Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ on HBO, The Epic Closeout of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Movie Trilogy

Epic in length, scale, and the amount of main characters wearing masks, The Dark Knight Rises did boffo box office upon its 2012 release. Nearly a decade later, superhero movies are hard currency for Hollywood. But this one and its earlier counterparts in the Nolan string still feels like the king of “the dark retelling” idea.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Released in 2012, The Dark Knight Rises was the final tine in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy trident. Co-written with his brother and usual collaborator Jonathan Nolan, and with a story conceived with David S. Goyer, Dark Knight Rises cleared over a billion on a budget of $250 million-ish, which is about a billion reasons why Warner/Legendary Pictures gave Nolan carte blanche to put out a 165-minute film where the main bad guy wears a complicated breathing apparatus, the actor playing him makes some interesting choices of expression (Alexa, search the Web for “Bane Voice” memes), and the Bat Man himself, instead of tooling around in ever-more-badass versions of the Batmobile, spends a good bit of the movie out of commission in a jailhouse half a world away. Viewers have come around to how Nolan does things. Most of them have even accepted Christian Bale’s grumble-whisper as part of the price of admission for superhero movie making at this scale.

And what a scale it is. The Dark Knight opens with a gripping action sequence full of disintegrating airframes, midair blood transfusions, and the introduction of Bane (Tom Hardy), an international mischief maker whose burly frame and ever-present respirator give a look somewhere between bionic and beast. In the fallout from the events of The Dark Knight, Batman has disappeared from Gotham City. But Bane has a dastardly scheme to bring him back, and its component parts include cement laced with explosives, tunnels, side deals with the Wayne Enterprises board of directors (in particular Ben Mendelsohn in full sniveling preen mode), and the aid of cat burglar Selena Kyle (Anne Hathaway). Why does Bane want Batman? Well, it all goes back to The League of Shadows, R’as al Ghul, and what he believes is Batman’s intertwined destiny with his longtime adversaries and Gotham City itself. Oh, and there’s a fusion bomb somewhere in the city, and it’s set to go nuclear. Say what you want about Bane, his mask, his peculiar manner of speech, but he doesn’t do anything small, and neither does Christopher Nolan.

Filling out the corners of The Dark Knight Rises are Michael Caine and Gary Oldman, returning as Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, respectively; Joseph Gordon Levitt as a noble young cop destined for bigger things; and Marion Cotillard as a new member of the Wayne Enterprises board who is both Bruce Wayne’s love interest and, as it turns out, an instrumental ingredient to the destructive omelette Bane is cooking up.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What is it with Christopher Nolan and movable walls? In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne (Bale) is meeting with Fox (Morgan Freeman) in his office. Fox waves his hand and voila! His wall of books spins away to reveal the cavernous R&D/armory level of Wayne Enterprises. Similarly, in Interstellar, Professor Brand and his daughter, Dr. Amelia Brand (played by Nolan joint regulars Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway) are pitching Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) on gallivanting off to outer space when the wall of their mundane office unfolds to reveal a Falcon 9 launch vehicle parked right there, like it’s the prize platform for the Wheel of Fortune shopping round. Where’s the ceramic pig?

Performance Worth Watching: It’s not a huge role, but as Bane’s key henchman Barsad, Josh Stewart offers swarthiness, menace, and even something approaching camaraderie with his sociopathic, masked boss. “They work for the mercenary…the masked man,” he tells Aidan Gillen’s clueless CIA agent early on in an accent of indeterminate origin that’s perfect for a henchman, and he appears throughout the film at Bane’s side, always locked, loaded, and ready for some wet work.

Memorable Dialogue: Bane’s version of blabbing to the hero about his elaborate plan for destruction instead of outright killing him is full of prototypically baroque Nolanisms. “So, as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe that they can survive so that you can watch them clambering over each other to stay in the sun. You could watch me torture an entire city. And then when you truly understand the depths of your failure, we will fulfill Ra’s Al Ghul’s destiny.We will destroy Gotham. And then, when it is done, and Gotham is…ashes, then you have my permission to die.” The crushing weight of destiny, hate, souls poisoned, though — Gotham City’s global livability ranking has gotta be complete garbage.

Sex and Skin: Nothing to distract too much from all of the brooding and bruising going on.

Our Take: Pain, fear, chaos, anger; what does one’s soul truly say? Christopher Nolan’s conclusion to his trilogy of Batman films operates at a city-sized scale, literally trapping millions of people inside a cage match between two guys. But the Bat’s battle with Bane keeps the film percolating because it never loses sight of those elemental properties. Bane likes to bloviate about how he was born in pain, about how much darkness was his old friend, and why those qualities make him more powerful than Bruce Wayne, a man who only came to the darkness when it suited him, a man who bought darkness with privilege. And so Wayne’s mission is clear, even when he’s mothballed in a bizarre jailhouse in some faraway land with a vertebrae protruding from his back. After all hostage-taking of an entire metro area, after the effective removal of the government or military’s ability to fight back, after all the tech toys are subtracted from the equation and the jokes about Bane’s respirator have become hollow, it’s one guy going after the other guy. In superhero movies, even in Christopher Nolan superhero movies, war, more often than not, comes down to just one punch.

Thankfully, Batman’s war does at times include that tech we’ve come to expect. The famous tumblers are here multiplied, and decked out in urban camo livery; Selena Kyle, her Catwoman suit revealed, gets to cruise around on Batman’s beefed-up motorcycle and fire its onboard machine guns; and the man himself does some battling from above in The Bat, a VTOL fighting platform that just might be the coolest Batman vehicle yet.

Our Call: STREAM IT — once you’ve cleared your schedule of three hours, that is. The Dark Knight Rises colors the superhero film as it’s come to be defined by Marvel in a grimier shade, and features multiple Oscar winners to boot.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch The Dark Knight Rises on HBO Max

Watch The Dark Knight Rises on HBO Now