15 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy The Dark Knight Trilogy

2. Bruce Wayne Should Have Died At The End (The Dark Knight Rises)

The conclusion to the Dark Knight saga was "tidy" to say the least, tying up the vast majority of loose plot threads and making it clear in what direction the future of Gotham (and indeed, Batman himself) was heading. However, there's one note that doesn't quite work, and that's the fact that Bruce ends up surviving the nuclear explosion at the end of the movie. This is in large part the fault of Nolan's manipulative direction, which tricks viewers into believing that Batman is in the Bat when it explodes, when in fact, he'd bailed out minutes before and let the repaired auto-pilot function do all the work. Then, at the very end of the movie, Nolan shows Bruce in Florence with Selina, which some misguidedly interpret as a mere "hallucination" or "wish" of Alfred's, which is totally absurd. Wasn't the ending of TDKR so much more interesting when Alfred was sobbing at Bruce's grave? It seemed like Nolan had the balls to do what no other filmmaker had dared: to kill Batman off so that nobody else could attempt to make a canonical follow-up to this story, but in the end, he couldn't help but give him a happy ending, even if, given how much he'd suffered throughout these movies, it was relieving in its own way.