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The Dark Knight Rises… Above all Expectations! – Movie review

Next, we meet the terrifying warlord Bane, played by British actor Tom Hardy. Bane, the steel-muzzled one man army, with hands the size of dustbin lids and arms as thick as tree trunks, is quite reminiscent of X-Men’s ‘Juggernaut’, with a bit of added facial machinery. Hardy is positively petrifying, a man ‘born in hell’ and made of pure poison, using the virtues of hope and truth to terrorise the poor city folk of Gotham into destruction. With not a care in the world, (apart from his choice in sheepskin coats) and the most cinematic sounding punches ever known to man, Bane unleashes untold chaos on Gotham City, transforming the city to wreck and ruin in one foul swoop, and turning over power to the criminals. But this seemingly unstoppable man is yet to come to full blows with our hero, The Batman.

This is the true 21st Century Batman, backed by an armoury of the most up-to-date gadgets one could imagine, and officially the coolest modes of transport. From his range of high-end sports cars, the classic Batmobile and his transforming cannon-mounted bat-bike; Wayne has never been short of impressive vehicles. But The Dark Knight welcomes in a new gadget, appropriately named ‘The Bat’ which is shrouded in a delayed mystery similar to the Gatling gun-mounted jet pack in the movie ‘Kick Ass’. The Bat is later revealed to be an incredibly high-tech helicopter meets hovercraft, something not far from the ‘Transformers’ franchise, and as Wayne’s close friend and gadget maker, Lucius Fox assures “And before you ask, don’t worry, it’s available in black”

The Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, battling with his personal demons and social stigma, begins as a recluse, segregated from society. Gotham is a peaceful city, almost entirely free from organised crime in lieu of Harvey Dent’s death. But suddenly a new super villain and terrorist leader, Bane rises from the tunnels under the city with a plot to destroy Gotham using Wayne’s fusion reactor as an atomic bomb. Killing two birds with one stone he inconspicuously lures the entire police force of Gotham into his tunnels whilst wreaking destruction upon the surface which releases the criminals from prison and traps the cities authority underground.  A chance encounter with Catwoman and a few wise words from his loveable butler Alfred, played by Michael Caine, seems to wake the Batman, and he seems to remember who he is and once was. But after a personal attack of his finances and support, Wayne finds himself completely at the mercy of Bane’s army of mercenaries as they wreak havoc across the apocalyptic, dystopian remains of Gotham, and his entire company is surrendered beneath him. He is beaten and captured, and locked away in a foreign prison, close to death…

One couldn’t help but notice the similarities with Wayne’s story and the original Iron Man movie. Tony Stark, leader of his own enterprise company has built a reactor of which his enemies want to use for evil and finds himself kidnapped and held captive in a foreign prison. Then some similarities became clear between Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman, the ruthless temptress, and The Avengers equivalent, The Black Widow. It is undeniable that there are a lot of similarities in this film to other superhero movies, however this movie also holds so much originality, that even though these stories are the same, it barely crosses one’s mind. There are no brightly coloured costumes, ground-breaking romances or humorous one-liners in this film. The Dark Knight Rises seems to truly strip back what the superhero stereotype has become all about, and focuses on the dark, gritty relentless battle of Good vs. Evil. Instead of borrowing these themes and characters from other similar films such as X-men and The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises is such a spectacularly crafted piece of cinema that it appears more of an amalgamation of all of the greatest aspects of every great film, corroborating together the best of the best, to truly make the ultimate super-movie.

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