Christopher Nolan: Ranking All 9 Of His Movies From Worst To Best

6. The Dark Knight Rises

The Prestige Christopher Nolan
Warner Bros.

While The Dark Knight Rises isn't the best film in Nolan's trilogy of Bat-flicks, it's nowhere near as bad as a host of online trolls would have you believe. In fact, the biggest reason why The Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment to some is the exact same reason why Interstellar was a disappointment to some; expectations.

Heath Ledger set the bar incredibly high, so even though Bane was an intimidating villain, he was labelled a let-down. We expect Nolan's stories to be extremely watertight, so when we find minor nitpicks (how did Bruce get back into Gotham? How did Batman survive the blast?), the story is labelled a let-down.

This expectation - that everything needed to be perfect - caused the film to suffer, becoming a victim of its own existence.

In truth, The Dark Knight Rises fully realises the idea at the heart of this trilogy - that Batman isn't a man, he's a symbol, a legacy. In that sense, it was the perfect ending, and there wasn't really any other direction Nolan could've taken it.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.