Christopher Nolan's conclusion to the Dark Knight Trilogy. Bane, Catwoman, the Tale of Two Cities frame, and the IMAX-shot final act that has divided audiences for over a decade.
Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Gotham City has had eight years of peace under the legal framework of the Dent Act, which allows law enforcement to detain criminals indefinitely. Bruce Wayne has retired from being Batman and lives as a recluse in Wayne Manor. The film opens with the arrival of Bane, a former League of Shadows operative whose tactical capacity has made him the most-dangerous threat Gotham has faced.
The film tracks Bane's progressive seizure of Gotham across several months — the stock-exchange attack, the football-stadium speech, the city's isolation from the rest of the United States, the citizen-tribunal show trials. Bruce returns as Batman, is broken physically by Bane in the sewers, recovers in a foreign prison, and returns to Gotham for a final reckoning. The film closes on a nuclear explosion above Gotham Bay, Batman presumed dead, and a final-scene reveal that he and Selina Kyle have escaped to a quiet life in Florence.
The Dark Knight Rises is, by general consensus, the most-divisive film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. Critics who admired the structural ambition (the Tale of Two Cities echoes, the class-warfare subtext, the willingness to put Batman in a position of physical defeat) found it the most-ambitious of the three. Critics who found the plot mechanics implausible (Bruce's recovery from a broken back, the timing of the nuclear device, the city-wide isolation that the film does not quite explain) found it the weakest.
Both readings have textual support. The film attempts more than its predecessor; it also coheres less cleanly. Nolan's general working preference for prioritising thematic shape over plot logic is more visible here than in The Dark Knight, whose structural integrity is the trilogy's high-water mark.
Tom Hardy's Bane is the trilogy's most-physically-imposing villain. The character wears a respiratory mask through almost every scene, which forced Hardy to perform almost entirely through his eyes, his physical comportment, and his vocal delivery (which was extensively post-dubbed; early test screenings could not understand his dialogue, and Nolan re-recorded almost all of it with greater clarity for the final cut).
The performance has been argued about. Some critics consider it among the most-original action-villain performances of the 2010s — Hardy's specific commitment to the character's strange dignity and his refusal to play Bane as standard genre villain. Others find the post-dubbed dialogue too obviously dubbed and the character's logic too obscure. The split is durable. Hardy has gone on to deliver several other films at this register (Mad Max: Fury Road, Locke, The Revenant), establishing himself as one of the most-distinctive lead actors of his generation.
The Dark Knight Rises contains roughly 72 minutes of 15-perf 70mm IMAX footage — at the time, by far the largest IMAX 70mm content in any feature film. The opening sequence (the airborne kidnapping of a Russian scientist), the stadium speech, the climactic chases, and several other sequences were shot in the format. Audiences who saw the film in 70mm IMAX cinemas experienced significantly more visual information than audiences who saw it in standard digital projection.
Nolan's commitment to the format on this scale was the structural argument that would, across the next decade, expand the use of IMAX 70mm in mainstream cinema. Subsequent Nolan films (Interstellar 2014, Dunkirk 2017, Tenet 2020) extended the proportion of IMAX-shot footage. Oppenheimer (2023) finally crossed the threshold of being shot mostly in IMAX. The Dark Knight Rises is the structural precedent that made the broader IMAX revival possible. See our essay on the IMAX format.