An epic action film with a “spectacular opening” and “breathtaking special effects” is on ITV2 tonight. It’s described by one reviewer as having “an intelligence, epic thrust and visual grandeur far beyond” its box-office rival of the time — though it did not win any Academy Awards.
The Dark Knight Rises from 2012 is the third in the Dark Knight trilogy, following on from Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Directed by Christopher Nolan, it has an astonishingly good cast including Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The film opens with Tom Hardy’s Hannibal Lecter-like Bane being freed during a mid-air hijack. He goes on to create havoc in Gotham, with an assault on the Stock Exchange and the theft of a nuclear device. Eight years after he disappeared, Bruce Wayne (Bale) decides the Dark Knight must rise once again.
The film has an average review score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes (and an average “popcornmeter” rating of 90% from more than 250,000 ratings. And it’s fair to say viewers love it, even on repeat viewings. One said: “The Dark Knight Rises has a great story, amazing villain, and some insane set pieces, which all add up to an epic conclusion of an amazing movie trilogy.”
Another said: “Everyone should watch this movie once in their life.” A third said: “Tremendous film on the rewatch.”
Writing in the Guardian, film reviewer Peter Bradshaw said: “Christopher Nolan insists on the seriousness of the Batman mythology; he has thoroughly reinvented it, reauthored it and thought it through, in a way no other director has done with any other summer franchise.”
Andrew O’Hehir, for Salon.com, said: “Arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen.”
However, not all reviewers were big fans. Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman said: “Nolan has become hooked on the grandiose, at times even the biblical. For anyone who admired the witty playfulness of his early films, it’s a dark night indeed.”
And Anthony Lane in The New Yorker said: “The story is dense, overlong, and studded with references that will make sense only to those intimate with Nolan’s previous excursions into Batmanhood.”
Tragically, on the film’s release a mass shooting occurred inside a cinema in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012, when a 23-year-old shot into crowds with multiple firearms, killing 12 people and an unborn baby. He was given 12 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole plus an additional 3,318 years.
The Dark Knight Rises is on ITV2 at 9pm on Monday, December 29.
