Bane launches a full-on proletarian revolution in which the meek are given the support of his thug army as they strike down the rich, the police officers having been caged up. This Michael Moore fantasy, though, is treated with no sentimentality at all. Garbage immediately piles up in the streets and justice is dispensed a la Robespierre, with bourgeois dissenters being sentenced to death without trial. Only Batman, an aristocratic capitalist hero, can restore the balance.
If The Dark Knight was about the War on Terror, The Dark Knight Rises puts equal force and fury behind a tale about financial crisis and revolution. It’s the first Occupy Wall Street blockbuster, and that Christopher Nolan’s film was well underway before the OWS movement even got started is a tribute to his perspicacity.
The new film is a pleasure, sprawling in its storytelling, satisfyingly brawny, and occasionally moving, particularly in a terrific final act. In addition to all of that, the movie is so unabashed about its conservative message that you practically expect it to end with a dedication to Ronald Reagan. See if you can think of the last movie you saw that shows hundreds of big-city police officers lining up against a rowdy mob — and the police are the good guys. The movie is a counter-revolutionary document with as much damnation for populist revolt as Dr. Zhivago.
Like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises is slow to get started and features a lot of long, talky, somewhat painstaking exposition before Batman finally appears about 45 minutes in. After staying out of the public eye for eight years, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is a mass of scar tissue who can’t walk without a cane due to a bum knee. Alfred (Michael Caine) is more or less a nanny to him, and at a fancy party he is helpless to stop a society jewel thief named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) from robbing him of his mother’s pearl necklace.
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