Review: The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Story: Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lives in recluse. Mentally and physically broken by his years as Batman he sees Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) clean up the streets of Gotham. However, the arrivals of the gymnastic burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and of the cruel mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) force Batman out of retirement. The question is if he is able to rise up again and confront his present foes as well as the demons of his past.

If The Dark Knight Rises is quite a disappointment, then it is so because of the enormous expectations of fans, and the high bar set by its predecessors, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). In fact, to call ‘TDKR’ a bad film is unjustified. It is a good summer blockbuster; by far the best of this summer. It grabs such fodder as The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-man in their necks and scoulingly sends them back to kindergarten. And yet it disappoints.

The biggest let down for me was that director Christopher Nolan does not chart new territories and themes in TDKR. Rather, he returns to the issues already covered in quite some extent in Batman Begins. And although Bruce Wayne / Batman does grow as a character, I miss the expansion to Batman’s universe and psychology that made The Dark Knight so very special. From a storytelling point of view it makes sense to make the circle complete, and Nolan does not hesitate to emphasize this, using quite a big number of flashbacks to Batman Begins. But I think he is mistaken to pressume that his audience is not already overly familiar with the previous films.

Valuable time is lost with these flashbacks, and although I do not think that The Dark Knight Rises is too long, I do think it could have spent some of its running time (a whopping 164 minutes) in a more effective manner. On many an occasion, especially in the climactic final hour, Nolan falls back on cheap short-cuts in his staging of the battle over Gotham’s fate. On first viewing these moments may be mistaken for plot holes, but on second viewing they appear to be the result of cramped storytelling and shoddy editing. Unnecessary mistakes that could easily have been solved had Nolan allowed himself more time to stage these scenes properly and less time reinvoking worn down, and this trilogy unworthy, generic stereotypes.

Nolan likes to work with the same people over and over again: Story writer David Goyer, producer Emma Thomas, writer Jonathan Nolan (yes, the brother), composer Hans Zimmer, editor Lee smith and cinematographer Wally Pfister. If I would recommend Nolan to look for another editor if he continues in action films, I must also praise Wally Pfister. Pfister was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Knight, and he won one for Inception, and in The Dark Knight Rises he delivers again. The vistas of a Gotham under siege are stunning. In cooperation with the special effects team Pfister does something extraordinary: the stunts and effects that in other films seem weightless and immaterial digital constructions have heft and weight and, consequently, realism in TDKR.

Nolan also prefers to work with actors he already knows. Of course he brings back Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth), but he also calls in the services of his Inception veterans Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard (as business woman and love interest Miranda Tate) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Gotham city cop John Blake). And there are surprising cameos by some old characters as well. The only major new face is Anne Hathaway. And it must be said that, in such an enormous ensemble, it is Hathaway who stands out, next to Bale and Gorden-Levitt. The other actors suffer from the fact that their roles are perhaps slightly too marginal and underwritten. Tom Hardy is imposing, threatening and scary as Bane, but he can not rival Heath Ledger’s Joker. He should not want to either, and we should not expect it from him.

As an action spectacle, this film is stunning. Big set-pieces involve a chase scene with multiple motorcycles, a street battle between cops and thugs and, perhaps most memorable, a mid-air abduction in the opening sequence. We should not underestimate the contribution of composer Hans Zimmer to these scenes. The master of the genre almost overplays his hand with a thunderous score that drowns out bits of the dialogue, but the crucial word in this sentence is ‘almost’. Empire compared Zimmer’s soundtrack with an earthquake, and that is an appropriate metaphor. The music defies further description.

By not offering us something fundamentally new, apart from some interesting characters, Nolan deprives his film from the depth and the political commentary that The Dark Knight had. Complaints that TDKR is politically reactionary or conservative miss the point that there is actually a shocking lack of politics in this film. If there is any, it only serves as a masquerade of or a detraction from the actual plot, which then is too light to justify the epic ambitions of the film.

But Nolan does deliver emotionally. The fans who have made his films the huge successes that they are have invested in this world and in these characters. And although this individual film may not be able to match the quality of its predecessors, it does succeed in satisfyingly finishing this particular story of Bruce Wayne. Actually, it might be its strongest point (and this is the only small spoiler! I put into this review) that it finishes the story of Bruce Wayne, but not necessarily that of Batman. A relief for the studio and for the fans.

Final verdict: The Dark Knight Rises is a fitting and satisfying conclusion to what we can now call the best superheroe franchise to date. However, it is also demonstrably the weakest link in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and so it is with appropriate heartache that fans have to say goodbye to their holiday fling of three summers.

Trailer Tuesday: Lawless Prometheus Rises

Lawless

Dir. John Hillcoat. Starring: Shia LeBoeuf, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska & Gary Oldman

Release date NL: November 2012

 

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce & Idris Elba

Release date NL: 31 May 2012

 

The Dark Knight Rises

Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Aidan Gillen & Liam Neeson

Release date NL: 20 July 2012

Trailer for The Dark Knight Rises online!!!

Quick analysis? This is gonna be dark stuff, with Bruce Wayne leaning on a cane. Michael Caine’s Alfred is in tears and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is in a tight spot, politically. A masked Anne Hathaway whispers ominously, and then the shit hits the fan. The Arkham prioners are set loose on the streets of Gotham once more and it turns into a very nasty revolution.  With Batman getting Bane’s “permission to die”… Wow.

Most remarkable is how light the film looks. Batman used to lurk in the shadows: now he is brought into full daylight.

My only worry is about the CG on the collapsing football field and the flying Batwing-kinda-thing. That really needs some more polishing. But there is plenty of time for that in post-production, as The Dark Knight Rises is not set to premiere until July.

Catching – the Contagion review

Forgive the pun in the title. But coming out of Contagion one can do with some mild-mannered, light-hearted tongue-in-cheeking. For Steven Soderbegh’s latest thriller is gripping to say the least. Contagion mostly calls into recollection Traffic, Soderbergh’s other multiple-plotline ensemble piece about a terrible disease keeping the world in a deadly grasp. And although Traffic’s drugs are referred to as a disease only in a metaphorical sense, Contagion is a about a real disease. A terribly nasty virus carried over from bat to pig to Gwyneth Paltrow and then the rest of the globe. ‘What if’ SARS, the bird-flu or the pig-flu had been as apocalyptic events as sometimes was predicted? Well, for a start the USA would run out of body bags within twelve days.

Soderbergh shows the spread of the disease, its impact on everyday life and the efforts of scientists and doctors trying to find a cure and containing the virus in a documentary-like fashion. He therefore uses the handheld cameras and unusual angles he also used in Full Frontal and Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh famously switches between such high-brow experiments and more traditional commercial fare (Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels) and Contagion is something in between. It is an enormous flick, in terms of cast, sets and scope, but it is delightfully devoid of cheap thrills and easy emotions. Soderbergh is one of the few directors – the only other one I can directly think of is Christopher Nolan – who get to make serious and intelligent films with huge budgets. Contagion gets to spend time in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Atlanta, London and Hong Kong.

And it stars no less than six big names: Matt Damon is the common citizen caught up in the epidemic pretty early and Gwyneth Paltrow is his cheating CEO wife. Laurence Fishburne is the head of the Centre for Disease Control that tries to find a cure to the disease, and Kate Winslet is his on-the-site organizer. Marion Cotillard is a WHO researcher trying to track the origins of the virus in China and Jude Law is a weasily blogger who makes money out of panic by selling fake medicines online. And if you’d think that wasn’t enough to keep track of: Elliott Gould, John Hawke and Jennifer Ehle also have substantial roles. The last one is even essential.

No surprise then that not everyone gets too shine. While Winslet, Paltrow and Fishburne are impressive, Cotillard and Law feel superfluous. Cotillard even disappears from the film halfway through, only to get a small payback at the end. Ehle on the other hand is only introduced properly, as anything else but a lab-coat, almost near the end of the film. But if there is any star to this film than it is Matt Damon. It is becoming baffling, the last two years, how he lifts up anything he does, how he squeezes real character out of little material, and how he fits in such diverse roles: The Informant! True Grit, Hereafter, now Contagion. Wow.

While the plot may feel fragmentary at moments – perhaps more suitable for a television miniseries – Soderbergh’s style is properly cinematic, combining wide vistas with close inspection of minute details. And to top it off Contagion boasts a stunning and sinister musical score composed by Cliff Martinez. Contagious, gripping, catchy. Forgive the puns that are my sighs of relief after finishing this film uninfected. Go and see, and for God’s sake don’t cough during the film: you’ll make everyone run for the door.

Villains for The Dark Knight Rises revealed?

The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s third and last Batman film, is currently in production on set in Pittsburgh. On-set photographers took the following pictures of Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard, in the costumes of their respective characters (and expected villains): Selina Kyle (who may or may not become catwoman), Bane and Miranda Tate. Nolan is very secretive about the plot for the film, so the character descriptions are based on the graphic novels, and may or may not correspond to the role Nolan sees for these characters in his film

Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle:

Selina Kyle is the alter ego of Catwoman, as Bruce Wayne is that of Batman. She has previously been played by Michelle Pfeiffer (in Batman Returns) and Halle Berry (Catwoman). These incarnations saw Kyle having a close relations to cats, but in her first appearance in a graphic novel (Batman #1, 1940) Selina Kyle is simply a very talented, lean burglar with the nickname ‘The Cat’ . The costume in this picture, and the fact that she drives Bruce Wayne’s ‘ bat-bike’  suggest that Nolan has opted for this early incarnation of Selina Kyle.

Tom Hardy as Bane:

In the graphic novels, Bane is a genetically and chemically enhanced super soldier, both physically strong and very intelligent. A version of the character appeared in the dreadfull Batman & Robin, but there he was an animalistic bulk of muscles employed by Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), and not very intelligent. He was played by Jeep Swenson. In the comics Bane was mostly a villain, although he was at some times an ally of Batman. Ominous omen: in the ‘ Knightfall’  series Bane beats Batman and breaks his back…

Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate

Marion Cotillard is playing Miranda Tate, who – official communications – Warner Bros. describe as a businesswoman helping Bruce Wayne with his philantropic work. But this costume, and one other photo in which Cotillard is seen climbing out of the Batmobile, suggest that there may be more to her character. Miranda Tate is rumoured to be an alias for Talia Al-Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s A-Ghul, Batman’s opponent in Batman Begins. The character Talia Al-Ghul has a rich history in the Batman comics, at one point being engaged to Bane, then giving birth to Bruce Wayne’s son, and also crossing over into the Superman universe when working for Lex Luthor. So yes, given that Nolan is involved in producing and writing Zach Snyder’s new Superman film Man of Steel, we might expect anything from Miranda Tate.

The Dark Knight Rises is set for a July 19, 2012 release in The Netherlands. Man of Steel for June 14, 2013 (USA).

Preview: The Dark Knight Rises

Last week Warner Bros. released the teaser poster for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and yesterday they also put an HD version of the first teaser online. A shoddy low-quality version had already been leaked to the internet, but its quality was so bad that hardly anything could be seen or heard in it.

The new teaser still tells us little about the plot: there are some images from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and a voice-over by Liam Neeson that comes from the first film. Then: an image of Gary Oldman’s commissioner Gordon on a hospital bed: hurt, weak. He insists that Batman must come back, that they were “in this together”. An unseen Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) doubt whether Batman still exists. Then there are shots of someone climbing out of a hole and of Bane (Tom Hardy). One of his face and one of him approaching a stumbling Batman in an underground location.

And that is it. I am thrilled. I am very much looking forward to the film, yet I am afraid as well. Mostly because of the cast list. The Dark Knight Rises sees Bale returning as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred) return as well.

Tom Hardy will be Bane, who in the comics is a genetically engineered super-soldier or villain. Anne Hathaway is cast as Selina Kyle, and may transform into Catwoman. Hathaway is new to Nolan, but Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gorden-Levitt are not: they worked with him on Inception. Gorden-Levitt will be police officer John Blake, and Cotillard will play Miranda Tate, in the comics also known as Talia Al Ghul, the estranged daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, Batman’s enemy from Begins. Josh Pence is cast as a young Ra’s, and Liam Neeson is rumoured to return as the old version of the character.

Such long cast lists lead to problems; see last years Iron Man 2. All these well-known actors and characters can hardly all be given the screen time they need to develop their characters properly and play a major role in what still should be the story of Batman. At worst, we could get a mess of a film. However, considering Nolan’s disciplined style of filmmaking that is not likely. More likely is that the film will show an extreme version of the template of The Dark Knight and Inception, in which supporting characters’ emotional or personal development are sidelined in order for them to schematically inhabit the various political, moral or mythological points Nolan wants make.

Something else I fear is that Nolan might move away from the realistic tone of his previous Batman films, and indulge in the more metaphysical themes and plotlines some of the comics (for instance Frank Millar’s “The Dark Knight Returns”) offer. That is something I would not be fond of.

But I had similar fears back in 2007, when I first learned that Heath Ledger, whom I, at the time, only remembered as the teenage heart-throb from 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale, would play The Joker, a role made iconic by Jack Nicholson. And I had my doubts about the pitch for Inception as well: A thriller set within the architecture of the mind? And in both cases my doubts and fears were met by great films. Let’s hope Nolan can do it again.

And more… trailers

Plenty of noteworthy trailers to share this week. Today the teaser for The Dark Knight Rises will be released (officially that is. Earlier this week bad quality versions already leakd online). Before that, a few other treats:

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Dir. Guy Ritchie. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law & Noomi Rapace.

Release date: December 15 2011

Contagion

Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Marillon Cotillard, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne

Release Date: October 20 2011

The Iron Lady

Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Starring: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent & Roger Allam.

Release date: December 8 2012

Good-Looking Car Wreck – the Public Enemies review

I missed Public Enemies in cinemas last year, so here is a review, based on the DVD, of Michael Mann’s historical crime film.

Public Enemies follows the last year of Public Enemy nr. One of the United States in 1933: the equally famous and sought after bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp. It also gives attention to the man charged with arresting him: FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). As such, Public Enemies recalls Mann’s older film Heat, which pitched robber Robert de Niro against cop Al Pacino. However, Public Enemies does not come close to Heat, in any respect.

First of all the film is shot in a very high definition digital format. And although this provides great detail and a sharp and clear image, it is completely inappropriate for a period piece that not just references 1930s gangster films, but actually incorporates them in its narrative. Films like this are much better served with a soft, classical lighting and cinematography.

Second, the plot is unstructered and all over the place. It introduces the characters of Dillinger and Purvis, and that of Dillinger’s girlfriend Billy Frechette (Marion Cotillard), but every other person in the film is unrecognizable, exchangeable and disposable. This includes even J. Edgar Hoover and Baby Face Nelson, another famous criminal. This is infuriating. People in the film are constantly talking about Baby Face Nelson, but it is only after 90 minutes that I actually find out who of all the interchangeable criminals surrounding Dillinger actually is him.

(Don’t you think this trailer is brilliant? A pitty the movie does not deliver)

Dillinger’s relationship with Frechette is built up in the second half hour of the film, but then ditched and forgotten for another 45 minutes, before Billy is brought back for a supposedly emotional last act. Due to this intermission their romance never really sets of, and is not believable. Cotillard works hard and delivers where possible, but Johnny Depp fails completely. He is unlikable and does not allow any identification or engagement with his character. This is of course normal for Depp, who has always excelled as the eccentric outcast, but never as a leading man. It does not help that Dillinger finally gets killed when going out with two other girls while Billy is in jail for helping him. Maybe historically correct, but entirely inappropriate for a lead character we’re supposed to identify with.

Christian Bale gets way too little to do as Melvin Purvis, a man who – as we learn in the ending credits – quitted his job at the FBI after Dillinger was shot dead by one of his agents and one year later committed suicide. Now that is a story that I would be interested in, but Mann does not even give us a hint of what motivates or drives Purvis, or of what sent him over the edge finally. Instead we only get a strange, stitched on Southern accent.

The film would have been much better if it were centered on the likable Purvis, giving Bale the opportunity to anchor the audience in the world of the story, and Depp the opportunity to shine as the eccentric, fame digging outlaw, without the burden of emotions and relationships. But Michael Mann has missed this opportunity, interested as he apparently was in design (it must be said, the set design and costumes are gorgeous) and prlonged and loud action scenes.

Two scenes stand out. Billy Frechette being interrogated and tortured by the FBI and not giving up Dillinger, and one scene in which the famous criminal walks into the FBI field office to have a look at Purvis work place, while the agents present do not notice him, caught up as they are in the radio commentary of a baseball match. But two scenes do not save a car wreck of a film.

A Fascinating Science Experiment – The Inception review

The Internet is teeming with adoring Inception reviews (just do some googling), so let me be very brief here. I saw Inception tonight, and was mightily impressed. The plot is amazingly smart, but never condescending. No red harrings here, as in Nolan’s earlier film The Prestige, which I very much disliked. In director/writer Christopher Nolan’s universe, Inception is closer to The Dark Knight and Batman Begins than to Memento or Insomnia. However, unlike The Dark Knight, Inception fails to deliver emotionally. There is stunning cinematography and cgi visuals, a forceful musical score by Hans Zimmer, and good performances by the actors. Especially the ladies, Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) and Ellen Page (Juno) are very convincing. The plot is more balanced than that of The Dark Knight. The ideas it spawns will linger. And yet.

As I said, Inception does not deliver emotionally. First, I thought this was because of Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as protagonist Dom Cobb, a man who enters another person’s dreams to steal valuable ideas. Cobb is separated from his children, and takes on a last, impossible job to get back to them: Inception, inserting rather than extracting an idea. This difficult job is made more difficult by Cobb’s memories of his deceased wife (Cotillard), which keep invading the dreams he is entering. But it is not DiCaprio’s performance that upsets me, he is doing fine (though not delivering the performance of a lifetime, as Empire suggested). It is the plot. It is simply too smart. Never condescendingly so, but just complicated enough to keep you thinking with the film, instead of engaging emotionally. In the end, you want the inception to work, the project to succeed, and you care less about Dom Cobb, his wife Mal and their children.

Another thing: Inception is really straight forward. It sets up a situation, presents a challenge, sees the assembly of the inception team (Cobb, Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and follows the complicated heist (think Ocean’s Eleven on hallucinating mushrooms) step for step. It is complex, but not deceiving. However, in the final act Nolan seems to take one step into the subconscious too much, and it becomes slightly unclear where the boundaries lie between dreams and ‘limbo’, which is the place you end up if you die too deep inside the subconscious. Perhaps I have missed a line or two explicating this, and I should allow myself a second viewing. But… I don’t think that is fair. I mean: I saw The Dark Knight three times in the cinema. But because I liked it. Not because I though I had missed something.

I am a very experienced and educated film viewer. Watching films critically is what I do professionally, it’s what i’m trained to do. If even I miss a few marks, then perhaps the film is trying a little too hard in being complex. And forcing people to see it again, just to ‘get’ it or achieve satisfaction, it means forcing them to pay a second ticket (9.80 in my cinema, because it is a ‘long’ film). And that feels wrong.

Christopher Nolan is a very gifted film maker and story teller. He has proven on a number of occassions that he can combine complex narrative structures with emotional engagement and satisfaction. However, he may have had a little too much freedom, or a little too much money on this occasion. It would do him no harm to look back on The Dark Knight to see what left the audience in shock and in tears, before he moves on to make his third and final Batman film next year. Because it wasn’t the smartness of the plot, not with me.

Nolan said Inception was his ‘Bond’ movie. I guess he was right. But the 1960s and 70s Bond then, not Daniel Craig’s haunted character from Casino Royale. In the end I think Inception is like a Russian Baboesjka doll, or a science experiment. Fascinating to look at, but it lacks the real magic. That last final spark that characterizes the really really great films

Still, the movie event of the summer? Certainly.