system so special? Why only use one roving bomb in the city? Why not take control of ONE American naval vessel and take the missiles out of that and then have to fight Steven Seg – wait wrong movie.

The only other character of interest is Blake, who might as well have been Batman for this story because he did the most detecting and actual hero work. Everything that Blake did in this film Batman NEEDED to be doing. Breaking down Banes plan, being smarter than the cops, being the logical cool head of the movie that wanted to in the end at the very least save the kids. But while Blake is doing all of this we are watching Bruce Wayne heal his broken back and get not only out of a hole but from the other side of the planet with no funds, and no way to have Alfred sneak him back into the quarantined city. Which he does in just under five months. Lucky him. So instead of seeing Batman 'Rise' by putting in the hard work hours to re-earn the love and trust of Gotham city and PROVE that he wasn't the villain in the case of Harvey Dent we are left with Blake who they then sort of toss a bone to him by either making him Nightwing or the New Batman.

So why is the movie called “The Dark Knight Rises”? Because they connected back to the well that Bruce fell into as a child. The prison that he climbs out of is his emotional version of a resurrection, the time when he throws the weight of his decisions from the second film off his back and climbs out of the dark pit of his living death and crawls back to the light of the world, newly afraid and ready to kick ass in the name of Gotham. The only part of this that fails to work is the fact that we aren't given a chance to see Bruce Wayne weighed down by the decisions made in the film. Yes he gets his back broken but the splitting with Alfred, the loss of Gordon as an ally, the problems in the city, even the loss of his company pretty much do NOTHING to affect him past the moment in which they happen. So by the time we are told that this hole he is in is a form of resurrection it only works on a very minor level because we haven't really had time to see him under the emotional pressure of the burdens he bears, even though we know he bears them, ultimately the escape from the hole is inevitable and the character fails to show or express ANY emotional growth.

Gotham is much the same as Batman. After the first two highly random and dangerous events that are the first two films, I find myself not only wondering why anyone would choose to live in Gotham but why the city continues to function at all. Both of these questions could have been very interesting to see Nolan answer but he skips past both of these and lands on “how do you hold a major metropolitan area hostage for the better part of a year and get both the citizens, the public safety workers, the national guard, the military, the government, and the United Nations to do absolutely nothing. In fact, the threat of blowing up the city is such a great deterrent that they put one cop on one bridge to tell people to go home should they storm the bridge. What happened to seal teams? “We will not negotiate with terrorists!” The swat cops and other public servants with weapons in the city itself? Did they just give all that shit up like “oh shit there’s a bomb on a truck, Bane! Please take all my guns!”? Ultimately we are presented with a city and by extension a nation that is perfectly willing to sit back, do absolutely nothing to stop the villains, the bomb, or save the city in any way. I don't count sending in the group of random guys who then immediately get shot after an info dump because it was a waste of time but they needed a somewhat plausible reason to explain what was going on in the city as the audience was just with Batman for the last twenty minutes half way around the world. The city clams up, goes into hibernation and refuses repeatedly to save itself, until they have like fifteen minutes left, then the three thousand cops that have been living in collapsed tunnels for three months (released by the batwings missiles) emerge after months of captivity wearing pristinely clean and immaculate uniforms, well fed, and somehow in fighting shape. So the city and the plot really skip FIVE months like it meant nothing and then the cops, and ONLY the cops gather to fight the bad guys, to say nothing of the firemen, the military folks who were there on leave, the national guard members, or any other civil servants and first responders that happened to be in Gotham at the moment that the city became locked down (unless you’re Bruce Wayne). But no just the cops who somehow lost their guns in that five month period because even though fully armed SWAT guys walked into those tunnels they all came up funny hat wearing beat cops with night sticks where their service revolvers should be. Bane and Batman get in on this cops and crooks beat down as the city slumbers (except for the boys home kids who get put on the ONLY BUS IN THE ENTIRE GOTHAMN METRO AREA) Bane and Batman get busy with their Rocky IV fight and punch each other in the head and chest repeatedly (cause time bomb not important only boxing important!) Until Miranda Tate stabs Batman with a Kryptonite knife...I think it's Kryptonite cause that's the only reason I can think of for him to be all “I suck again” while it's in him but then back to being awesome once he pulls it out.

Here comes the part where I backtrack and point out that I'm skipping a lot of really beyond stupid plot shit, but I will sum up. Bane's more convoluted plan was to work as a mercenary for the guy who was trying to woo Miranda Tate in the beginning of the film. See he wants control of Wayne Enterprises and figures the best way to do that is to have a bunch of mercenaries break into the Gotham Stock Exchange (Think the NYSE) and break into the computer system and using Wayne's stolen fingerprints (courtesy of Catwoman) to trade away Wayne’s entire fortune, including the company, so that Daggatt could buy it all. In response to this disaster Wayne gives the company to Miranda Tate, much like he gave it to Fox in the first film, only Tate turns out the be the ultimate villain. Bane kills Daggatt because he has outlived his usefulness, which is questionable at best because really this whole idea is ludicrous at best. So then Miranda Tate has control of the fusion device and sort of pretends to be a victim when Bane takes control and forces them to access it to turn it into a bomb, then she sits around some more while Bane makes a bunch of speeches about not taking shit from rich folks no more ‘cause were going to burn this mother down. Then, when Batman and Bane are having it out and you think Bane is this badass who climbed out of the same prison Batman did, you find out that no, it was Miranda all along and fuck Bane you actually don't know shit about him other than he's got a mask ‘cause someone cut his pretty face. Then she sort of double deuces both Bane and Batman and lives up to the horrible stereotype that women cannot drive by crashing the truck with the bomb in it and dying after an action scene where her truck sloughs off like sixteen direct missile hits...wtf. Goodbye Miranda Tate.

For fun go back and watch the blond rip off of Harvey Dent police guy at the end of the movie. He goes from pistol to random ass assault rifle to random ass being dead, you don't see him switch weapons, you don't see him die, it’s just three cuts in less than thirty seconds and it's good bye dip shit blond cop guy. It made me laugh.

So Batman and Bane go back to beating each other about the head and shoulders except Catwoman shows up and shoots the hell out of Bane with the Batcycle guns, which is probably better than finding out that his face mask just had Juicy Juice in it.

In the end, after gratuitous action scenes, Batman sacrifices himself (or did he?) to fly the bomb thing out into the ocean which will cause no harm at all to Gotham's fishing or aquatic industries in any way. Alfred gets his Goodwill Hunting ending, Fox somehow avoids indictments for being the worst CEO in the history of companies that took on military hardware contracts (oh wait – that’s not so hard). Commissioner Gordon stayed Commissioner Gordon, Blake, whose middle name is (da da DAA!) Robin, gets a geocaching clue from the Wayne estate because they declared Bruce Wayne dead, and the relationship that didn't develop between Wayne and Kyle is cemented by seeing them together in Paris, which is good because at least we know they both like Bruce's mothers pearls.

And people continue to live in a city that has been poisoned, spied on, terrorized, and almost blown up all thanks to technology and lax security courtesy of Wayne Enterprises.