Film Review: The Dark Knight Rises

Certificate: 12A (intense sequences of violence and action, some sensuality and language)
Directed By: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman
Budget: $250 million
Runtime: 164 minutes
Trailer: Watch

The bar that Nolan set with The Dark Knight was so high that there was always the risk that he could become a victim of his own success. In hushed voices people doubted if The Dark Knight Rises would ever be able to hurdle it. Specifically, topping the intensity displayed by Heath Ledger's Joker was always going to be a tall order, and certainly it hasn't been done here. Indeed, the comparisons were always inevitable. But The Dark Knight was one of those rare movie events, the kind of film that doesn't come around often which makes any measurement against it somewhat unyielding. Trilogies are also a notoriously difficult thing to nail, but if there's one man you'd want at the helm it's Christopher Nolan, a man who has yet to make a truly terrible film. And with that, one can safely say that The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most fitting conclusions to a trilogy ever made.

Eight years after the Joker brought a little anarchy to Gotham, the city is at peace and Bruce Wayne (Bale) lives as a recluse within the confines of Wayne Manor. But when cat burglar Selina Kyle (Hathaway) spurs Bruce into donning the mask and cape again he soon unearths a fire rising beneath the streets of Gotham, stoked by a gas mask wearing radical named Bane (Hardy).

In true Nolan fashion, The Dark Knight Rises is very much a film of our time. The stakes are even more portentous where if you thought the Joker's plot was audacious, you haven't seen anything yet. Maniac Bane brands himself as champion of the disenfranchised, issuing a call to arms not to the criminals of Gotham, but to the '99%' lingering in economic recession to take back from those who have exploited them. But this is a smokescreen, a game of shadows masking a far more nefarious plot to tear Gotham apart. The Dark Knight Rises' themes are certainly interesting, raising issues of bankers, occupiers, vengeance and lost hope on an epic and personal scale, and it is these things which you will probably take most from the film. This is a bleak and wholly realistic apocalyptic scenario, something almost tangible in a mirror image to our world. Where the Joker sought to highlight the perennial battle between chaos and order, Bane's plan is much more controlled and purposeful, even simple in its execution. He instigates a battle between the haves and the have nots, playing on inherent systemic unfairness and the uprooting of established models. This is about revolution; a war between existential concepts rather than the fundamentals of the universe.

Bane might not be as iconic as the Joker, or even as nuanced as Heath Ledger's portrayal, but he is nonetheless a memorable villain who demands attention. And while at least you could understand what came out the the Joker's mouth, there's something equally disconcerting and pernicious about the garble emanating through his morphine-pumping Darth Vader costume. But then his sheer physicality does most of the talking for him. Certainly, he is the only villain in the trilogy who ever looks like he might break the Bat, making the caped crusader look fallible, weak, and with that the situation hopeless. In many ways his battle with Batman is just as enthralling as the Dark Knight's brush with the Joker. While a notch below the cerebral out-smarting and counter out-smarting battle of wits with the psychopathic clown, Bane's braun and simplistic eloquence in setting off an unstoppable chain reaction of events poses a different, yet equally fascinating challenge for Batman. Even if the idea of two burly men in pantomime costumes shouting at each other in ridiculous voices should strike one as hysterical.

The contrast between Wayne and Bane is stark. Bruce is the crippled beast that wanders his empty castle without cause or purpose, trapped in a body battered by years of crime fighting. Having lost the love of his life, there is a strong sense that Bruce's journey of channeling his rage into becoming justice incarnate has regressed to the directionless adolescent harbouring uncontrollable grief and rage we met at the beginning of Batman Begins. He believes in nothing anymore, a fact he's consistently reminded of by his conscience, Alfred (Caine). Bruce is concerned only for his own affliction, unlike his parents, who as board member of Wayne Enterprises Miranda Tate (Cotillard) puts it, "invested in the world" through their philanthropic pursuits. The years have left him soft, in the same privileged bracket of the 1% Bane seeks to usurp where his over reliance on technology and bat gadgets prove no match for the masked lunatic. In order to beat Bane, Bruce must first go through the same initiation of the man "born and raised in hell on Earth" (or a pit prison halfway around the world if you will). But this isn't merely for the purpose of a Rocky training montage, slumming it by training in primeval conditions in order to physically harden up; this is very much a spiritual journey which reinvigorates his belief and ethical obligations, ultimately bringing the trilogy full circle.

Bale pulls off the troubled Bruce Wayne masterfully, embodying the tragic tale of a man born with everything yet trapped within the darkest recesses of his own mind. But as much as there is a focus on Bruce's story, The Dark Knight Rises features many other wonderfully character driven plot strands. In particular Anne Hathaway is superb, and any fears surrounding the inclusion of 'Catwoman' (never referred to as such here) are quickly laid to rest. Selina Kyle is introduced in such a delectable manner that you wonder why there was any grumbling in the first place. She effortlessly oozes sex appeal without ever meaning to, her ambiguous motivations making her one of the most intriguing characters in the film. Likewise, there is an incredible amount of time spent on rookie cop John Blake (Gordon-Levit). Displaying similar levels of integrity and fortitude to Commissioner Gordon (Oldman), The Dark Knight Rises actually threatens to become more his story, making a compelling point that DC might do well to make a new spin-off trilogy based purely on him. Michael Caine's Alfred is also given some meaty material, delivered with incredible heart as he imparts the hopes and dreams he once had for his effective adopted son.

If there's any criticism to be had here then perhaps at two-hours forty-minutes The Dark Knight Rises does get nebulous in places.  There's so many plots and sub-plots going on that proceedings slow down about halfway through. Also, similarly to The Amazing Spider-Man, this might be one of the few superhero films which barely features a superhero. Certainly Batman's screen time is less than in Begins or the Dark Knight, but then this is a film which thrives more on the expositions of its characters rather than its action. This also shows, where apart from the American football scene we saw in the trailer its action sequences are perhaps not as spectacular as we've seen before.

None of this however stops this being one of the most satisfying climaxes to a movie trilogy ever put to film. Indeed, Nolan's Batman will be cemented for some time as the best superhero series ever. The Dark Knight Rises is a wrought, emotional epic which is complimented perfectly with Hans Zimmer's exhorting musical score. As bat-fans we have truly witnessed something very impressive over the last seven years. This has been a remarkable series combining spectacle with equally engaging character-driven exposition, delivered in such a delightfully understated manner with style and aplomb. It's just such a shame the legend has to end.

Film Review: Contagion

Hollywood has been through just about every permeation of potential causes for man's demise. From asteroids to nuclear war, killer bees to volcanoes, polar shifts to alien invasions, now it would seem that viruses are flavour of the week. Even the current pop-culture fascination with zombies invariably begins with some nasty little germ mutation. And what with recent scares over H1N1, bird flu and SARS serving to whip up a panicked frenzy, it seems fitting then that a film posit 'what if the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat?'. What if the result was some sort of pig-bat virus, transmitted through touch and able to claim your life in a matter of days? Contagion attempts to provide the answer.

When an unknown deadly virus begins knocking off seemingly random people around the globe, authorities race against time to track the source of the contagion and find a cure. Meanwhile a man (Damon) must deal with the sudden deaths of his wife (Paltrow) and son-in-law as society breaks down and an internet conspiracy theorist (Law) blogs myths of a cure which only serves to exacerbate the panic.

This is your typical 'what if' scenario similar in vain to 1980s disaster movie The Day After and global warming/cooling/whatever doomsday effort, The Day After Tomorrow. Like those, Contagion's grounding in reality can be a rather frightening prospect. An unseen killer, easily transmitted, accentuated by director Steven Soderbergh's lingering shots of touched doorknobs and surfaces for a few seconds longer than necessary. We are introduced to cities with their population totals flashed at the bottom of our screen while bodies are piled into massgraves and the death toll rises. And yet, Contagion never gives the impression that this disease is all that deadly. While the film's globe-trotting exploits are supposed to give you a sense of scale and magnitude, we aren't really given any stats as to how many people the virus has claimed. There is a snippet which mentions that, after a year, 2.5million have died in the US, but this represents only 1% of the US population. If we were to scale this out and assume that figures were similar in the rest of the world then it doesn't seem as unbearable as the film suggests. That may sound callous but if you take one of the most deadly natural disasters in human history, the Spanish flu which killed some 10% of the world's population back in 1918, this virus seems relatively small fish in comparison.

Indeed, fears can be further allayed when I read that the virus in Contagion isn't exactly scientifically accurate either. While the disease in the film is highly lethal, infects large amounts of people and has a very short incubation period, the reality is somewhat further removed from such a scenario. In reality an infectious disease must have a relatively long incubation period and less lethality than the film propositions in order for the virus to continue to spread. Consequently tracking the disease, which is a central plot point in Contagion, is much more difficult than the film suggests. As such many facts had to be bent in order for the story to work, and so Contagion's premise perhaps not as frightening as it first suggests.

More frightening though is the societal effects of the virus. As authorities fail to contain the outbreak and food riots ensue, people begin looking to alternative sources for guidance. Cue Jude Law's Alan Krumwiede, a conspiracist blogger claiming the government are in on it all and that the only cure is a homeopathic medicine called 'Forsythia'. Inevitably panic spreads in a fashion which seems more contagious than the virus itself as people loot pharmacies in search of this miraculous placebo. As many of us get our information from the internet these days we often forget that not all of it is vetted and corroborated. The internet is essentially a double-edged sword, both doing wonders for the proliferation of information yet burdened with an equal capacity to transmit dangerous myths and rumour. With regards to Krumwiede he quite evidently has a screw loose but what's more interesting is how the film paints him as the 'bad guy', embodying everything 'unAmerican' from dodgy accent to bad teeth. And yet Krumwiede raises some interesting points about pharmaceutical companies creating crises in order to profit as well as the unforeseen consequences of vaccines such as autism or the swine flu shot which actually killed people back in 1976. Yes he misleads people and hypocritically uses the situation to his advantage in the same vain he accuses big pharma of by becoming a modern day snake-oil salesman, but the ad-hominem portrayal of a paranoid, anorak-wearing crack-pot acts to invalidate some perfectly reasonable questions. The fact that he's Australian could also allude to another infamous Aussie whistle-blower that authorities have had a problem with lately, one Julian Assange.

Perhaps Contagion's biggest problem however is that its all star cast and jumping all over the world doesn't leave much room for showcasing their talent. Nor do you really get the time to build an empathetic relationship with their characters where you probably won't really care which Hollywood superstar snuffs it next. Damon's everyman isn't really afforded the opportunity to capture grief very well as he quarantines himself and his daughter inside their house for the majority of the film while Winslet promises spunk but is sold short just as soon as she sparks interest. Cottilard's WHO (World Health Organisation) epidemiologist meanwhile is given perhaps the most dramatic story arc yet it is one the film shafts right until the end. So much so in fact that it needn't have been even incorporated into the script. Only is the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) head-honcho, played by Laurence Fishburne, given any sort of multi-faceted depth, embodying the same human fallacies of self-interest, stupidity and arrogance as the rest of us. Indeed, it is these three facets alluded to throughout the film which are more scary than any killer-virus could be. Moreover though the briskness with which Contagion shoots over everything, while admittedly serving well to create a fluidity of event, also unfortunately sacrifices character development for something which looks much more like a documentary.

But then, this is the nature of the beast where globe-trotting films are invariably driven more by events than characters. And yet, it still feels like a disappointing waste of talent, even a gimmick to pull in audiences. Everything would have worked exactly the same had its characters been played by just about anyone else. Consequently Contagion is a film without sympathy, as clinical as its scientists who scramble in their lab for a cure. Like the humans involved here it's not perfect, but if you're into your apocalyptic scenarios you might want to give this a go. Preferably with a face mask.

Film Review: Midnight In Paris

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

On holiday with his fiancee Inez (McAdams), Hollywood screenwriter Gil (Wilson) takes to wandering Paris' left bank in search of a cure to his creative block. Harking back to the 1920s when a plethora of famous expatriate artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway called Paris their home, Gil stumbles upon an unexpected source of literary inspiration.

Gil is unfulfilled in his soulless job as a Hollywood script doctor, longing to write a novel which would see him join the pantheon alongside his literary heroes. His superficial fiancee however holds him back, dissuading him from committing to his aspirations in favour of him continuing to pull in the big bucks from his uninspiring Hollywood career. Unsupportive and belittling of his desires, materialistic Inez is more inclined to spend time in Paris shopping, dining with her Tea Party-supporting parents and gallivanting with her invidious pseudo-intellectual friend, Paul (Sheen), rather than let Gil engorge his reluctant muse. That is until Gil takes a midnight stroll only to take a thaumaturgic trip back to 1920s Paris.

Woody Allen has managed to create a wonderfully whimsical tale wholly unconcerned with the mechanics of time travel. Instead, Gil strolls around Paris waiting for midnight to chime when he is picked up by another inebriated chimerical artist in an old Peugeot which whisks him off to hang out with other fabled artists from the period. But there is also a lesson here. There is a tendency to look back on a previous era as an ideal that is better than the present. The central thrust is to grasp your own time, something Gil only realises when delightful love interest Adriana (Cottilard) hastens him to the la belle epoque era of the 1890s to meet Henri Matisse. As the pompous Paul puts it, "Nostalgia is a from of denial". Indeed, no one ever considers their age to be 'golden', even if posterity deems it so.

This is probably the most likeable of all Owen Wilson's roles, genuine and entirely unassuming. He's believably enthused and incredulous at the same time that he's meeting his heroes, and that they're also so accommodating and encouraging of his efforts on his novel in a way his fiancee is not. But then, they weren't legends themselves at the time, constantly encountering and competing against aspiring writers like Gil at Gertrude Stein's (Bates) salon. The other showstopper is Marion Cottilard's Adriana, airy and graceful, emanating a breeze you can't help but feel attracted toward. We meet her as Picasso's bit on the side, but she and Gil soon form a bond which evolves into a love interest. It is Gil's humility which she is attracted to, diametrically opposed to the super egos of troubled genius artists she has previously dated. However, perhaps what's most disappointing is how fleeting the moments spent with Gil's artisan heroes are. From Corey Stoll's portrayal of a very masculine yet tentatively insightful Hemmingway to Adrien Brody's amusing Salvador Dali, you just wish to see more of them. Back in the present McAdams is perfect as off-putting pushy fiance Inez as is Michael Sheen's odious Paul, the self-proclaimed cultural expert whose obnoxious behaviour is typified when he tries to correct a museum tour guide played delightfully, if not briefly, by France's First Lady Carla Bruni.

Darius Khondji's cinematography beautifully captures Paris in the way postcard pictures have evoked so many people's imaginations of the city. Yes, it conveniently ignores all the shit parts, but this is Woody Allen's love letter to gay Paree. Directed with grace and wit, Midnight In Paris is light, completely enamouring and an absolute gem.