10 Coolest Superhero Movie Scenes Ever
9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - Joey, Have You Ever Been In A Turkish Prison?
Time hasn’t been as kind to the third instalment in Christopher Nolan’s seminal Batman trilogy as it has to the first two films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).
As you’d expect for a culminating cinematic chapter, it’s more convoluted, contains more characters and complications. Repeat viewings tend to dull the initial impact of the movie, exposing its flaws (plot holes, stretched logic and dodgy pacing, for the most part).
This introductory sequence, however, still remains a jaw-dropping piece of cinema. Like the previous entry in this article, it serves as a perfect introduction to the film’s supposed central antagonist: in this case, Tom Hardy's malevolent, unstoppable masked terrorist Bane. Here we see him take down Aidan 'Littlefinger' Gillen's CIA plane to recover an asset and remove any witnesses…
Bane’s mid-air hijacking is audacious and thrilling, setting the tone for what’s to follow. A high-octane set-piece right out of a Bond film, it has much of the same style as Nolan’s 2010 masterpiece Inception, almost as if it had been left on the cutting room floor during post-production.
Readers of the Batman comics remembered Bane from the Knightfall storyline, in which Bane had ‘broken’ Batman, rendering him paralysed. Of course, they made up a tiny fraction of the film’s intended audience, meaning that Nolan had to set Bane up in their minds as a serious threat from the word go.
This scene succeeds in establishing Bane and his crew as formidable adversaries before they even set foot in Gotham, and sets out Nolan’s stall for the remainder of the movie, which arguably never quite recaptures the same excitement.