Warning: The following contains major  spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises. Proceed at your own  risk!
It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that I liked The Dark Knight Rises quite a bit. I was, after all,  part of the team here at ComicsAlliance that wrote somewhere in the neighborhood  of 60,000 words about how much I loved Nolan’s last Batman film, and I  walked out of this one feeling satisfied with both the direction and the  execution of the final chapter of his trilogy. It’s solid, enjoyable,  and interprets themes that are a core part of the Batman mythology in a way that  we’ve never seen before on film. That said, I do think that it’s  probably the most flawed of Nolan’s three Batman movies.
My  writing partner, Chad Bowers, told me that one of his biggest problems with Rises was that he didn’t feel like it worked as a sequel to The  Dark Knight, and in a lot of ways, he’s right. Despite the emphasis on  Harvey Dent, Rises feels like more of a throwback instead to Batman  Begins, both overtly with the way that the plot ties tightly into the first  movie and Cillian Murphy’s surprising (to me) return as the Scarecrow, and also  with the weird quirks that crop up in characterization.
The  most notable for me was at the end, when Catwoman rolls up and rescues Batman  from Bane by shooting him with a gun. It’s the same kind of climax that I had a  problem with in Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s recent Batman: Earth One  (which I don’t think is a coincidence), and while Nolan does it with  considerably more skill, the act leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Batman himself  doesn’t kill or use guns, but in Nolan’s version, that’s presented as a  weakness. Having that be the way that a villain like Bane is defeated doesn’t  ring true at all — especially given how enjoyable Bane and his ludicrous  Broadway Musical bad guy voice are for the rest of the film.
In fact,  Batman’s entire second fight with Bane is more than a little lacking, especially  given how perfect the defeat of the Joker is in the last film. That was such an  incredible moral victory, not just the triumph of one man over another, but of a  city refusing to turn against each other, inspired by Batman to stand together  against someone who preyed on their fears. Here, Bane is defeated because Batman  magically gets better at punching between scenes for no apparent reason. The  redemption of Gotham City, and of Batman himself, comes later; the villains are  pretty incidental to it by that point.
Also, while he’s a solid character  throughout the film and the subject of one of the most emotional moments when he  accidentally kills someone, that big reveal with John Blake at the end may well  be the biggest groaner in super-hero movie history. I rolled my eyes so hard  that I think I pulled a muscle.
But despite those flaws (and a few  others), I still thought The Dark Knight Rises was great. A lot of that  has to do with the character work on the part of both Nolan and the cast,  particularly Bane and Catwoman. Anne Hathaway is legitimately amazing every time  she’s onscreen, but Hardy’s Bane was a huge surprise. In a lot of ways, he’s a  direct attempt at recapturing what Heath Ledger did with the Joker, from the the  voice and over-the-top swagger to the fact that he’s got a complex,  ever-spiraling plan that culminates in a massive lie meant to trap Batman. Even  the core mechanic of his plan, the idea of an ordinary Gotham Citizen who’s  secretly a “triggerman” with the power of life and death over his neighbors, is  a direct thematic callback to the moral dilemma that the Joker sets up for  Gotham as the culmination of his plan. But to the credit of the film and actors,  it never really feels like a retread as much as it’s a further exploration of  those themes.
As  someone who tends to read a lot into things — particularly the moral victory at  the end of The Dark Knight — I was genuinely thrilled at how much  Nolan decided to just literalize the ideas at the core of his story. For good or  ill, there’s very little subtlety to anything that’s going on here, from  Catwoman’s desire for something that’s literally called “the Clean Slate” to  Christian Bale and Michael Caine saying their opinions of each other’s actions  out loud in a scene that would’ve been awful if it had been attempted by lesser  actors.
The entire second half of the film follows a logic that has  absolutely nothing to do with reality, and everything  to do with symbolism. From a realistic perspective, it makes no sense that every  policeman in Gotham City would be sent underground to be buried alive for three  months, but it works in context as a representation of law and order being  overthrown and suppressed by Bane and his fanatical army of devotees. The same  goes for the scene where Batman gets his spine broken and then pretty much just  walks it off, does a few push-ups and decides that he doesn’t have a limp  anymore. No joke, I thought that part was great, but it’s also something that’s  easy to laugh at for how much it completely does away with the concept of  believability.
To be fair, though, the comic that sequence is based on  involves Bruce Wayne recovering because his girlfriend has psychic healing  powers that cause her to mentally regress to a five-year-old after she patches  him up. Compared to that, recovering from paralysis by getting punched  in the back and then doing a few crunches is downright sensible.
That’s  an interesting aspect of the film, too: The Dark Knight Rises wears its  influences on its sleeves. It lifts directly from The Dark Knight  Returns (I’m not going to lie, I was pretty excited to see the old cop and  the young cop chasing Batman), Year One, Knightfall and No  Man’s Land, and there are smaller influences from plenty of other stories  as well. But in mashing all of those up, it came away with something those  stories could never have: an ending. Or at least, a kind of  ending.
Nolan  has a luxury that the creators working in the Batman comics don’t. He’s not  bound by having to have Batman show up five times next month in a  self-perpetuating comic book story machine, so he can show us how his version of  Batman ends, and that ending is a victory. In Begins, Batman sets out  to become a symbol that’s more than a man, and in The Dark Knight, we  see how powerful that symbol can be. By the end of Rises, that symbol  has truly grown to encompass more than one man ever could, to the point where  the man at the core of it is no longer necessary. It’s a complete and total  victory: Gotham City is no longer a place that needs Batman to survive. The  climate that led to his parents’ murder — revealed in Begins to have  been a social construct created by the League of Shadows — has been changed  into something better. The extraordinary grip that crime held on the city has  been broken, and with it, the need for Batman. He finally gets the happy life  that he deserves, but he’s also secure in the knowledge that if the need for  Batman arises, there will always be someone there to help that won’t have to  resort to running around in hockey pads. Again, it’s the symbolism of Batman as  the hero without powers, the hero that “could be you” (if you happened to be  born a billionaire with a photographic memory and a genetic disposition towards  athletics) made literal. It’s an interesting idea, and for Nolan’s version of  Batman, it works.
Coming to The Dark Knight Rises as a fan of  the comics, or even of other mass media interpretations like Batman: The  Animated Series, it’s a weird movie. It’s less about Bruce Wayne than it is  about the idea of Batman and what that means, and as  someone who’s devoted a lot of time and energy to that idea, I found it to be  very appealing. Taken as a trilogy, the movies themselves move further towards  the symbolic and representational, from the fairly straightforward action movie  of Begins to the morality play of The Dark Knight to the  genuinely mythical storytelling of Rises. I’m not quite sure it works  as well as it could’ve, but in telling that story in that way, it fulfills the  first movie’s promise of Batman becoming more than just a person. He becomes an  idea, a symbol of hope, and it’s that idea that wins out as the focus of the  movie.
And if nothing else, it’s certainly the second-best Batman movie  with an extended sequence based around the premise that some days, you just  can’t get rid of a bomb.