Reviews
Empire Magazine
Nev Pierce
“Where Avengers demolished New York with a glee unrivalled outside of a terrorist training camp, Rises takes turning Gotham into Gomorrah very seriously indeed. Nolan’s has been the Batman of the War On Terror and the credit crunch, made in an age where belief-driven crazies threatened world security and men with nothing more than computers and a sense of entitlement destroyed arguably as many lives as thugs with guns. Rises plants seeds of sedition, questions the position of the financial elite and presents the plight of the 99 per cent. Even as the jeopardy ratchets and our position ... is dire, Rises doesn’t forget to have some fun, with a pyrotechnical act that brings to mind Fight Club’s Project Mayhem. It’s this balance between sobriety and sensation that is Nolan’s most significant achievement throughout these films. Batman can easily play as either glum or camp — it takes a special talent to not just recognise his inherent absurdity and his inspirational power but also embrace them both: a talent with a taste for the theatrical.”
16/07/2012
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The Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
“The impressive success of The Dark Knight Rises pleasantly confounds our notions as to where great filmmaking is to be found in today's world. To have a director this gifted turning his ability and attention to such an unapologetically commercial project is beyond heartening in an age in which the promise of film as a popular art is tarnished almost beyond recognition. Wouldn't it be nice if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which snubbed the trilogy's first two films in the best picture race, finally got the message?”
18/07/2012
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Total Film
Matthew Leyland
“As the scale and stakes balloon, Nolan maintains taut control; if anything the storytelling coheres sharper than The Dark Knight. The trick lies in holding fast to what he - and we - care most about: the cost to a (Bat)man's body and soul. This time, it's painfully personal. Lest this all sound itchily introspective, rest assured: there's a ridiculous amount of cool shit here. "Boy, you are in for a show tonight," drools a fat copper as the Bat-pod burns back onto Gotham's streets, new tricks up its wheels.”
20/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
“Nolan’s sheer audacity makes the stakes feel skin-pricklingly high. If he is prepared to go this far, I often found myself wondering, just how far is he prepared to go? Well, the answer is further than any other superhero film I can think of: after a breathless, bravura final act, a nuclear payload of catharsis brings The Dark Knight Rises, and the Batman legend, to a ferociously satisfying climax.”
19/07/2012
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Time Out
Tom Huddleston
“As in the previous films, Nolan and his co-writer, his brother Jonathan, draw on real-world issues to spice up the fantasy, and with dubious results: with its rampaging Occupy Gotham anarchists, philanthropic billionaires and decent cops who ignore due process, this is so staunchly right-wing it’ll thrill all those Fox News anchors outraged by ‘The Muppets’.”
18/07/2012
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The Times
Kate Muir
“There has been some talk that millionaire Batman is more a Conservative Crusader for trying to maintain the status quo, but Bane’s methods reveal his madness: show trials and plans to destroy the lumpenproletariat that seem plain mean, not revolutionary. Bane and Batman fight mano a mano, and sometimes it is hard to work out what they’re growling about, with Bane acting just with his eyes beneath a mask that clings to his mouth like a metallic tarantula, and Batman able only to snarl under his black cowl. Like many parts of this movie, the scenario is imperfect but daring.”
20/07/2012
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Scotland on Sunday
Siobhan Synnot
“The Dark Knight Rises is not a bad film; I love that the director and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, are ambitious for superhero stories to be more than just clashes between good and bad costumes, but his trilogy struggles to balance character and momentum with exposition. One example is Marion Cotillard’s philanthropist, who offers a rudimentary romantic interlude but is largely required to set up the instability of the film’s nuclear McGuffin – although once placed in a spherical casing on a chain, apparently the four-megaton device can be swung around the streets of Gotham like a conker.”
22/07/2012
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The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
“Informed by Kane’s original comic and Frank Miller’s resuscitation of the character in the 1980s, Mr. Nolan’s Bruce-Batman has oscillated between seemingly opposite poles, even as he’s always come out a superhero. He is savior and destroyer, human and beast, the ultimate radical individualist and people’s protector. Yet as the series evolved, this binary opposition — echoed by Dent’s rived face — has grown progressively messier, less discrete. Much of the complexity has been directly written into the franchise’s overarching, seemingly blunt story of good versus evil. It’s an old, familiar tale that Mr. Nolan, in between juggling the cool bat toys, demure kisses, hard punches and loud bangs, has layered with open and barely veiled references to terrorism, the surveillance state and vengeance as a moral imperative.”
18/07/2012
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The Guardian
Xan Brooks
“The dark knight duly rises for the bruising final stanza in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a satisfying saga of revolution and redemption that ends the tale on a note of thunder. If viewers were wanting a corrective to the jumpsuit antics of The Avengers, or the noodling high-school angst of The Amazing Spider-Man, then rest assured that Batman delivers in spades. Here is a film of granite, monolithic intensity; a superhero romp so serious that it borders on the comical, like a children's fancy-dress party scripted by Victor Hugo and scored by Wagner.”
19/07/2012
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The Observer
Philip French
“The contemporary parallels are clear, though the underlying politics are somewhat confused. One supposes that Nolan's views are not unlike Shakespeare's (or Dickens's) – a loathing of people acting as a mob, a deep suspicion of politicians and a belief in the preservation of social order in a fluctuating world.”
22/07/2012
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“Bane's animal snarl is often frankly indistinct. His voice sounds like Darth Vader shouting, while playing a bass accordion through a Harley Davidson exhaust pipe. There were times when I wanted Miriam Margoyles to come on, give Bane a brisk clip round the ear and say: "Come on, darling, en – un – ci – ay – tuh!" Well, there is arguably something bestially menacing in that very unintelligibility; actually, the voice clarifies later in the movie, though for me the problem with Bane is in any case not with his voice, more with his conflict with the Dark Knight.”
19/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“There's next to no levity, which is why Hathaway is so welcome as Selina Kyle (Catwoman to you). Rom-com trouper Hathaway is the odd one out in this august cast, yet she brings light relief, with an acidic twist: her Selina has an urbane impertinence that suggests that she, at least, doesn't take the whole show in crushing earnest. Selina even cracks a joke or two, and even if they're not that good, nothing's more welcome than a quip in the abyss. After the past few days however it feels as if there's less and less to quip about. In this context, she's like Dorothy Parker heckling at a Nietzsche seminar.”
22/07/2012
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“What, [though,] I think Nolan has crucially brought to this franchise is solemnity and humourlessness. Belief, you might even say. None of the Marvel superhero films are so ominous and portenteous, so deliberately dark. Nolan has turned a preposterous character back into a grave myth, the story of a tortured saviour, reluctantly giving his all. That, I suspect, is what audiences crave in a world stripped of calls to faith, not just in-jokes or simple fun. That’s why they can’t bear to have the movie questioned — and why it’s going to be so big. ”
20/07/2012
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“As Nolan’s films have got bigger, he has gravitated away from eloquent spectacle and towards clinical destruction. The Dark Knight Rises has riots and street battles and freeway chases; AK-47s go off so regularly that the silence between the rounds is more startling than the gunfire itself. But among the Blues Brothers- style excess, there is no single image to rival the Cocteau-esque horror of that intimate scene in Nolan’s Batman Begins when the villain, zonked on his own hallucinogenic gas, imagined a warped, seething vision of Batman. ”
19/07/2012
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“Unbelievable events include the moment Bane doesn’t kill Batman when he has the opportunity. Sceptics may also ask how it is, in the last 45 minutes, that Batman has a habit of turning up unerringly in the right place at the right time, when for the previous two hours he has been unable to do anything right. Mind you, it’s just as well he does, because otherwise the film might never end. Another fault is that Bane is a boring villain. Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight was a creepily memorable figure. Bane is just Darth Vader in a Hannibal Lecter mask, and his words are practically inaudible.”
20/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“It is fascinating to ponder the antithetical trajectories of two current restart franchises, both comic-based and with British-led casts. The Amazing Spider-Man (English lead actor, Welsh baddie) is limber, funny, human and mercurial. The Dark Knight Rises (Welsh lead actor, English baddie, English director) is pompous, oppressive, without humour or humans: a sort of giant plinth for which no one has remembered to make a statue.”
19/07/2012
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“When these two put up their fists, the punches they land are like the noise a fridge would make if you pushed it off a high building. It is hardly more realistic than those cartoon graphics (POW! ZAP! KER-BOOM!) of the Batman show on 1960s' telly. Those TV shows look homely next to the bombast of the present franchise. Along with the muddied sound of The Dark Knight Rises, the cumulative effect of the screenplay is portentous and deadening. It compounds the impression of a filmmaker who has sacrificed his quicksilver wit and invention for grandiosity – and length.”
20/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
“ With Nolan’s films, the hostility between teenage fan-boys and middle-aged cineastes, between high and low culture, has collapsed into a “We all love Christopher Nolan” consensus. Not me! Sorry, guys. I’ll take James Cameron’s Terminator films or Tim Burton’s Batman duo over Nolan’s films any day. Anyway, this is the third and final film in Nolan’s trilogy, and this one really is all blockbuster brawn and very little brain. It’s as if Nolan and his co-screenwriter, his brother Jonathan, decided to dumb down, forget all that intellectual stuff in the previous two films and just serve up kick-ass action, spectacle and excitement. Yes, I know it touches on themes of terrorism and economic collapse, but only a fool would be taken in by this intellectual tokenism.”
22/07/2012
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