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

6. The Dark Knight Rises

Tom Hrdy Bane Dark Knight Rises
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 over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!