The Dark Knight Rises: A Fan’s Experience (Not A Review)

There would be ga-zillion reviews about The Dark Knight Rises on the internet, and you would’ve read more than half of it. But this is my #fanboymoment, an irresistible urge throttling my emotions to take the form of words, and emboss my feelings on this .doc file.

I, like almost all of you grew up reading Batman comics, watching  The Batman: Animated Series during the 90s, and drawing bat symbols on my pencil box and notebooks. The wait for somebody to get a smuggled copy of DC comics was always eagerness at its best. But The Dark Knight Rises is much more than Batman, than the Dark Knight, and way more than any superhero movie.

The Build Up

There’s a reason why they call Christopher Nolan as God. That’s because he truly is one. TDKR is beautifully spun into the previous two franchisees of the Batman trilogy that you would want to sit down, grab a bowl of popcorn and see the three movies at a stretch without even getting up to pee once. Right from the start when Bane exhibits his wrath on Gotham till the climax, you see a Dark Knight in every hero of Gotham city. Right from Batman, Commissioner Gordon, Detective Blake, Mr. Fox, to Catwoman.

The Dark Knight Rises Experience

Nolan makes you sit at the edge of your seat with bated breath, anticipating what Bane will do next, what worse will Gotham have to endure under the brutal tyranny of a calculative destroyer. And then he makes you seethe in anger at Bane, till all the lights go off under the subway and the Batsuit makes an entry, as the cop says “You’re in for a show tonight”. At that fraction of moment in the endless sea of moments you have lived, you feel like cruising that Batmobil and crushing the monstrous skull of Bane. It’s difficult to put to words how artistically Nolan sews an emotional side of Alfred who’s constantly worried for Bruce Wayne, into the adrenalin pumped drama. For a moment you forget that Bruce Wayne and Batman are one, your heart feels heavy for Bruce’s losses and it’s again strong as Batman displays his theatrical crusader spirit. But hey! That’s Nolan, the man for you. He never portrays the superhero as iconic and out of this world. He makes him look as ordinary and as rusty as anyone can get after an exile. What he excellently shows is, the intent of a man called Bruce Wayne. It’s the intent that transforms him into Batman, and then the Dark Knight. Without the intent and will, even a superhero is as ordinary  as anyone.

The part where Batman takes a right turn on the Batmobile and the front wheel rotates 360 degrees is classic. You could play it over and over again on your laptop and still not get bored.  And the Rugby match scene goes down as one of the most classic scene I have ever seen. There might be calmness while the boy sings, but the silence is deafening with anticipation of the worst.

Batman and Bane

I can endlessly talk about the characters. I mean it. The dialogues are crisp, snappy, that you would want to make a note.  Especially when Gordon quotes a remarkable piece from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better place that I go to than I have ever known.”

You can clearly note Bane’s calculative, sinister, and logical annihilation spree. He kills his own men without a sign of remorse on his face. Very different from a Joker who runs around the city wreaking chaos. Bane’s more of the organised crime type. Tom Hardy looks monstrously huge and at a point a pseudo communist. Bale stuns you with his grit, intent, and pain again. So much that you’d actually freeze his moments of comeback at Bane in your head, in order to savour them again and again.

Today, I will dust off the Batman poster in my room. I owe this to the caped crusader and to Christopher Nolan as well. I owe them a remarkable experience, so that 20 years down the line I can read this and remember the impulse that made me pen down this article.

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