It’s been a month since The Dark Knight Rises was released to nearly universal acclaim and record-breaking box office returns. Even critics and fans alike who had problems with the movie’s length and perceived plot holes admit the sheer spectacle of it all on the screen is something that calls back to the days of epic filmmaking by the likes of DeMille, Lean, and Ford which is high praise indeed for a film about a billionaire orphan in a tricked-out Nomex survival suit trying hard to get rid of a bomb.
Such spectacle would be reduced to sound and fury signifying nothing or a Michael Bay Transformers movie if it wasn’t for strong acting performances not just in RISES but across the preceding movies of the trilogy, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Performances like Sir Michael Caine as the long-suffering butler, Alfred, Morgan Freeman’s smoothly droll Lucius Fox, and, of course, the Agent of Chaos, the Joker, as interpreted by the still-missed Heath Ledger to name just a few.
Those same performances would have been good without a strong lead in Christian Bale’s portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman but because Bale was more than up for that task those performances as well as his own are indelible in film history. Bale’s ability to play three versions of the same character as a fearsome masked vigilante, a self-absorbed playboy, and an all too fallible mortal trying to save his city is often overlooked because of its subtlety but it would be a mistake to do that because Bale was just as important as director Christopher Nolan when it came to helping the Dark Knight truly rise on the silver screen.
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