In Defense of The Dark Knight Rises on its Fifth Anniversary

I always find it amusing when I remember that The Dark Knight Rises made over a billion dollars and currently holds an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, because public opinion turned harder on that movie than America on second term George W Bush. Ask most people nowadays their opinion on that movie and prepare for a hyperbolic, Cracked inspired verbal listicle of all of the ways in which it is now The Worst Movie Evar^TM, at least until they get to telling you how their 40^th viewing of The Force Awakens is the one that really showed them how that movie is the worstest ever.

So why the heel turn on this initially well-received and definitely financially successful movie? Probably because most people enjoyed that movie the first time they saw it, and then at some point realized it was dumber than a sack of hammers in a lot of ways. “WE WERE TRICKED”, they cried, and then it was time to get out the torches.

Here’s the thing: The Dark Knight Rises is, for all intents and purposes, a loud, flawed, clunky, stupid movie. It relies entirely on emotional manipulation, convenient plot contrivances, and a lot of smoke and thunder, and it falls apart logically upon any cross-examination. I still love it unreservedly.

There is a moment in The Dark Knight Rises that I always point to when pressed as to why I love and defend the movie. It’s not Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman (though she is excellent), nor is it any of Bane’s big set pieces (though they are excellent), nor is it even the final montage that left me a sobbing mess in the theater and left my wife trying to make it look like she wasn’t actually with the big crying bearded man. It’s just before that montage, as Batman tries to carry the Batman ’66 inspired Giant Macguffin Bomb (I don’t care if it wasn’t actually inspired by Batman ’66, I believe what I believe) out to sea. It’s the moment when all of the kids on the school bus duck from an explosion, afraid their end is at hand, and one of the kids shouts “no, it’s Batman!” and points excitedly as the Bat flies through the explosion and heads out to sea, saving the city and seemingly sacrificing himself. It’s a moment that is a literal “look, up in the sky! It’s SupermanBatman” moment in a movie and franchise that had defined itself largely through its grounded, “realistic”, supposedly “dark” take on a superhero. It might initially seem a bit out of place, yet to me it was the best Batman-as-Superhero moment in movie history.

I have many gripes with the current DC Cinematic Universe that began with Man of Steel, but one of them is when I hear people talk about how they're DC’s attempt to “Nolanize” their entire universe. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were definitely a much more serious, straight take on Batman than had ever been attempted before, and the “gritty, realistic” descriptor that has been attached to them and abused ad nauseam by directors of projects ranging from Ninja Turtles to Power Rangers ever since is certainly accurate. The big difference between Nolan and his successors with WB, however, is that his movies can delve into dark places while remaining fundamentally optimistic movies, whereas you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more nihilistic take on Batman or Superman than the one we just got.

For all of the scary and even depressing moments in the Nolan movies, his Batman is arguably the most successful Batman we’ve ever seen depicted. He literally wins his war against crime! The Gotham City that was overrun by the mob and so corrupt it was deemed worthy of complete destruction by the League of Shadows is eventually cleaned up, with organized crime completely demolished, and hope restored to the people. Batman is actually allowed to retire.

Taken as a whole, the TDK trilogy's main goal is to answer the question of what Batman is and what he means to Gotham City. In Batman Begins, Ra's tells Bruce has to make himself more than a man. Batman is initially a symbol of resistance, a tool to use fear against those who prey on the fearful. TDK explores the practical advantage of Batman being a symbol, namely that he can take the hit and the blame for Harvey Dent's fall and Gordon's failures, so that people can maintain faith in the structures and systems that Batman has attempted to clean up and save. In The Dark Knight Rises Batman is redeemed and transformed forever as a symbol of hope, an inspiration to the city of Gotham to take the cause of justice into their own hands.

This is a contrast with the Frank Miller take, where Batman is an urban legend, never actually seen by the public, a psychotic obsessive who wages a one man war not on behalf of the city, but in order to punish criminals. I have always objected to this take for the exact reason that Ra's tells Bruce he must make himself more than a man: a Batman that is nothing more than an avenging angel in the night will always fail, will never change anything, and is ultimately a vigilante "lost in the scramble for his own gratification." This can be seen in The Dark Knight Returns comic itself, where Gotham is a complete and utter shithole at the time Batman retires and is even worse when he returns. There's no evidence whatsoever his Batman didn't make things actively worse by provoking the Joker and others. This carries over into the Miller-inspired Batman in Batman v Superman. We're told that this Batman has been Batman for over 20 years, yet we have a Gotham that is described as filthy and crime-ridden, a Joker who is inexplicably free to wander around blowing up prisons and committing crimes even after Batman takes a seemingly murderous turn, and the people either ignore the existence of Batman, deny it, or act like he's as bad as the criminals he fights. There's absolutely nothing heroic about him in the slightest.

This is one of the factors that makes Scott Snyder's run on Batman in the comics my favorite take on the character in ages, if not ever. His Batman is once again a major public figure in Gotham, well known and beloved by the citizens of Gotham. Snyder seems to address the two possible avenues Bruce can take as Batman, the futile one man war of Frank Miller's obsessive or the heroic symbol to the people, in his re-imagining of Batman's origin in Zero Year. In this scene set during Batman's first year on the job Alfred lectures Bruce over how he's just using Batman as a tool to get revenge on everyone he feels let him down, and how Batman needs to stand for more than that:

 By the end of Batman's first major battle, he has come to the same realization and admits as much to Alfred. Batman needs to stand for something, he needs to be an inspiration and a symbol:
 

Nolan's Batman undertakes a similar journey from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight Rises. He starts out as an angry young man willing to murder his parent's killer in cold blood, evolves into a an avenging terror out to scare Gotham's criminals into submission, becomes a scapegoat for the public good, and then eventually becomes the heroic symbol that shows the people of Gotham they no longer need to fear the dark.

So in the end, I love The Dark Knight Rises because it, more than any other movie (including its superior predecessor), gives us a truly super-heroic Batman, the symbol of justice and hope that I have loved since I was a kid. For all its flaws (and there are admittedly quite a few), it is the movie that gave us a fully-formed Batman fighting in broad daylight and inspiring little kids to literally look up to him for hope and protection. That's pretty damn awesome.