'The Dark Knight Rises:' Movie Review

How will he resolve this?

That was the question that preoccupied me after watching Christopher Nolan’s last Batman film, "The Dark Knight Rises." Recall that movie ends with Batman’s taking the blame for Two-Face’s murders and riding off into exile. Recall also that while the Joker survived the second movie, 2008's "The Dark Knight," the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, didn’t.

How Nolan was going end the series in a satisfying way, without a Joker that was clearly intended to be central to the last film, was a mystery to me. How would Nolan resolve this?

As it turns out, very well, thanks.

"The Dark Knight Rises" picks up the loose threads from both prior Nolan films and weaves them into a whole. Eight years after the events of "The Dark Knight," Gotham is still operating under the lie of Harvey Dent’s heroic death and Batman’s disgrace. Bruce Wayne has withdrawn into seclusion, mourning the loss of childhood friend Rachel Dawes and operating under the false belief that she had wanted to come back to him before her death at 250 52nd St. Laws named after Harvey Dent have expanded police powers, and the Wayne Foundation’s charitable enterprises are collapsing from neglect, leaving Gotham’s underclass more desperate than ever.

Into this environment, step two characters keen to upend the current order. Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway, and Bane, played by Tom Hardy. Selina Kyle is a quick witted, flirtatious cat burglar in the mold of Robin Hood. Bane is a remnant from The League of Shadows organization that Batman thwarted in the first installation of the trilogy, 2005's "Batman Begins." Bane intends to complete Ra’s Al Ghul’s plan to reduce Gotham City to ashes. To that end, he ignites a Jacobin-style revolution and remakes Gotham into a Reign of Terror state.

If the parting message of "The Dark Knight" was that sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, the theme of "The Dark Knight Rises" is that, good enough or not, the truth is necessary and will out. The effort to maintain the myth of Harvey Dent leaves Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) vulnerable to Bane and validated his argument that Gotham City is inherently corrupt, sustainable only through deceit, and worthy of annihilation. Only by letting truths come out, and by accepting their meaning, can Wayne and Gordon save themselves and their city.

The performances of The Dark Knight Rises are first rate. The returning cast members Bale, Oldman, Michael Caine (as Bruce Wayne's butler/father-figure Alfred), and Morgan Freeman (as Wayne Enterprise's president and Batman's gadget-man Lucius Fox) do fine work. Hathaway is excellent as the lithe, streetwise, cynical Catwoman (the movie never calls her that, but I don’t care), and while Hardy’s Bane never matches the anarchic charisma of Heath Ledger’s Joker, he didn’t have to. Bane needed to exemplify physical menace and ideologically driven fanaticism, and Tom Hardy successfully embodies both traits.

By the way, anyone debating whether to shell out extra money to see the "The Dark Knight Rises" in IMAX should...see it in IMAX. Nearly an hour of the film’s 164 minutes were shot in the hi-res format, and the results are stunningly immersive. In Bellevue, it's showing in IMAX at . 

I’m sorry to see Nolan’s time on the Batman films come to an end. He’s restored my faith--shaken after a decade of Michael Bay’s dominion over the box office--that big budget entertainments can also show an genuine interest in developing character and theme. But I’m glad that he left us with The Dark Knight trilogy, a series with energy and ambition that brought us to that rarest of all points, a satisfying resolution.

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