On Christopher Nolan and his Batman Trilogy

Will The Dark Knight Rises live up to the impossible amount of hype surrounding it? And how does the rest of the series hold up?

Well here we are: seven years down the line from the first film, and four since the sequel that lit the world on fire, down to a mere 25 and a half hours to the conclusion. I've got my tickets all set for tomorrow night and for the big midnight blowout of Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated Batman finale, called The Dark Knight Rises, and I've spent a few nights this week re-acquainting myself with the rest of the series. Needless to say, I can hardly even describe how psyched I am for this movie.

I'll admit that there have been a few times over the past few years where the ridiculously hyperbolic praise for Nolan, and especially for The Dark Knight, has really started to irritate me. And I'm a big fan of his: I think The Prestige and Inception are science fiction masterpieces, and I think he certainly stepped things up for comic book movies with Batman Begins. When that movie unraveled in the summer of 2005, Nolan was picking up the pieces of a franchise that had been, essentially, left for dead eight years earlier. Joel Schumacher's disastrous Batman & Robin is the kind of deal-killer that  every major studio has spent the past 15 years trying to avoid. It took a bankable property and proceeded to do almost everything wrong with it, from having George Clooney play himself in a Batman suit, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's plethora of cringe-worthy lines, to bat nipples. Schumacher's obsession with cheesy camp (and the resulting lack of dark, realistic textures or storylines) and a barrage of horrific reviews (the film scores a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 28 on Metacritic) led to a disappointing box office gross. Or perhaps the studio realized that the script was, in fact, the worst ever written. In any case, the movie was acknowledged as the piece of crap it is by everyone. from studio heads to Schumacher himself, and the planned follow up, supposedly called Batman Triumphant, was canned. Years later, Clooney would hit the nail on head by saying "I think we might have killed the franchise."

Luckily, Christopher Nolan was there to pick up the pieces and build them back up into something that was not only worthwhile, but transcendent as far as comic book movies go. After watching both films back to back, I actually think that Batman Begins is the superior work. Nolan chooses to construct the film completely around Bale's Bruce Wayne, and the result is in turns haunting, hilarious, and viscerally thrilling. Somebody once told me that Batman Begins is a movie about Bruce Wayne, whereas The Dark Knight is a movie about Batman, and that's true. It's a blurry line, no doubt, but one that I think marks a valid difference. Wayne often gets lost in the shuffle during the feverish action and constant tension of the sequel, and we occasionally lose him entirely in the sea of other characters. Nolan tries to juggle Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox, Michael Caine's Alfred, the mob, a slew of corrupt cops, and a relationship between Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) that never quite works despite its paramount importance to the plot. His worst offense, however, is the amount of time he spends with the citizens of Gotham, which would be fine if he spent it in interesting fashion, but he doesn't. The extended "boat sequence" almost derails the entire film, focusing too much on characters we don't care about, and doing so with awful dialogue and a predictable arc. And then there's the Joker himself. No one can deny the sheer level of brilliance that Heath Ledger channels into his performance here, nor that he was deserving of the Supporting Actor Oscar in 2008 (though I personally thank that Javier Bardem and Christoph Waltz both won for greater, more nuanced villain work in the surrounding years). But Ledger's presence is so gargantuan that Bale's is greatly diminished, and while the film certainly comes together in time for its conclusion (a spine-tingling cutoff, especially now that the sequel is mere hours away), re-watching it in quick succession with the first film left me sure of one thing: I don't want another Dark Knight.

And it seems likely that I will get my wish. While I've sworn off reading any full reviews and kept myself deliberately in the dark concerning specific plot points and characters (just like last time around), the RT blurbs seem to agree on one thing: that The Dark Knight Rises, as great as it is, "doesn't quite live up to its predecessor." It's a weird qualifier to get excited about, but that's just what's happening for me, because the buzz says that we get back to Wayne and we see him come full circle from where he was in the first film: we get back to the heart of the matter. I trust Nolan to do that, because, for all of the fanboy hype and exaggerated claims, he has never made two movies that are even similar, let alone the same. The ballet-like story choreography of Inception is worlds away from the innovative filmmaking structure utilized on Memento, which bears no resemblance to the unraveling mystery of The Prestige. And his Batman films, while both members of the same trilogy, could hardly be further apart: one is a clear portrait of Wayne's psyche as he becomes more than a man, the next a cloudy glimpse of it, fraught with horrific threats, death, pain, and conflict; one is sheltered in the safety of Wayne Manor, the next consistantly shrouded in the shadows of a broken city; one is a man who loses his parents and vows to never let his loved ones be harmed again, while the next is the shattering realization that his transformation has only brought them closer to danger and doom. And the third film...well, I'm not sure what that will be yet. That's the point, right? But I'm hopeful that, by the time I walk out of the movie theater, sometime after 3 a.m. on Friday morning, I will have just experienced something visceral.

Something important.

Something completely satisfying in every way.

So bring on that midnight showing: it's time to see how this thing ends.