THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
On a few different occasions now I’ve been
in conversations where I’ve confessed my love for my favourite movie (The
Shawshank Redemption) or my favourite television show (The West Wing) and
someone’s made a comment to the effect of “that’s a very mainstream choice for
a critic”. The implication being that critics should only love what everyone
considers to be high art, which has always seemed to me a very odd assumption.
Critics don’t necessarily like different films to everybody else; they just put
a lot more effort into working out why
they like them. Lots of critics might love The
Master, but they don’t like it because it’s highbrow (mostly), they like it
because they enjoyed engaging with it.
Which is all really the long way around of
saying that my favourite film of the year is The Dark Knight Rises and the reason is the same as anyone else’s:
it engaged me the most.
It’s hard to describe the level of guts and
ambition it took to make The Dark Knight
Rises happen. First of all, Christopher Nolan had to commit to making a
dark, moody blockbuster that revitalized the movie fortunes of a character long
since relegated to the sin bin after Batman
& Robin. He cast mostly British actors in the various key roles and
once that was a success, cast a moderately known Australian actor as one of the
most famous fictional villains of all time. Once The Dark Knight broke all kinds of records, he then followed that
up with a Tale of Two Cities inspired
epic (featuring more non-American) actors and a little known villain at its
centre. Whether you liked the film or not, the reviews were stellar (if tinged
with a sense of the third not quite being
as good as the second) and the franchise as a whole worked more themes and
ideas into its three film run than most blockbuster trilogies combined. As a
movie, let alone a trilogy, it is an absolutely spectacular success.
I don’t really care whether this third
movie works better than the second (I love them all equally), but I do care
whether it makes an appropriate finale to the first two movies, and on that
count The Dark Knight Rises achieved
beyond anything I could have expected. I’ve seen some accusations that the
ending is a cheap cop-out, which I understand is the cynical view, but I can’t
view it as anything more than an exclamation point on the underlying theme of
the whole franchise: a symbol can long outlive a man. It’s a fascinating theme and
one this trilogy addresses with a remarkable amount of depth, clarity and
thought. Don’t underestimate this movie or this trilogy just because it has a
man running around in a cape at its centre. It’s one of the most momentous
achievements of the year - or any year.
No comments:
Post a Comment