Hear Me Out: Why the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy really is painfully average
An average sandwich.
faroutmagazine.co.uk
To say that Christopher Nolan’s 2008 superhero movie The Dark Knight is a bad movie is to commit internet sacrilege, and for good reason too, as whilst the film isn’t without its faults, it helped to legitimise superhero movies as a serious form of cinematic storytelling. On balance, The Dark Knight is a great film, though unfortunately, it just so happens to be sandwiched in between two rather mediocre blockbuster flicks.
Having never helmed a major big-budget release, director Christopher Nolan came to the DC superhero character in 2005 with a distinct vision as to where he wanted to take the Batman character. Inspired by Frank Miller’s comicBatman: Year One, Nolan’s new, gothic take on Batman was a world away from the strange comic-book style of the previous director Joel Schumacher, with Batman Begins focusing on the brooding anger of the titular character and the grit and grime of the city itself.
Played by Christian Bale, Nolan creates a troubled and brooding character who long mourns the loss of his parents, with the actor showing a new take on the character that was gobbled up by audiences at the time of the film’s release in 2005. Feeling fresh and revolutionary at the time against the backdrop of Sam Raimi’s fun Spider-Man films and the exuberant X-Men, with the benefit of hindsight, Batman Begins feels just as cartoony as each of the aforementioned films it was supposedly ‘bettering’.
Donning a dated rubber suit for its titular Batman and doing little to showcase a revolutionary narrative at its centre, Batman Begins isn’t the saviour of superhero films that it was once remembered as. With only Cillian Murphy’s terrific Scarecrow to save it from all irrelevance, the first film in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy is often given the benefit of the doubt for sparking the trilogy, though actually offers very little when it comes to originality or innovation.
Three years later and The Dark Knight would set the world of commercial cinema alight, building off the first film in the trilogy well in realising that the strongest aspect of what makes the story great is the villain that stands in Batman’s way. Putting on one of the greatest performances in modern blockbuster cinema, the late Heath Ledgerchanged the way that the Joker is perceived by creating a menacing individual who challenged Batman with maniacal psychological games.
Though The Dark Knight is certainly more than its powerful antagonist, there’s no doubt that Ledger’s Joker and his relationship with Batman ties the film together, even if the basic story itself once again lacks any sort of intricacy.
It’s all rounded off with the final, and worst, film in the trilogy, the confused Dark Knight Rises that tries to once again create an iconic leading villain, only to create a forgettable, muffled muscle-man. Narratively confused and stuffed with too many characters, Christopher Nolan’s final film helps the trilogy go out with a whimper, with Tom Hardy’s villain Bane unable to invigorate the film with any sort of rousing energy despite a few thrilling scenes.
Thus ends one of the most average film trilogies of all of time, punctuated by several great performances that lead limp narratives to their anticlimactic conclusion. The problem with the Dark Knight trilogy isn’t that it’s a particularly bad collection of films, it’s that they feel, hollow, empty and entirely pointless, with Christian Bale’s smug and nonsensical ‘cheers’ at the end of The Dark Knight Rises capping off a bombastic superhero trilogy with more noise than sense.
