The Dark Knight Rises is the best of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.
No, seriously.
Batman Begins is a close second - and The Dark Knight isn't a bad movie by any means (it's a pretty perfect movie) but Rises represents the best of the trilogy because of its ability to marry a real-world aesthetic with a comic-book inspired tone. It's really unlike anything else in the Super Hero tentpole genre that's been taking over movie theaters for the past decade and because of it stands a cut above the rest of genre fare.
Picking up 8 years or so after the events of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises sees a Gotham that has returned from the brink the Joker had brought it to. Thousands of criminals from Gotham's old mob days were behind bars, but at the cost of Batman's legacy. Instead of telling the truth about District Attorney Harvey Dent's actions at the end of the previous film, Batman took the fall in order to keep everyone dent prosecuted locked up. Bruce gave up being the Batman, Commissioner Gordon is on the verge of retiring, and everything is pretty quiet.
Until Bane shows up to rip shit in two. And you know what?
Once it becomes clear that Gotham is in somebody's crosshairs again, Bruce Wayne knows its time for him to come back as the Goddamned Batman and make it right. What started his career was his mentorship under Ra's Al Ghul and the League of Shadows, so it makes sense that Batman's final mission would be against what that organization became.
Y'know, because themes.
After that it's pretty much off to the races. Some cop Gordon takes under his wing deduces Batman's secret identity and it's cool seeing Bruce have someone to talk to about cape shit with besides Alfred for once, Anne Hathaway plays anti-hero Catwoman who loves to cat-burgle and cat-betray, and we're treated to an all time fight with some of my favorite lines from anything ever.
"Peace has cost you your strength; victory has defeated you."
"The Shadows betray you because they belong to me."
"Ahh, yes - I was wondering what would break first; your spirit, or your body."
It wasn't just badass lines, it was so perfectly translated from the page it was drawing inspiration from - showing something every Batman fan has wanted to see since 1994:
Y'know what? Just take a five and watch the whole scene because it's freaking rad.
Not only do we get one of Batman's most iconic moments realized on the big screen, we get it realized so gorgeous. The cinematography in Nolan's movies is always jaw-dropping-ly gorgeous. You can tell care and consideration went into the framing of everything and the end result is probably the most beautifully filmed superhero movie we're ever going to see.
But it's incorporating this key element of the Batman mythos that led to one of the two greatest criticisms of the movie, and usually what leads people to call Rises the worst of the entire trilogy.
Also, hats off to Tom Hardy for crushing it (heh) as Bane. Not only is he physically terrifying, but that voice - with the accent you can't place and the tonal cadence you can't predict is so fucking unsettling that the dude just scares you when he breathes.
After Batman has one of his vertebrae's dislocated, he's dropped in the middle of fucking nowhere - a literal hole in the ground prison that you have to make an impossible leap to escape.
All the while, Bane is wreaking havoc in Gotham - the dude has cut it off from the rest of the world and basically lit the fuse on what's a nuclear bomb - that will decay in three months time into a big fuckin' ass explosion that'll finally wipe Gotham off the face of the earth. He's making Gotham suffer the way he did in that same prison Bruce is in, the prison he used to be a captive of. And the police can't do a damn thing about it because they're all trapped underground in the sewer system.
Y'know, because themes.
And the first piece of criticism is that there's no WAY Batman (gonna keep calling him Batman instead of Bruce Wayne because who would you rather hang out with?) could recover and then make it back to Gotham to fight the good fight. Fuckin' Julian Edelman was out for the entire year when he tore his ACL in a preseason game, you think Batman can break his back and make it home for supper?
Yeah. I do. Because I'm a fucking romantic.
Batman's spirit is so indomitable, so absolute that he literally transcends what we understand to be human in a way that's completely understandable. You read stories about mothers finding the strength to lift cars to protect their babies, well Gotham is Batman's baby and he's moving every obstacle in his way of to the side because his need to protect, that inherent thing inside of him telling him "no more orphans" is louder than an airhorn and the singular thing that exists. As an audience, t's not our job to understand how Batman is better than us; all we have to do us understand that he is.
So of course he pulls himself up by the bootstraps and wills his back into alignment because of course he does - he's the goddamned Batman, son.
Once he gets back to Gotham, he needs an army to fight Bane's. he gathers allies he trusts, and allies his allies trust and the chessboard is pretty much all set up for a final showdown. He rescues the cops that were trapped underground because the bomb is going off tomorr- oh shit, this is the other part that people say is so stupid it removes the movie from contention as best of the trilogy.
Completely unrelated to Dark Knight Rises, I've just always loved this cover by Jae Lee
"Those cops were underground for three months - they hadn't seen the sun in a quarter of a year and there's no fucking way they weren't malnourished out of complete physical relevance three weeks in, let alone three months."
And more so than the back one, this is the best argument I see against the film, but again, it's too damn romantic to let it get in the way of something like watching the superfluous take precedence over utility and see a sweet ass army of cops charge on a not-sweet-ass army of assassins and terrorists.
It's too fucking epic. It's some Lawrence of Arabia level shit.
But this criticism is understandable because Batman is historically the only unrealistic element in any of Nolan's three movies. Here's a dude who's so freaking perfect - smart, strong, imaginative - that he seems like he's the next step of humanity. So we can accept him doing inhuman shit because we know he's better than us, but whenever anyone besides his foil does something that breaks from our notion of reality, we can't accept that - we have to call foul because those aren't the rules. The rules are that Batman is the apex predator, then its his villain, then there's 50 feet of blank space - and then there's the rest of us, with Gordon at the top.
But the cops being confined underground for three months and then all of a sudden mounting an attack? That breaks those rules. And to people who file that under unacceptable, all I can do to argue for it is...
Y'know.... because, themes.
This moment is Gotham's ascension - this is the common person, the most basic level of Batman saying "fuck you" to the paradigm and rising up, doing something completely inhuman in the service of humanity. It's a fucking beautiful moment where they get the chance to live after being dead for three months and do so in the likelihood that they're just going to die again.
And that? That's beautiful as shit. That's the most comic book fucking thing ever - that's why millions of issues of Detective Comics would sell in '39 and why it's still a top 10 book now almost 80 years later. None of us will ever be born on Krypton. None of us will ever have Zeus be our father, none of us got injected with super-soldier serum in World War II, and none of us will ever be bitten by a radioactive spider...
But anyone of us could put on a cape and do the impossible. This movie just proved we don't even need a cape to do it anymore.