I’ll assume other movies are opening this weekend, but none of them will be watched. We should probably also mourn the fates of any film opening in the next three weeks as well, which means The Watch and Killer Joe are probably destined to small-screen releases for quite a while. The Dark Knight Rises opens this weekend, and hopefully rights this so-far summer of lackluster actions films. Spiderman is highly okay; The Avengers was fun if a bit too long, Prometheus tried really hard to make us think it was Alien, and Battleship – well, it was based on a rather boring board game.
The circumstances leading up to this release can send its critical success in one of two ways. (Financial success is guaranteed, particularly for those who bought Dark Knight in advance and are now selling them on Ebay.) Regarding the film’s reception, the long wait without satiated excitement could lead to higher-than safe expectations. I blame this for some of the views of The Dark Knight as well. Ledger’s performance is amazing, but the film itself is rather viscous and faux-philosophical – something that ironically contradicts the films as anti-comicbook-style films. (You can almost see a thought bubble with italicized print come out of James Gordon Jr.’s mouth when he asks, “Why we have to chase him?”) If these expectations are not met with an uber-climax and kickass actions sequences, the film could get relegated to the pile of wonky third-installments. (See Godfather III, X:Men Last Stand, Superman III, Matrix Revolutions, Spiderman 3 for most recent examples.)
However, the film could also trump the success (critical and otherwise) of The Dark Knight. How? Probably by either killing Batman or putting him out of commission. I’d actually prefer to see this happen, solely because if Nolan puts Batman on the shelf, it’s going to take a stellar hand behind the camera to reboot the franchise, and I think it deserves to rest for a while. Tim Burton had two solid films in the late 1980’s. Then, Joel Schumacher took over and shat pastel and cheesy lines all over everything. A play at clever nostalgia or not, it was never appropriate to have Robin say “Holy rusted metal Batman! It’s rusted and full of holes! The cadence didn’t work, and it was sillier than the overall premise (brain waves drained through a new television-top device) and the Rorschach that looks like a bat no matter who looks at it. Plus, Rorschach ink blots only appear in a few patterns (the image in the film is not one of them). They are not randomly produced like a Jackson Pollack painting.
An additional ending might be – and has been rumored – that Batman is taken out of commission and the role of Dark Knights gets passed on to Joseph Gordon Levitt. Within this film, he is cast as a member of the police force, but it would be intriguing if he ends up becoming the next Dark Knight – not a Robin, but perhaps a version of Nightwing, or something like that. The upside here could be a solid ending to the Batman character. The downside could be the perpetuation of a franchise that will ultimately run on steam and negligible villains.
Regardless, the film will make billions of dollars and be sold out for weeks. Here’s hoping those who sleep outside the theater aren’t deceived by their expectations.
