Review: The Dark Knight Rises

*Note: This contains spoiler alerts.

There is a lot going on in the almost three-hour The Dark Knight Rises, which is the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. I’m going to go over a brief synopsis, mainly so I don’t really ruin the entire film for moviegoers.

It starts out eight years after the last left off, when Batman (Christian Bale) killed Harvey Dent/Two-Face to save Gotham. However, the city of Gotham and its police force made Batman out to be a bad guy, and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), who knows the truth about Dent, is left to clean up the city without Batman.  Bruce Wayne goes into hiding, refusing to come out, especially now that the city is cleaned up. However, shortly after Dent Day, Bane (Tom Hardy) is planning a huge attack to take over the city and trap/kill all of the police.

Bane attacks the stock exchange, and uses Wayne’s fingerprints, which Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) stole from Wayne’s mansion, to make him take the fall for causing the crash and eventually bankrupting Wayne enterprises.  Wayne realizes what is happening, as Bane wants access to a nuclear energy source he has been working on for years and gave up on.  Wayne puts Miranda Tate (Marion Cottilard), an investor, in charge of his board and the project, so it is safe hands.

In an effort to stop Bane, Wayne un-retires his Batman suit. He asks Catwoman to show him the way and in turn, as Catwoman is wrapped up with the wrong people, she essentially leads Batman to Bane and leaves him to die. Batman is defeated and Bane locks him up in a prison, but won’t kill him yet. He wants to keep him alive and injured, so he can see him destroy Gotham and then he’ll kill him.

While Wayne is locked away, Bane blows up parts of the city, trapping the entire police force underground. His group of misfits take over the city, exiling and killing any politicians, police, etc. There is chaos. However, Gordon and his protege Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are left on the outside and together they devise a plan to release the officers and get rid of the nuclear device that is literally a ticking time bomb, set to destroy the city. Wayne sees all that his happening in his city and starts to train to heal himself and get stronger.  He breaks free from the prison and heads back to Gotham to save it, with 18 hours left on the time bomb. He saves Gordon and Blake from Bane’s clutches and retrieves Fox (Morgan Freeman) to try and stop the device from going off.

And essentially Batman saves the day and the city.

As I said, there is so much going on in this film, that I don’t even want to try and explain it all, as I will not do it justice. I will say that this film is excellent. It explains a lot about the Wayne character, why he is the way he is and why he does what he does. It introduces Catwoman and Robin as well. It develops all of those characters and the ending I think is spectacular. I think my only complaints about the film were you couldn’t really understand Bane, as he has a device over his mouth. I honestly only heard about 85 percent of what he said. In addition, I felt that the Batman character wasn’t really in the film as much as he should have been. Out of the two hours and 45 minutes, I would say Bale only had about an hour’s worth of on-screen time, which was disappointing. But if you’re not analyzing it as much as I did, you probably won’t even notice. The time flies and never once will you look at your watch. Despite that he wasn’t in it that much, Bale was excellent as the brooding, dark Batman/Wayne character. The cast was pretty much all-star too, which was awesome.

I think what I love about Wayne is he is so angry, yet has a huge heart. Even though the city let him down, he still feels he has to save it from destruction. Even though life let him down, taking away all of his loved ones, somehow he finds it in himself to fight and move on. And it’s that drive that he is Batman.

You need to see this film on the big screen and if you have the extra cash laying around, go see it in IMAX, we didn’t, but I wish we had, as there were some scenes that we heard the cracking of the speakers like it was about to pop or blow.

4 stars.