My excitement for The Dark Knight Rises was tempered by the tragedy in Aurora, CO. However, I did still see the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy this past weekend.
At this point I’m not entirely sure how I felt about TDKR. I thought that TDKR was a fitting conclusion as it incorporated a number of themes from both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I know that I liked the movie but I’m not really sure how much I liked the movie. More than anything I think I’m just sad that this particular Batman saga is over and that Warner Bros. is undoubtedly already planning its next reboot.
Below are some thoughts I had while watching The Dark Knight Rises. I’ll do my best to keep things spoiler-free because I’d hate myself for ruining Jim Carey’s cameo as the Riddler.
Chaos
Chaos was a theme superbly introduced through the Joker in The Dark Knight. That theme of chaos is effectively carried into TDKR through Bane. While the Joker was a self-professed “dog chasing a car”, Bane is a far more calculating villain. Bane wants to create chaos in Gotham City but he goes about it in a very methodic and un-chaotic way. Whether spontaneous or planned, our world is filled with chaos. We don’t know what tomorrow holds, much less the next five minutes. In light of the chaos we see around us, it’s comforting to know we have a God who’s got the whole world in his hands.
Movement
Without giving too much away, a big theme in TDKR is moving on. Knowing how things ended in The Dark Knight, it’s no surprise that Bruce Wayne might need to do a little moving on with his life. I like that in movies we get to experience a lengthy amount of time truncated to a few hours. If we could do that with our own lives moving on might be so much easier. Even if we could speed up time, though, we’d still need the desire to move from where we are to where we want to be. Without that desire to grow and change we’d simply stay stuck, no matter how quickly we moved through life. In order to grow that desire, we have to see that what God wants for our future is better than what we’re experiencing today.
The End
Everything has its conclusion. From something trivial like a movie to something meaningful like a life. In the end, everything ends, there’s just no way around it. No matter how badly I want Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale to keep making Batman movies, it’s not going to happen. Nolan has said that he’s finished with Batman and I can’t imagine Bale coming back without his director. We need to get used to the cyclical nature of life because we experience it all around us. Loved ones die, friends move away and seasons of ministry come to a close. Knowing that everything will eventually end, though, should push us to better appreciate what we have right now. We should constantly thank God for the blessings he’s giving us now because they’ll eventually become the blessings we had back then.
I am looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight Rises again. Some movies require multiple viewings, especially when wrapped up in so many layers and emotions. I don’t know what’s next for the Batman movie franchise but I certainly hope we’ll never see nipples on the Batsuit again.
What did you think about The Dark Knight Rises?
I liked it quite a lot, though not as much as “The Dark Knight.” For me, the fact that Batman didn’t identify and deal with Bane’s weakness (I don’t want to spoil for others, although I bet folks can figure it out just from publicity shots) from the get-go strained credulity a little; also, Bane was difficult to understand and that mask really hampered Tom Hardy’s acting. Oh, well. I thought the resolution was beautifully handled (although, on reflection, it did make me think of the old Adam West Batman movie: “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”) But thumbs up. I will watch this many more times in the years ahead, I’m certain. I pity whoever WB taps to helm the franchise after Nolan!
Jim carry wasn’t in the dark Knight rises!