YMMV / The Dark Knight Rises

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Fans are divided on whether Bane and Talia are in a platonic or romantic relationship. It's also unclear how much their motivation relates to the League of Shadow's dogma vs. how much of it is simple revenge.
  • There's also the question of who's the real Big Bad. Talia/Miranda and Bane both have personal reasons for wanting to destroy Gotham and torture Bruce Wayne, and the nature of their relationship is left ambiguous enough to make them a true Big Bad Duumvirate. Talia never asserts that Bane is a mere henchman to her; Bane is The Heavy and was definitely claiming to be a leader of the League of Shadows earlier in the film, and he has enough initiative to ignore one of Talia's orders. He has enough authority to get other members to die in his place, and is even shown finding and using Gordon's speech in the plan to open Blackgate, which Miranda/Talia could not have known about beforehand. The novelization based on the script even reveals that he considers himself to be the true heir to Ra's al Ghul, and wishes to destroy Batman more to prove himself as the worthier student than out of any true loyalty to Talia.
  • Bane himself. Depending on how you view him, he could be seen as the trilogy's biggest Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds or a depraved monster.
    • On the one hand, The Reveal shows that he too was born in the World's harshest prison, and was compassionate enough to care for the child and aid her escape at great personal cost. Talia implies that his excommunication was influenced by Ra's distrust, and the film implies his Start of Darkness came from the torture he suffered for helping Talia.
    • On the other hand, he consistently kills his henchmen or has them die in his place, sadistically torments Batman almost solely to prove he is worthier than him, leaves everyone who incurs his wrath to rot in the same Pit he was in (including the doctor who helped him overcome his injuries, though the doctor was indirectly responsible for them to begin with as he's the one who left Talia's cell door unlocked), came up with the idea to isolate all of Gotham and torture it with false hope based on his own experiences, (Talia was established as escaping the Pit, and only wants to destroy Gotham to avenge her father, not torture it), and then finally gives the trigger to Talia and puts her in the blast radius to ensure his plans to rule and destroy Gotham go as planned. If it wasn't for Talia and his tragic backstory, he would have arguably been a Complete Monster.
  • It's possible that the ending is All Just a Dream of Alfred's - though that wouldn't explain why he specifically imagines Bruce with Selina, a woman he barely knew beyond one brief meeting and a rap sheet. (According to Christian Bale, it wasn't an Imagine Spot or dream sequence.)
• Anticlimax Boss: When Talia reveals herself in the final act, Bane is seemingly and abruptly killed off by Catwoman with a shot from the Batpod's cannon in a way that some find anticlimactic, if not outright upsetting.
• Ass Pull: Bruce surviving the bombing at the end was completely left unexplained with no foreshadowing or any Freeze-Frame Bonus whatsoever which was very likely another reason that contributed to the ending having a mixed reception.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: This film’s version of Bane became the de facto version for the character for casual viewers who haven’t read the comics or seen any other media.
• Award Snub: The internet was in a fury for no nominations at the Academy Awards. Not even for Cinematography or Hathaway’s performance.
• Broken Base:
  • One of the biggest dividing points is the film's ending in which Bruce Wayne finally retires from being Batman, passes the torch to John Blake and chooses to live happily ever after in Europe - specifically Italy - with Selina "Catwoman" Kyle, Earth 2 style. Cue fans claiming "The Real Batman Would Never Do That!", "The Real Batman Could Never Do That!", "The Real Bruce Wayne Can Never Stop Being Batman!" and so on and so forth, to the point that some even say "The Real Batman Would Die Before He Stopped Being Batman!" and keep insisting that a better ending would be Bruce being dead for real, even though that completely defeats the whole point of the film, that Bruce had to find the will to live and move on with his life. Having him learn that just to die anyway would be counterproductive to say the least. Others dislike the ending because they were hoping for an open ended and the adventure continues... type ending wherein future filmmakers and casts could pick up where Nolan and co left off and continue to expand and build upon his work, possibly even using his saga as the launch pad for a cinematic DC Universe, something Warner Bros. had tried to do with 2011's Green Lantern and eventually started with 2013's Man of Steel.
  • Also, there are fans not too pleased with the fact that there is no reference made at all to the Joker, the antagonist of the previous film. Nolan and co said this was done out of respect to the late Heath Ledger.
  • Detractors commonly accuse the film of being filled with holes in the story to the point of being incomprehensible while supporters claim these either can easily answered or ignored.
  • The Reveal of Talia Al-Ghul is a big one, considering it raises questions on how much of the Evil Plan was Bane's own doing and a result of his competence, much to the dismay of his fans.
• Cant Unhear It: Being a Fountain of Memes, people like to read Bane's lines in Tom Hardy's voice.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Despite Nolan's insistence beforehand that she was just a random business lady, no one really bought it about Miranda. Especially because he pushed back the production for Cotillard to have her baby. Even when the movie first came out, it was a shock to no one that she was actually Talia al Ghul. The film treats this as a huge revelation.
• Character Rerailment:
  • This is the second time Bane has made an appearance in a live-action Batman film. His first film incarnation drew criticism for being reduced to Dumb Muscle while his comic incarnation was a Magnificent Bastard Genius Bruiser capable of matching wits with Batman himself. The Dark Knight Rises portrayed Bane more accurately to his comic incarnation, and even the film's detractors admit that he's easily the best part of the movie.
  • The last cinematic appearance of Catwoman was in the universally reviled 2004 film, and even this film only refers to her as Selina Kyle, possibly to distance itself from that. And while her portrayal in Batman Returns is still beloved to this day, the portrayal wasn't very comic book accurate. This film's Selina/Catwoman goes back to the roots of her being a criminal who eventually reforms, and has an interesting dynamic with Batman.
• Contested Sequel: A masterpiece just like its predecessor, a good movie despite not living up to its predecessor, or a typical disappointing superhero threequel? Nearly everyone agrees that The Dark Knight was better so really it's a contest of whether this movie or Batman Begins gets second place. Fans are rather divided on whether Bane was a compelling antagonist or just a generic bad guy, and whether the ending (where Bruce fakes his death and retires from being Batman to settle down with his girlfriend) feels earned.
• Continuity Lockout: One of the biggest criticisms of the film is that its story is tied too heavily with previous installments, one of them being made seven years prior and consequently out of most viewers' memories. In contrast, its predecessor can still be enjoyed as a stand-alone film.
• Crack Pairing: CIA/Bane became one in the wake of the opening scene's Memetic Mutation.
• Cry for the Devil: After Batman defeats Bane in their climactic final battle, Talia intervenes and stabs Batman and spends the next minute explaining the full-extent of Bane's Tragic Back-Story and how his selflessness lead to him getting crippled and at the mercy of the other prisoners of the pit. She reveals that the only person who got him out of the pit excommunicated him because his experience in prison warped him into "a monster" who was too physically and mentally scarred by his upbringing to be accepted. It's a thorough Mood Whiplash after the triumph of Batman physically defeating him. It then gets subverted when Talia asks him afterwards to keep Batman alive, only for him to immediately ignore her when she leaves and get blasted across the room before he can kill Batman.
• Ending Fatigue: As if the length wasn't enough (the main page makes sure to point out that it was once the longest superhero movie until Avengers: Endgame beat it by being 3 hours long), the ending tries to solve just about everything hanging - in a way the Broken Base still complained.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Jonathan Crane makes a cameo, much to the joy of his ever growing fanbase and delivering another One-Scene Wonder performance. This makes him the only Batman villain to appear in three successive movies in the same continuity.
  • The CIA agent from the opening scene has his share of fans, thanks to his memetic lines, badass moments, and great back-and-forth with Bane. Some have theorised that he somehow survived the plane crash.
• Epileptic Trees: A leaked photo of what was actually the exterior set of The Pit◊ was initially thought by many to be a different sort of pit, a Lazarus Pit. Given the prominence of Ra's al Ghul in the trilogy's story, it actually wasn't too bad a guess.
• Evil Is Cool: Bane, to part where part of the Broken Base for the film is the reveal of Talia's involvement and Bane being unceremoniously killed off shortly after said-reveal.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Darth Connery for Bane. People have often compared his voice to Connery playing Darth Vader.
  • "CIA" for the CIA agent, Bill Wilson.
  • "The Masketta Man" or "Mosquito Man" for Barsad.
  • "Brother" for the nameless grunt who stays behind on the plane that Bane crashes. Some have also taken to calling him "Juan" ("Juan O'Vous" or "Juan Avyeu" specifically).
• Fandom Rivalry: With the other big superhero movie event of the summer: The Avengers. It wasn't just the fans, the film's DP Wally Pfister also mocked The Avengers for being too fantastic as compared to Rises.
• Fight Scene Failure: While older films in the Nolan series could largely hide issues with fight scenes behind editing and none of the characters besides Batman being written as amazing fighters, Rises features a lot of onscreen fighting. Consequently, a lot of the fisticuffs feature rather obvious whiffs◊ or extras reacting to attacks nowhere near them◊. It's also far more evident that Batman's own fighting style seems to be oddly limited for a character of his stated abilities, as Seanbaby once noted.
  "For Batman's gritty and intense combat, Christopher Nolan chose the Keysi Fighting Method, a martial art designed mainly to protect your skull as you trash a bar. In KFM, you keep your elbows up and maniacally bash, similar to how a chimpanzee might escape a car and change its T-shirt at the same time. It's since been abandoned by the guys who developed it, but KFM is the reason Batman looks like he's auditioning for Paula Abdul when he fights."
• Foe Yay Shipping: The dialogue from the opening scene has contributed to the pairing of CIA/Bane.
  CIA Agent: You're a big guy.
  Bane: For you.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • The entire opening scene. Referencing any one line in that scene is known as Baneposting.
  • Bane in general has generated many memes thanks to his bizarre voice, nonchalant attitude and ridiculous plans.
• Franchise Original Sin: The perceived inferior quality of this sequel especially compared to the previous film, throws light on some of the Nolan/Goyer team's favorite creative crutches, for example,
  • The same nihilistic undertones of the villain's motivations on all three movies.
  • The tendency of the main villains to hide in plain sight among their mooks. Ra's al Ghul presented a decoy as himself before revealing his true identity. The Joker reveals himself as the final mook in the bank heist. So, in this last film Bane is among the prisoners taken by the CIA to interrogate about his own wherabouts. By now, this had been repeated often enough to be noticed as an Author Appeal by the audience and critics.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A murderous gunman killed a dozen people at a midnight screening of the movie. The notoriety of this incident, and the killer being dressed as the previous movie's villain, can make the film much harder to enjoy after the fact. Also, the Gangster Squad trailer that aired just before the attack featured a shooting in a movie theater. Warner Brothers since pulled the trailer and had the final act of the film (in which the theater shooting would've taken place) re-written and shot, though some people's screenings still showed the trailer.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Batman telling Gordon that anyone can be a hero, even someone doing something as simple as putting a coat around a boy's arms and assuring him that it's not the end of the world, became even more heartwarming after the tragic Colorado shootings, where Christian Bale himself went to visit the victims unannounced, on his own money and time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The CIA agent played by Aidan Gillen claims that he threw someone out a plane after shooting them, joking that they "didn't fly so good". This becomes humorous when you keep his role in Game of Thrones in mind, as two years later, Gillen's Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish actually throws a character through a trapdoor overlooking a drop of thousands of feet — an action which was referred to by another character as "flying" when other people met that same fate.
  • The moment the power went out at New Orleans stadium during the Super Bowl of 2013, jokes about how Bane was attacking the city spread like wildfire.
    • Which is doubly hilarious considering all the comparisons made before hand of Baltimore Ravens (winners at said game) Linebacker Ray Lewis' facemask to Bane's mask.◊
    • Furthermore, prior to a 2017 game between the Ravens and their hated rivals, the Steelers (who played the Gotham Rogues football team that had their stadium destroyed in the movie), Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs took the field wearing the Bane mask. The Ravens lost the game, but it was an awesome moment nonetheless.
  • Selina saves a street kid (played by Aramis Knight) from several thugs. Aramis was later cast as Bean in Ender's Game, who grew up on streets dominated by bullies. Maybe he misread "Gotham" as "Rotterdam"?
  • John Daggett tries to intimidate Bane and gets strangled to death doing so. Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Daggett, would star as Imperial Director Orson Krennic in Star Wars: Rogue One, where he faces Vader himself, and again, nearly gets strangled while trying to be intimidating, with Vader countering "Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director.".
  • A comic book aspect of Bane that is Adapted Out of the film is the source of his super strength, a super-soldier steroid called venom. Hell, just seeing Tom Hardy wearing a black mask with "teeth" qualifies as this alone.
  • Thomas Wayne is still alive and being held hostage by Catwoman.
  • Bruce Wayne's doctor is Mr. Mxyzptlk. Knowing this, maybe he caught on that Bruce was Batman, but decided keeping the mystery would be more fun?
• I Knew It!:
  • Months before the release of the film, fans were already speculating that John Blake would take over as Batman following Bane breaking his back. Turns out, the only thing they got wrong was the timing of the torch being passed.
  • Likewise, after it was leaked that Liam Neeson had filmed a brief cameo reprising his role of Ra's Al Ghul, people began guessing that the League of Shadows would be involved and that Miranda Tate was really Talia Al Ghul, his daughter (photos also leaked of Marion Cotillard wearing rustic-colored clothes and scarf atop a Tumbler, which made the casting of a very French woman as "Miranda Tate" highly suspicious). Basically everyone knew there was more to Miranda Tate and John Blake than Nolan let on.
• It Was His Sled: Bane breaks Batman's back.^note More accurately, he dislocates a lumbar vertebrae. It's been an iconic part of the character's notoriety for decades.
• Jerkass Woobie: Bane and Talia. When you learn the full story, it's really quite tragic. Doesn't stop them from doing unjustifiably evil things, however.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Some only watch for the memetic opening scene.
  • A significant portion of viewers watch just for Selina Kyle. Overlapping with this, Anne Hathaway's fandom who would otherwise have no interest in a Batman film tuned in just for her.
• Les Yay: Selina and her roommate and fellow thief, Jen, an expy of Holly Robinson.
• Life Imitates Art: This is reminiscent of the stock trading scene.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Bane, the man born in darkness, is a hulking beast of a man who is far more crafty than he appears. Once a prisoner in the world's worst prison, Bane sacrificed his health and safety to defend the young Talia Al-Ghul, forming a bond with her that would last for the rest of their lives. Intending on fulfilling Ra's al Ghul's mission, Bane allows a Gotham socialite to believe he is is just a common thug as he infiltrates Gotham to rig the stock exchange and bankrupt Wayne. Defeating and breaking Batman, Bane lures the entirety of Gotham's police into a trap underground, revealing the true downfall of Harvey Dent and inspiring the people of Gotham to true anarchy while holding the city hostage with a bomb after killing the only man who can disarm it. Intending to destroy Gotham, Bane holds the entirety of the city in his grip, being the one and only villain in the entirety of the trilogy to have succeeded in breaking Batman himself.
  • Talia al Ghul is the daughter of Bruce Wayne's former mentor Ra's al Ghul and the leader of the League of Shadows after his death. She grew up in a Hellhole Prison with her protector Bane before escaping, who subsequently became Talia's closest confidante. Talia and Bane set out to fulfill the late Rha's' goal to destroy Gotham in order to purge it of sin, exposing Harvey Dent's crimes to discredit his legacy that brought the city years of peace, bankrupting Wayne Enterprises through stock market speculation by using Bruce's stolen fingerprints, and manipulating Bruce to fall in love with Talia under the alias Miranda Tate to gain his trust and to give them control over the rest of Wayne Enterprise's assets. Talia and Bane decapitate the city's leadership, stir up class warfare, and steal a fusion bomb so they can blackmail the U.S. government into giving them full control over Gotham, while having Bruce locked away in their former prison so he can be witness to Gotham's destruction. Their reign of terror lasts months, despite knowing full well that the bomb will eventually explode anyway, and when Batman returns to stop them, they only pause to rub their impending victory into his face and the extent to which they drew out their vengeance and deceived him.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • When you learn the whole story on Bane, it's actually somewhat sympathetic. But planning to torture 12 million people with the false hope of survival for months and then kill them kinda scratches it.
  • Same deal for Miranda Tate AKA Talia Al-Ghul, the other Big Bad. Even worse, she plans to destroy Gotham using the very means her father disapproved of—nuclear holocaust, if you believe the novelization of Batman Begins.
    • As if that wasn't bad enough, just before she dies from injuries sustained when her truck crashes, the fusion reactor's chamber is flooded, destroying the reactor's only lifeline. Batman didn't force the truck over, she crashed the truck deliberately just to seal Gotham's fate!
  • Daggett crosses it with his scheme to send Bruce Wayne, in the words of a newspaper article, "from billionaire to bum" by working with Bane to commit stock exchange fraud. He had no other reason to do it than corporate greed; he explicitly wants to be the leader of a combined Wayne-Daggett company, and he's thoroughly frustrated when Miranda fills the vacancy left by Bruce instead of him.
• Narm: See here.
• Narm Charm: In spite of his deep, muffled voice (or perhaps partly because of it), Bane still manages to be a distinct, interesting, and intimidating antagonist. For a lot of people, his goofy quirks help to make him even more memorable as a villain.
• Olderthan They Think: This isn't the first time Anne Hathaway has played a delinquent. In 2005 she had the lead role in the drama Havoc, where her character engages with gangbangers and drug dealers.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Jonathan Crane is a two-scene wonder and one of the most memorable parts of the film.
  • Aidan Gillen's CIA man appears in only the plane-crashing scene but is still an extremely popular character and his scene has attracted memetic popularity.
  • Desmond Harrington as the police officer who blows up the bridge near the end. In such a small part, he conveys just how scared and reluctant he is to do it.
  • Ra's al Ghul appearing in a memory caught many by surprise.
• Questionable Casting: Anne Hathaway as the Anti-Hero Selina Kyle initially raised quite a few eyebrows. This vanished when the film came out and critics and viewers agreed she did a fantastic job and was one of the best parts of the film.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Bane's intelligent depiction here did wonders for many mainstream viewers whose perception of him was Dumb Muscle (especially if Batman & Robin was their biggest exposure to him) and many comics fans agree it has made quite a positive impact in returning him to his Knightfall characterization. A year later, Bane's depiction in the comics became a carbon copy of his movie depiction, complete with trenchcoat, flak-jacket and collar-gripping stance.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The blonde trader at the stock exchange who Bane chokes to death is played by Glen Powell, whose career took off afterwards.
  • Young Talia in the flashbacks is played by a young Joey King who would gain prominence in The New '10s with roles in The Act and The Kissing Booth.
• Rooting for the Empire: Despite Bane's speech being one big lie designed to manipulate the citizens of Gotham, many viewers cheered during the montage showing the rich getting overthrown, especially since the only rich person who wasn't a Jerkass was currently crippled and trapped in a faraway prison.
• She Really Can Act: While Anne Hathaway is a respected actress among critics, she has a notable hatedom for always playing Woobie-ish good girls, and many people protested her casting for this reason. Here however she goes radically against type and shows that she can play a manipulative Action Girl.
• Signature Scene: Definitely the plane scene. Baneposting has been a beloved pastime on the internet for years afterward.
• Special Effect Failure: A rare audio example: Bane's voice was re-dubbed, after the original proved really hard to understand and led the poor audience reaction when the IMAX prologue was released. Now this isn't a problem but in a few scenes Bane's voice is very poorly mixed with the rest of the soundtrack - in particular his first scene on the airplane, where everyone's voice is covered and mixed with the sound of the airplane engines. But Bane? He comes in crisp and clear like if he was on a sound stage. Because he is.
  • Firearms in the movie when they are fired also have no muzzle flashes or cycling slides. Most obvious in the opening plane scene and the stock exchange robbery; the CIA interrogator's pistol has a sound to show it fired, but no muzzle flash or casing is ejected, making it look very amateurish. The stock exchange robbers fire submachine guns into the air, but again no flashes or casings are shown. The muzzle flashes can at least be chalked up to being a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, since it can be hard to see muzzle flashes in real life without a high-speed camera.
  • During several fight scenes with Batman against Bane's mooks, one mook is always shown falling down on screen despite never being struck with anything or fighting any one. Especially obvious towards the end, when one mook turns around, sees Batman and just falls down while Batman is fighting several others.
• Strangled by the Red String: Bruce falls in love twice during the film, and it's debatable whether either time was all that convincing. The sex scene between Bruce and Miranda is especially weird, because it has no build-up and doesn't even get mentioned again. Retroactively it makes a little more sense from Miranda/Talia's perspective but not Bruce's.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Much of Bane's faux-populist rhetoric is appealing, particularly given that the film depicts several members of the rich and powerful as corrupt jerks. On the other side of the coin, it also depicts some of them as being as human as everyone else, and the main character is a rich guy who sacrifices everything to help those less fortunate.
  • Foley. For instance, urging caution instead of jumping into a hole that everyone knows is booby trapped is a particular example - whenever he calls Blake "a hothead" it is usually because Blake is being a hothead. Similarly, diverting the chase from the Stock Exchange thieve to Batman is a fairly justifiable decision - Batman, to his knowledge, was wanted for the murder of several police officers and a District Attorney, and threatening children with lethal violence and the attempted murder of the Police Commissioner. From what he knows, not the audience, he makes pretty defensible calls both times. His cowardice after the Fall of Gotham is less appealing.
• Squick: An imprisoned doctor "treats" Bruce's dislocated back by tying him to a rope hanging from the ceiling and stretching it, Bruce screaming the whole time. OUCH.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Batman only appears for about 32 minutes of the 165 minute movie (2 hours and 45 minutes).
    Honest Trailers Narrator: Get ready... for a nearly 3 hour Batman movie, where Batman only shows up for about 33 minutes.
  • The Joker was an inevitable case of this thanks to his actor's death and the refusal to recast him. Because of it, the movie could not tie in the League of Shadows arc with the Joker's arc and had to go with the former only.
  • Talia isn't established as the infamous daughter of Ra's al Ghul until almost the last minute, at which point she has little to do outside of give exposition, drive a truck and die. Her only real purpose is to create a plot twist, which was a glaringly disappointing execution of her character considering that in the year this moive came out, comic-book Talia was establishing herself as a proper arch-nemesis to Batman.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some watchers were more interested in how the rest of the country/world was taking an entire large metropolitan area being completely cut off from everything. Despite Bruce being outside of Gotham during it, it isn't really explored much.
  • Despite all the time spent setting up the cover up of Harvey Dent's crimes, after the climactic moment where Bane reveals the truth to the world...nothing really comes of it. After Blake chews Gordon out about it, it is never mentioned again. Admittingly, they had bigger issues to deal with that quickly overshadowed it, but it was disappointing that so little came of all of that build up.
  • It's implied at the end that Wayne passed on the Batcave and its tools to Blake, whose true first name is revealed to be Robin. Sadly, due to this film franchise being ended, we'll never get to see this series' version of Robin in action.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The scene where Bruce researches Selina Kyle in the Batcave is supposed to show him dangerously slipping back into old habits due to his inability to move on from the past, and it does, but at the same time Bruce has every right to investigate a thief who stole a highly sentimental item of his and lifted his fingerprints.
• Vocal Minority: While certainly not perfect, the movie managed to score a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 87% ("Certified Fresh") with an even higher Audience Rating of 90%, along with a respectable 78% on Metacritic, and an iMDB user rating of 8.4—giving it a high-ranking spot on the site's Top 250 list. It also made over a billion at the box office. However, those who hate it tend to be very loud about it. Additionally, even some positive reviews acknowledge it was a tough act to follow after the success of the first two and ranked it the weakest of the trillogy.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • Rush Limbaugh thought that Bane was a reference to Bain Capital, the company Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney formerly ran (Bane first appeared in 1993, when Bain was much smaller, and before Romney came to prominence. When Bane was announced as the villain, Mitt Romney was relatively obscure and Bane was mostly unknown to the American consciousness). It got bad enough that not only did Nolan attempt to deny it but one of Bane's original creators, Chuck Dixon. even denied it was the case, and had to point out that Bane's character was closer in depiction to an Occupy Wall Streeter. Dixon also pointed out that he and the other creator, Graham Nolan, are both lifelong Republicans and that this is one of the few adaptations of Bane they actually like.
  • Which leads to the flip-side idea that some politically-minded people on the Left seem to have that the movie portrays the Occupy Wall Street are a bunch of violent lunatics trying to tear down Western civilization, or that the film is "Batman vs. the evil poor people". The trailers are more guilty of these bad implications than the actual movie though, since most of the violence is committed either by Bane's mercenaries (sometimes posing as menial workers) or the convicted criminals busted out of prison, not by any poor or ordinary people (who are seen mostly shutting themselves in their homes while this insanity is going on, and thankful to finally be able to come out once it's over with.) And there are one or two Corrupt Corporate Executives thrown in for good measure. Though there is a brief mention of Bane recruiting the disenfranchised and the poor, it's difficult to identify specific examples from his army of mooks.
  • Writer David Goyer has stated that the film had no intentional connection to Occupy Wall Street. In fact, the story was first conceived in early 2010 (the first Occupy protest was in 2011) and the plot was based on A Tale of Two Cities and The French Revolution, as the eulogy at Bruce Wayne's funeral shows. At least some of this take on the film comes from the widely-reported fact that Nolan had considered filming footage of Occupy's encampment for the film but ultimately decided not to.
  • Also skewered by Jonathan Chait in the NYT:
    What passes for a right-wing movie these days is The Dark Knight Rises, which submits the rather modest premise that, irritating though the rich may be, actually killing them and taking all their stuff might be excessive.
• Why Would Anyone Take Her Back?: Selina Kyle betrays Bruce/Batman repeatedly, and through her actions he goes bankrupt and loses his seat at his own company. However, she did it for a clean slate (something he can empathize with) and the betrayals were out of fear of Bane. When it really counted, she stood by him and saved him from Bane.

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