5. The Problem Of Back Stories
The Problem Both Bane and Selina Kyle have unsatisfactory, undeveloped backstories that seem to hint at a bigger narrative focus that was abandoned somewhere in development.
How To Fix It You can go one of two ways here, either fleshing out the back stories of key characters like Bane and Selina Kyle, or dropping them entirely. Both come with their own problems: fleshing out means further screen time and The Dark Knight Rises was already well past the t00-long-for-cinema point by the time the credits rolled. Scale is one thing, but it's also the natural enemy of uncomfortable cinema chairs. In truth, Selina didn't need much of a backstory - Hathaway's performance was loaded enough to suggest that she had something in her past similar to what Bruce Wayne had gone through, and that should have been the only thing that mattered in the script: Catwoman is after all an enigmatic character, and the preservation of her mystery should have been key. We didn't need to peek behind that particular curtain at all, and it seems Nolan realised that - at least partly - when he decided not to fully develop the significance of Selina's relationship with Jen. Sadly that character remained as an all too visible remnant of what still feels like an abandoned idea. Bane's backstory was far more important, especially if we were looking for a little more depth in his character - though it's often fatal for dark villains of his type - and dropping the whole Selina backstory would have given Nolan more time to put in the extra Bane backstory scenes that were filmed and will appear on the blu-ray Extras. Then perhaps we can see a little more development in the history of Bane and Talia's relationship, as there's something quite wrong about the way it develops in the cinema release version.