Starring: Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard
Director: Christopher Nolan
Category: IIA
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan brings his three-film stab at the Batman franchise to a close with another ideological volte-face.
A fantastic spectacle from beginning to end, the British filmmaker has basically eschewed the nuances he brought into the Batman universe three years ago, as he returns to simpler social and moral binaries with a man's struggle against an evil mob's apocalyptic plans to destroy the American way of life - a lunacy embodied in one of the film's most staggering scenes, as Gotham City comes under attack after an angelic young boy's stirring rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner.
The Dark Knight Rises begins with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) a physically and spiritually broken man, living as a recluse in his countryside mansion, having seen his caped crusader alter-ego (above) being branded Gotham's Public Enemy No 1 - a result of his alleged murder of the city's supposedly upstanding attorney-general, Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent, at the end of the last film.
Wayne believes there's 'nothing for me out there'. His self-exile is put to the test, however, with the arrival of a new menace in the shape of Bane (Tom Hardy), a perennially masked hulk of a man who proclaims to be 'Gotham's reckoning', as he seeks to save the city from its malaise by, well, destroying it.
The Dark Knight Rises first has Batman beaten to a pulp by Bane and then thrown into a pit, where he slowly recovers and wakes up to his raison d'?e, and somehow returns to fight for the soul of his city alongside long-time associates such as Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and new acquaintances such as Selina 'Catwoman' Kyle (Anne Hathaway), the hot-headed detective Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and green-energy advocate Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard).