Christopher Nolan's epic Batman series ended
on a somewhat confusing note.
Batman was essentially dead, Bruce Wayne retired
in Italy, and all the villains met a slow,
dramatic end.
But every resolution seemed to bring yet another
cliffhanger.
So what exactly happened with the finale of
The Dark Knight Rises?
Here's an explanation of what really went
down in the ending of Nolan's Batman series,
and what it meant — and still could mean
— for the future.
Blast survivor
During the climax of the movie, Batman scoops
up the bomb threatening Gotham with his Batpod
and shoots off toward the ocean as fast as
he can, where it eventually explodes at a
safe distance from the city.
The now-dead Batman is finally hailed as the
hometown hero he was all along, and Alfred
heads to Florence, likely holding onto a sliver
of hope that he'll find Bruce Wayne living
a new life as a quiet family man — just
as he'd described at the beginning of the
film:
"I had this fantasy.
That I'd look across the tables, and I'd see
you there.
With a wife."
Of course, Alfred does spot Bruce lunching
with Selina Kyle in a pitch-perfect resolution
that, well, seems almost too good to be true.
And for many viewers, it was.
Some fans interpreted this as another instance
of Christopher Nolan spinning top-style trickery.
They saw the scene of Wayne's perfect retirement
as a part of Alfred's imagination.
But Christian Bale says what we saw was what
we got.
"My personal opinion is no, it was not a dream,
that that was for real."
The fact that Lucius Fox later discovers that
the autopilot function on the Bat had been
restored by Bruce himself certainly lent some
credence to Alfred's vision, too.
The light knight rises
If Batman was the Dark Knight, then Officer
John Blake as the franchise's Robin is certainly
a lighter shade of justice.
"You should use your full name.
I like that name.
Robin."
"Thanks."
The orphan boy-turned-honest cop was a champion
of kids in need, and helped reconnect Wayne
Enterprises with the orphanage he'd grown
up in.
He's also the perfect person to take over
and become the city's newest masked hero in
Batman's stead, a future that was heavily
hinted at when he found the Batcave at the
end of the film.
We don't get to see what his crime-fighting
style might be like, but based on his do-gooder
attitude throughout the collapse of the city,
Blake could be an optimistic successor to
Wayne's tenure as Gotham's resident hero.
So the movie's closing moments, where Blake
gets the keys to the cave asks the obvious
question…
Room for a sequel?
It's been several years since The Dark Knight
Rises closed out Nolan's Batman trilogy.
But the ending to the film definitely left
the door open to more exploration of his grim
vision of Gotham City.
With Blake taking over the Batcave and plenty
of villains from the comics waiting for their
turn on-screen, there's a ton of material
to make this film series a quadrilogy or even
larger.
Unfortunately, the would-be star of such a
sequel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has cast doubt
on the idea of Nolan's series ever getting
a fourth installment.
He told Cinema Blend:
"I think Nolan very much thought of that movie
as a conclusion, and there's a theme that
runs through all three of those movies that
begins in the first movie, runs through the
second movie and it concludes in that moment
where he says that Batman is more than a man,
Batman is a symbol.
And so to have another man other than Bruce
Wayne kind of becoming Batman at the end of
that trilogy, I think that's the perfect ending
to that story."
But still!
Even if Nolan and Gordon-Levitt aren't interested
in returning to the material, another filmmaker
could, in theory, pick up where Nolan's series
left off somewhere down the line.
After all, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns
was a sequel to Superman II...26 years later
— and Singer just straight up ignored Superman
III and IV.
So never say never.
Setting a tone
Before the Dark Knight, the Campiness of 1997's
Batman and Robin derailed the Caped Crusader's
movie bankability.
"Hi Freeze.
I'm Batman."
But the end of Nolan's series signified a
major tonal shift, giving us a much more serious
and dramatic style than the previous set of
Batman films.
"I'm Batman."
That new, more grounded view of DC's comic
book characters would become something of
an inadvertent standard for the DC Expanded
Universe films to follow.
Just look at Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice's
grim, gritty vision of Batman.
The same dark tone colored the palettes of
Henry Cavill's Superman, and Justice League
looks like it's heading in the same direction.
And that's not the only precedent Nolan's
films set for the Batworld, either.
The standalone series
Everyone knows that shared comic movie universes
are all the rage right now.
After all, there's a lot of money to be made
by dangling one piece of the shared universe
as a must-see for the eventual superhero smash
film that's coming soon from each studio.
Even Harry Potter has gotten in on the sequel-prequel
spinoff game.
But The Dark Knight films proved that an endless
extension of a beloved property isn't always
necessary to rake in the big bucks and earn
respect at the same time.
While sequel hopes might always loom over
Nolan's trilogy, it currently stands alone
as its own three-part series that earned a
lot of respect from critics and had audiences
forking over their cash at the same time.
It's hard to imagine what might've become
of the series if Nolan had allowed Warner
Bros. to spin the franchise out into a shared
universe of its own.
But the fact is that he didn't, and his movies
still accomplished everything they meant to.
Hopefully future filmmakers will look back
his trilogy — and its standalone ending
— as the perfect way to handle high profile
properties for the next generation...
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