14. The Clash of Principle & Spectacle
The Dark Knight Rises is a film fundamentally of its time, channeling both the spirit of outraged rebellion and the financial instability that has commanded miles of newspaper column inches in the past few years, twin pillars of influence that express themselves in the context of Nolan's Gotham. There is a growing dearth between the upper classes of Gotham's citizens and those at the bottom, and it is that situation that underpins Bane's uprising, and the inference is that the storm in Gotham was coming whether Bane mobilised his army or not. It might not have appeared so explosively, but it would have come eventually, gnawing away at Gotham from within. But then, with one sweep of his creative brush, Nolan makes that context just background noise, and somehow simply part and parcel of Bane and Talia's plan by suggesting that those problems were merely a step in the Bane-takes-Gotham story. It's a little tasteless to push those principles completely away, in preference for an explosive climax that changes the threat to Gotham from an internally perpetuated disease to a short-term, albeit fatal, external threat, because it encourages the audience to believe that all of Gotham's problems disappear in the distant mushroom cloud on the horizon, with Bane and Talia slain. That is of course one of those blockbuster prerogatives, to sweep everything under the carpet when the hero has saved the day, resetting smashed cities and climates of fear to normal pre-near-apocalypse levels, but to suggest that everything is now okay in Gotham after Batman dealt with the bomb-threat is to criminally undermine a massive part of the complex woven narrative. And it robbed the narrative of some added depth.