Of trilogies & tragedies

Though it can’t save the day, The Dark Knight Rises might be the perfect superhero movie.

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The Dark Knight Rises

It would be unfitting to begin any discussion of director Christopher Nolan’s epic conclusion of his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, without first acknowledging the tragedy that took place in the wee hours of the film’s wide release.

At a midnight showing of the film on Friday in Aurora, Colo., a lone gunman walked into the theater, launched gas canisters into the gathered crowd and opened fire. Twelve people died that morning, and 58 others were wounded. Police arrested heavily armed, 24-year-old James Holmes near his vehicle in the parking lot shortly after the incident.

In the wake of such events and the magnitude of loss involved, analysis of the film itself seems fairly trivial. Regardless of its merits, it’s a film that will be remembered first for being the background to a brutal massacre.

But to ignore the movie entirely, I think, would be unfair to those who died. It is a movie they wanted to see — would have likely spent much time discussing with friends had they not been robbed of the chance. I hope continuing that discussion honors their memory rather than insults it.

That being said, and despite the sad cloud that now hangs over it, The Dark Knight Rises is an excellent movie and perhaps the perfect conclusion to the best film adaptation of a comic book franchise to date.

The story picks up eight years after the events of 2008’s The Dark Knight. Batman, publicly blamed for the death of prosecutor Harvey Dent, has retired. The man behind the mask, billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), has become a recluse, battered both physically and emotionally by the death of the woman he loved, Rachel Dawes.

But Wayne is slowly stirred to action by whispers of a fanatical mercenary who has been drawn to Gotham City. Known only as Bane (Tom Hardy), the masked and muscled brute seems at first to be only a pawn in a complex corporate scheme by a Wayne rival to take over the company behind his family’s fortune. That is, until Bane launches another agenda, a plan to first take over Gotham, hand it over to martial law and then burn it to the ground with Wayne’s own technology.

Needless to say, this turns out to be a job for Batman, who finds himself both in pursuit of and requiring help from a mysterious cat burglar (Anne Hathaway), who seems to have ties to Bane and his organization — as well as plans of her own.

Meanwhile, an up-and-coming GCPD officer who goes by Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is working the legal side of investigating the Bane mystery for a Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) who has lost all political favor and been weighed down by the guilt of making Dent a paragon and Batman a pariah.

I gotta say, having been a fan of the comics in my youth, and particularly the Knightfall storyline that gave readers Bane’s iconic breaking of Batman, I was skeptical of the movie’s ability to do the character justice — especially after the abysmal failing of the last franchise in Batman and Robin. But, as with the Joker in Dark Knight, Nolan’s vision does justice to the source and is complete in its ability to get the most out of both story and actors. There’s no weak link here. Well, okay, maybe one major medical miracle and a couple minor “just go with it” moments that help move the plot along, but other than that, it’s fine.

And that’s despite a lot of complexity, just as in the previous two films. The Dark Knight Rises is a clockwork of moving plots and themes, particularly dwellings on human nature, but it all manages to stay in sync. Threads come together, and it all makes sense. Most importantly, to me, it all hinges specifically on Batman in a way that 2008’s film did not, which I felt was a flaw. The finale doesn’t fail in that way. No, it’s not a perfect movie, but it might be a perfect superhero movie. And while it won’t cure real grief or save the day in the real world, it’s still not a bad thing to have right now.

RATING: 4.5 stars

[ We rate our movies on a five-star scale, with one star being “terrible” and five stars making a movie an “instant classic.” ]

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