The Dark Knight Rises was decently reviewed upon release but with time it’s developed a slight, but unmistakable, air of disfavor. So of course the final movie in this trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, suffers, as much as any other comic book movie suffers, from comparison. Every supposedly serious superhero movie of the next decade and a half (and counting) would be judged against Nolan’s second installment. The sequel now overshadows Batman Begins with its impossibly long cape, so to speak The Dark Knight set a new and enduring standard for comic book adaptations and immortalized Heath Ledger in his intense turn as the Joker. It wasn’t the first superhero movie to take its source material (and itself) a bit more seriously-Stephen Norrington’s Blade and Ang Lee’s Hulk come to mind-but Batman Begins was a critical breakthrough for capeshit and a critical rehabilitation of Batman in particular. This Bruce Wayne, played by Christian Bale, is a vengeful crime fighter trained in martial arts by the League of Shadows, until he defects, determined to protect his hometown from the League and its leader, Ra’s al Ghul. His first entry, Batman Begins, set the bleak but just barely hopeful tone. To Nolan’s credit, he added the weight gradually. “It tests the weight a superhero movie can bear,” wrote the late Roger Ebert in his review. As such, The Dark Knight Rises, which first released 10 years ago on Saturday, was a massive and messy finale for Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. As an obnoxious congressman tells his deputy, the once-admired police commissioner Jim Gordon has outlived his usefulness to the mayor. The Joker is old news, and Gotham is safe.
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