Flushing the Evil Bane Down the Drain

The Dark Knight Rises – As someone who liked Batman Begins but thought The Dark Knight was just okay, I was glad to see that the third movie in the Nolan Batman trilogy was more of a follow-up to the first. The plot once again ties in with Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, and we see a bit of Jonathan Crane as well. More importantly, however, I feel that Begins really showed us where Batman was coming from, while Dark Knight kept him more in the background and what we saw of him showed him as a bit of a bully. Here, we’re back to the focus on the character, which helps to make him more likeable. At the same time, however, the Nolan view on Batman is pretty ambivalent overall, and this movie capitalized on that. The film starts with both Batman and Bruce Wayne having been absent for a while, and they both come back at around the same time. Nothing suspicious about that, right? The Dark Knight returns to fight Bane, a super-criminal who brings anarchy to Gotham City. I found him to be an interesting character, even if his voice was kind of goofy. Where did he pick up the British accent, anyway? Also, how does he find henchmen when he routinely kills them? And why didn’t Batman go right for his mask when the two were fighting? Finally, even if Batman flew the atomic bomb out into the bay, wouldn’t there still be radiation poisoning?

This movie left so many questions, but I still enjoyed it. And since I addressed some of what have been seen as conservative undertones in Dark Knight, I have to say that I didn’t see them so much here, despite suggestions to the contrary. That’s not to say there weren’t any, just that I didn’t notice them. I’d heard about there being some sort of reference to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but all I can figure is that people mean Bane’s uprising, and that’s hardly similar at all. Whatever Bane himself might have said about giving power to the people, what resulted was really anarchy.

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