Solved: how to turn this from mere spectacle into an actual story – using elements already in the movie.
Tell the audience who Talia (Marion Cotillard) is at the beginning. Let everything play as it does – she’s present in the Wayne Enterprises meetings; she gets together with Bruce; her reveal toward the end – and suddenly there’s tension. Her getting together with Bruce would then be an interesting left turn – is she softening, changing, feeling conflicted? – which would then be answered in the final act. As with her father, Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) in Batman Begins (2005), the comics have plenty of character melodrama (not to mention, goofy cowled-and-bare-chested brawls) which Christopher Nolan is completely uninterested in drawing from:
By actually establishing Talia from the outset, we’d then know all along that Bane (Tom Hardy) was never the real villain, that he was an elaborate – and compelling – distraction. But unlike Talia, there isn’t much to Bane’s character in the comics (his thing is that he broke Batman’s back one time)…
… so his initial setup in The Dark Knight Rises is already more compelling, which is what makes everything that follows so disappointing. It’s never explained what power it is he has that compels so many to follow him so devotedly, to sacrifice so much for him – and that’s the only thing that makes him interesting. His convoluted plan makes absolutely no sense, which makes him make no sense. Exposition via reading letters aloud isn’t dynamic, clever, or even basic visual storytelling. Batman’s eventual and inevitable triumph is unsatisfying and, after all the muddled messaging of Bane’s many ominous diatribes, is a victory purely of punches and not of ideology. And that voice… Jayzus. I went from being so excited for this movie, to laughing out loud in the theatre after the first moment I heard him speak.
Nolan is a conceptualist, not a story teller.
Of the myriad threads, characters, and themes served up in The Dark Knight Rises, not one holds together under even a moment’s scrutiny. It’s ironic, given Nolan’s beautiful, assuringly tactile film-making – actual celluloid and even IMAX, the practical effects, the grand scale – that these resources, exceptional in these times, are in the service of something so undercooked. If it weren’t for Heath Ledger‘s Joker in the previous instalment in this series, it’s doubtful this film would have been as anticipated, much less praised. And poor Christian Bale: in this finale he’s provided some of the most ridiculous moments and laughable dialogue of the trilogy. The actor and director were far better paired in The Prestige (2006), a film was about sleight-of-hand, in both form and function, whose construction and storytelling made sense. By comparison, The Dark Knight Rises is more a collection of impressive parts waiting to be assembled into something coherent.
Further Viewing
Beyond the Screenplay spends two hours doing a more detailed (and a more gracious) job fixing remixing The Dark Knight Rises:
Speaking of that singular performance, The Director’s Cut pieces together a montage of Ledger and Nolan, in their own words, on crafting the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008):
Nolan also did Talia’s father dirty in Batman Begins – he abandoned the character’s design as an ecoterrorist in the comics, in favour of that whole water supply thing: