event The Dark Knight Rises

Picking up eight years after The Dark Knight left off, The Dark Knight Rises finds Gotham enjoying a tenuous peace based on Harvey Dent’s moral ideals rather than the ugly truth of his demise. Meanwhile, the hero Gotham deserves has retreated from public view and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), has gone Howard Hughes in his estate, resigned to the margins while others mismanage his company and his city. But in the underground tunnel system, a powerful new villain emerges in Bane (Tom Hardy), a bulked-out mercenary in a gas mask who may look and speak like a professional wrestler, but who carries out a thoroughly considered plan to isolate Gotham and impose his own sadistic vision of government upon it. True to the director of Memento and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan lays down twist after twist as the trilogy draws to a close, but the true greatness of The Dark Knight Rises is how beautifully it’s integrated with the other two movies. Handling that mythology—to say nothing of the heavy freight of fanboy expectation—is superheroic in its own right, but the miracle of Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.

Picking up eight years after The Dark Knight left off, The Dark Knight Rises finds Gotham enjoying a tenuous peace based on Harvey Dent’s moral ideals rather than the ugly truth of his demise. Meanwhile, the hero Gotham deserves has retreated from public view and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), has gone Howard Hughes in his estate, resigned to the margins while others mismanage his company and his city. But in the underground tunnel system, a powerful new villain emerges in Bane (Tom Hardy), a bulked-out mercenary in a gas mask who may look and speak like a professional wrestler, but who carries out a thoroughly considered plan to isolate Gotham and impose his own sadistic vision of government upon it. True to the director of Memento and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan lays down twist after twist as the trilogy draws to a close, but the true greatness of The Dark Knight Rises is how beautifully it’s integrated with the other two movies. Handling that mythology—to say nothing of the heavy freight of fanboy expectation—is superheroic in its own right, but the miracle of Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.

Picking up eight years after The Dark Knight left off, The Dark Knight Rises finds Gotham enjoying a tenuous peace based on Harvey Dent’s moral ideals rather than the ugly truth of his demise. Meanwhile, the hero Gotham deserves has retreated from public view and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), has gone Howard Hughes in his estate, resigned to the margins while others mismanage his company and his city. But in the underground tunnel system, a powerful new villain emerges in Bane (Tom Hardy), a bulked-out mercenary in a gas mask who may look and speak like a professional wrestler, but who carries out a thoroughly considered plan to isolate Gotham and impose his own sadistic vision of government upon it. True to the director of Memento and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan lays down twist after twist as the trilogy draws to a close, but the true greatness of The Dark Knight Rises is how beautifully it’s integrated with the other two movies. Handling that mythology—to say nothing of the heavy freight of fanboy expectation—is superheroic in its own right, but the miracle of Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the way it imprints those myths with the dread-soaked tenor of the times.