Dark Knight Rises

Dark Knight Rising -- According to the most recent, and last installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, there is a prison located in Uzbekistan (or some other forlorn –stan) that consists of a huge well. The prisoners are lowered into the well from a brown CGI landscape that looks like a combination of Lhasa and Timbuktoo. No one can escape from the prison because the walls to the well are sheer and can not be climbed. Somehow, Batman finds himself imprisoned in the pit of this vast Cenote. Of course, Batman is an excellent climber and makes his living scaling skyscrapers and so his ascent of the prison’s sheer walls and, ultimate, escape is a fait accompli. But Batman is injured and has to endure some primitive chiropractic and traction before he is in good enough shape to scale the wall. The wall itself looks like a climbing apparatus in a East Hollywood gym – it has large bosses that serve as finger and toe-holds helpfully spaced across the vertical surface and the fellow prisoners are helpful in boosting an escapee upward, belayed by a rope. Once his back is better, Batman has absolutely no problem scaling the vertical wall with alacrity; it’s absurdly easy for the Dark Knight. But…for some reason, all escapees pause on a lofty ledge to make a “leap of death” – this is a desperate dive from one ledge to another. Here is the problem with this scene and the problem with the movie as a whole: there is no logical reason for a person climbing the wall to divert his attention away from the ascent – which proceeds with relative ease – to pause and, then, lunge across the gap between ledges. The climber should just keep ascending the wall using the helpfully spaced finger and toe holds. Batman has certainly climbed far more formidable walls than this one. But, of course, Batman pauses on the ledge. The prisoners chant encouragement in some foreign language and, at last, Batman leaps, just making the adjacent ledge. And, having attained that ledge, what does he do? Well, of course, he just keeps climbing upward as before to escape from the oubliette. There is absolutely no reason for Batman to make the desperate dive for the remote ledge; there is no motivation for him to take that risk. And, indeed, the risk posed by the wall makes no sense either – Batman can climb a wall like this with his eyes shut, at least, when he’s scaling Gotham skyscrapers in the dead of night. This episode signifies the vast and thunderous contempt that the makers of Dark Knight Rising have for their audience. The entire movie is like this: impressively staged and utterly idiotic. You can’t tell why the characters are doing what they do. No one’s motivations are defined – the bad guys do also sorts of vicious things but their objectives are never defined in any coherent way. Batman sulks and broods. Michael Caine over-acts impressively as the loyal Wayne family retainer, Alfred, but the movie has no use for him for ninety minutes and so he simply vanishes from the story. An army of cops is trapped underground. Somehow, their fellows keep them provisioned with food and water for three months (if they could get them food and water why can’t they be extricated from the sewer and subway tunnels where they are immured?). With ridiculous ease, Catwoman frees them – it’s just a single small explosion – and, then, they emerge as a blue horde armed with machine guns and wearing their best dress-blues. The bad guys are defending City Hall (why? To what end?) also armed with machine guns. The blue horde of cops converges on the mob of gangsters and, after a desultory exchange of gunfire, everyone indulges in a massive fistfight. The special effects are unconvincing. Nolan can’t even get the light dusting of snow that covers Gotham City right – it looks like rice leftover from some wedding or confetti. People are killed by being forced to walk across the ice of a river that never seems to freeze – the victims keep falling through the ice. Most of the soundtrack is so poorly recorded that you can’t hear what the characters are saying – it doesn’t really matter since they speak nonsense most of the time, but you strain to hear words and are rewarded with nothing but roaring tympani and menacing chords. It’s awful that the poor folks in Colorado were massacred while watching this film – it’s doubly awful that it is such a terrible waste of time and money. 250 million dollars puts on screen a picture that has every continuity and plausibility problem that Casa de mi Padre posits to exist in Mexican telenovellas. And there’s no doubt that a Mexican telenovella is made with more intelligence and respect for the audience than this thing.