“Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; l was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!”

One thing I find super fascinating about The Dark Knight Rises is that Christopher Nolan had perfect reasons not to make it, yet also perfect reasons to make it at the same time. There was obviously the unfortunate and shocking passing of Heath Ledger, but The Dark Knight had one of those endings where it somehow managed to have an amazingly satisfying “ride off into the sunset” ending, yet also an ending that could have easily been followed up. Nolan made the choice to follow it up after he and his brother found out a way to close out this trilogy, and I couldn’t have been happier with that decision.

What makes The Dark Knight Rises warrant its existence so much is Bruce Wayne’s (or Batman’s) character arc. After the events of The Dark Knight, Bruce retires as Gotham’s hero and takes the blame for Harvey Dent’s death, hiding the actual dark truth behind the man who lived long enough to see himself become the villain. This third chapter takes place eight years later, where Bruce is both a physically and psychologically broken character, essentially hidden from society. I am usually not a fan of these types of stories whatsoever (The Last Jedi, Dial of Destiny), but the reason this works is that it’s a character progression, not a regression. Bruce isn’t in shape to fight crime simply because he’s depressed or made some bad decision in the past; no, it’s because he feels his time fighting crime in Gotham City is over. He believes that the city has someone to look up to as a hope figure, even though a false one, in Harvey Dent, and therefore, he is no longer needed.

However, when a new threat arises in the form of the terrorist Bane, a very different version of the character from the comics, he knows he needs to step back in and help, which inevitably leads to an absolutely goosebumps-inducing scene. In all three of these movies, the main villain has affected Batman in a very different way; in Batman Begins, he faced fear, the very mechanism he set out to use; in The Dark Knight, he was outsmarted, and his hope and faith in Gotham were tested; and in Rises, it’s much more of both a physical and psychological threat. We saw Batman in a very emotionally vulnerable state in the last film, but here it takes it even a step further, and I think this is easily the best writing we got for the character specifically in this trilogy.

When he first returns as Batman, it’s inevitably very exciting, but it fairly quickly turns into something pretty deep, as we learn that he might be in over his head this time around. Bane definitely isn’t as smartly written as the Joker was, but the sheer force that he has makes him a villain to be reckoned with. He gets Bruce down to his darkest point yet, and all of this is amazingly portrayed by Christian Bale, who gives his best performance of the trilogy. You can see the absolute agony in him, though fairly subtly, as he watches the city he originally set out to protect at its weakest.

As you might assume from everything I’ve said (or know if you’ve seen the movie), The Dark Knight Rises is by far the most “epic” in scale of Nolan’s Batman films. It’s a much bigger movie in almost every way, which does have some downsides but mostly makes this feel like a worthwhile conclusion. Every character we’ve known so far gets a satisfying conclusion, as does the central story of this film on its own, the themes of the entire trilogy, and Batman’s character arc when you look at it in the big picture of things. It’s an ending that shouldn’t ever be touched, not even for “multiverse” reasons in other universes, because of how perfect it is.

The new additional character this go around that provides a dynamic for this version of Batman that we had yet to see so far is Catwoman (aka Selina Kyle), who I think is very well played by Anne Hathaway. Catwoman is similar to Bane in that she is also pretty different than her comic version, though definitely not to the same extent. She’s still morally complex, however, and provides an interesting and new perspective on everything for both Batman and the audience.

Something that really stood out to me on this rewatch, which I believe was my third watch in total, was the score by Hans Zimmer. Believe it or not, this is actually the only one of these movies that was solely composed by Zimmer on his own, whereas the other two were collaborative efforts with James Newton Howard. This score’s relationship with the other two films heavily reminded me of the relationship between the scores of the first two Denis Villeneuve Dune films (also Hans Zimmer), where the score in the sequel is essentially just a grander and more elaborate version of the predecessor(s), but not in a “lazy” way, in a way that actually serves the story. It’s definitely not as subtle in places as something like The Dark Knight, but that’s completely the point.

Now, is The Dark Knight Rises perfect? Not at all; in fact, it’s easily the most flawed of the trilogy, though I would still put it above Batman Begins because I think it has much higher highs. The main flaw of the movie is that there is just a lot here. So many ideas, so many characters, and so many different moving parts to the plot that definitely make it feel a bit convoluted at times. We get new characters in the form of Catwoman, Bane, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s detective character, and Miranda, the woman who is somewhat of a new love interest for Bruce but is also taking over a lot of creative control of Wayne Enterprises, and they all bring pretty big subplots with them. It’s not confusing, but it gets to a point sometimes where the writing feels forced and contrived to get to the end.

The biggest disappointment to me about the movie is, unfortunately, Bane. It’s really weird, because for the first half he’s a pretty remarkable villain, but as we get closer and closer to the third act, and especially as we head into the climax, it feels like the story doesn’t really know what it wants to do with him. He describes himself as “Gotham’s reckoning,” and we get that pretty early on, but as a character, he basically serves his purpose in furthering Bruce’s arc, and then just turns to doing evil stuff for the rest of the movie without a super clear motive - that is, until the end. There is a mystery surrounding him throughout a massive portion of the film, and the answers we get are underwhelming, to say the least, and completely throw the character’s potential down the drain. He’s still a fairly memorable villain, a lot of that having to do with the iconic portrayal, but definitely a weak aspect of The Dark Knight Rises as a whole.

But for me, the biggest thing a movie needs to do is make me feel something, and The Dark Knight Rises definitely does that thoroughly, including the ending.