The Dark Knight Rises
2012 · Directed by Christopher Nolan
Original language: English
- action
- crime
- drama
- thriller
The story
Following the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman assumes responsibility for Dent's crimes to protect the late attorney's reputation and is subsequently hunted by the Gotham City Police Department. Eight years later, Batman encounters the mysterious Selina Kyle and the villainous Bane, a new terrorist leader who overwhelms Gotham's finest. The Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.
What it’s like
Cold, grey-blue palette with a steel sheen, Gotham rendered as a sprawling, rain-slicked city of stone bridges, vast dark skylines and nighttime streets lit by sodium glow, while the Bat-dominated sequences lean on huge practical set pieces: a stadium full of people, an aerial hijacking, a collapsing bridge. Camera work is grand and often wide, with IMAX-scale frames that favour sweeping crane moves and dynamic handheld chaos during fights, and the score by Hans Zimmer hums with low synth drones and pounding percussion that swell into a mournful, heroic theme. The mood is grim, weighty and elegiac, a heavy late-night watch for a long, rainy evening rather than a light one. Pacing is deliberate in its first half and then builds into a long, relentless final act, and the emotional register is sombre, with a lonely, battered man slowly reckoning with fear and mortality. Violence is frequent and substantial: hand-to-hand brawls, gunfire, explosions, and a brutal, bone-breaking confrontation, with some peril and a grim prison sequence, though gore is limited. For people who want a big, bleak, blockbuster finale and a sense of scale.
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