Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, the latest 3D shooter iteration of the franchise, will get its last update at the end of the month. EA announced what’s coming through this final month of content, which will culminate in an appropriately harvest-themed Fall Festival event.
According to the announcement, this month will add two new characters: Wildflower and TV Head Zombie. Those were previously exclusive to weekly events in August, but you can pick them up with Coins in late September. You can use your Prize Bulbs in the Fall Festival map to score cosmetics like epic hats, victory slabs, emojis, and special costumes for Chomper, Imp, and Z-Mech. The Ranked Battle Arena will return to an unranked mode and away from the seasons.
Moving forward, the game will begin rotating previous Festivals and their associated Prize Maps, so you can collect any cosmetics that you missed out on at the time. What’s more, each of the Festival Prize Maps will remember your progress from the last time it came around, so you can just pick up from where you left off.
Battle for Neighborville was the third shooter spin-off from the Plants vs. Zombies series, following Garden Warfare and Garden Warfare 2. It released in September 2019, so this month’s update gives it just over a full year of updates. It received generally positive reviews, according to GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
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After months of programming that was, to be completely honest, subpar, WWE is finally rebounding. The first big move was to finally shift weekly programming away from the Performance Center and into the Thunderdome. The tone of the product immediately changed and Raw and Smackdown felt important again. Now, the return of a single talent has seemingly resurrected one of the company’s two main roster shows, making it feel like can’t-miss television once again.
Roman Reigns is back. The Big Dog made his return at SummerSlam, attacking Braun Strowman and the newly-crowned WWE Universal Champion The Fiend, leaving them lying in the ring and showing the audience a new edge to his character. Then he added Paul Heyman as an on-screen advocate, and went on to take the WWE Universal Championship, picking his spot in a triple threat match after Strowman and The Fiend destroyed each other at Payback.
This is the Roman Reigns WWE fans need right now. What’s more, this is the shot in the arm that Reigns, who never fully rebounded as a top character in WWE after taking time off for health reasons, needed.
When Reigns returned in February 2019 after his leukemia went into remission, he received a hero’s welcome, which was in stark contrast to the boos he normally got prior to going on hiatus. However, the adoration didn’t end up establishing him as the face of the company in the minds of fans. He took part in a number of feuds on the Smackdown brand, but the character had trouble connecting. Ultimately, Reigns had gone so long without evolving or changing that the goodwill couldn’t last.
Now, though, he’s back after a hiatus that began with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And this time, Reigns has changed–or at least the perception is that he has. The visual of seeing him stand next to Heyman, the longtime advocate of Brock Lesnar–one of WWE’s top heels for years–has immediately changed the perception of Roman.
No longer is he the man many fans felt WWE was pushing down their throats to be John Cena’s heir apparent. By pairing him with Heyman, WWE is elevating Reigns to the status of Lesnar, branding him a top-level monster of a superstar worthy of fans’ time, attention, and money. In this case, though, the upside for WWE is even better.
Unlike with Lesnar, Reigns is not a part-time performer. He will most likely be on every show and pay-per-view, representing the company to the best of his ability. And having Heyman at his side will only elevate him further, although that’s not to say Reigns needs Heyman to do the talking for him. Unlike Lesnar, Roman is very comfortable with promos. Over the years, he’s steadily grown to be one of the strongest on WWE’s current roster with a microphone, having honed his skills against many of the best talkers in the industry–from John Cena to The Miz.
What Heyman brings, though, is credibility. Heyman’s on-camera stamp of approval makes Reigns a threat and immediately establishes him as the top heel on Smackdown. That’s exactly what WWE has been missing of late. Over on Raw, Randy Orton hasn’t evolved in years, while Seth Rollins has been feuding with Rey Mysterio for what seems like a decade. Meanwhile, the top heel on Smackdown has been The Fiend, the demented version of Bray Wyatt that the audience is too fascinated by to hate.
Reigns as the top heel is not only refreshing for the current product, it’s enticing because this is the first time it’s ever happened. Since the initial split of The Shield, Reigns has been portrayed as a conquering hero, even while the audience tended to reject that image. Now, though, he’s not seeking audience approval. Instead, he’s there simply to take what’s his–the WWE Universal Championship–and wreck anyone who gets in his way.
A force like that, with a mind like Heyman helping to chart the path, is exciting. Plus, let’s be honest, any reason to have Heyman back on TV is a good one. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a promo of his that wasn’t downright incredible in the last several years, and that was when he only had Brock Lesnar to talk about. Having a new talent to advocate for gives Heyman fresh material to work with–and someone he can go back-and-forth with, much as he did during his time as CM Punk’s manager.
The future for Smackdown looks bright with a newly-turned Roman Reigns at the top of the mountain. As WWE continues to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has struck on something that could very well keep fans invested until such a time comes that the audience is allowed to return to arenas full-force. And once that happens, imagine the vitriol and rage that will come from those fans when they finally get the chance to tell the brand’s primary villain what they think of his new persona and associate in person.
At long last, watching WWE is getting very exciting once again.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 releases this Friday, September 4, and if you want to preorder it ahead of time, you can do so for cheaper than its regular price. Amazon and Walmart have Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 for $33.88, down from its regular price of $40. Both retailers offer free shipping and can deliver the game as early as its release date, though this depends on where you live and when you order it.
If you’re interested in the collector’s edition, you’ll be happy to hear that GameStop currently has it in stock with release-day delivery. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2’s Collector’s edition costs $100 and comes with the game, Digital Deluxe content, and a limited-edition Birdhouse deck.
Alternatively, you can buy Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2’s Digital Deluxe edition for $50, which comes with access to the Warehouse demo, “The Ripper” skater, retro content for Create-a-Skater, and retro outfits for Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, and Rodney Mullen. It’s unclear if this content will be sold separately.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is a remake of the first two Tony Hawk games, featuring all of their iconic levels and skaters like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen. It also boasts a trick system made up of different trick types from throughout the series, but if you just want to play the way you remember it in those first two games, you can turn off all of the extra tricks and play with the original games’ move sets.
The remake also includes many new skaters, including Aori Nishimura, Leticia Bufoni, and Lizzie Armanto as well as Leo Baker, Nyjah Huston, and Tyshawn Jones. You can take any of these skaters–or even your own custom character–into all of the modes, including multiplayer and the single-player Skate Tours.
PAX Online, a virtual event replacing both PAX Australia and PAX West due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is set to go live from September 12-20. For the event’s first day, Borderlands 3 creator Gearbox Software has teased some sort of announcement related to the Borderlands franchise.
Starting on September 12 at 12:45 PM PT / 3:45 PM ET, Gearbox will unveil “what’s coming next” in Borderlands and from its publishing division, Gearbox Publishing. It’s unclear how long the broadcast, titled the Gearbox Digital Showcase, will last or what specific announcements will be made. In either case, you can watch the presentation on Gearbox’s official Twitch and YouTube channels.
Before the Gearbox Digital Showcase goes live, though, the company will launch Borderlands 3’s next DLC on September 10. Titled Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck, the new DLC will also increase the level cap again, add more mini-events leading up to its launch, and introduce new gear, among other things.
Gearbox is going to be hosting the Gearbox Digital Showcase during #PAXOnline on September 12th at 12:45pm PDT/3:45pm EDT/8:45PM BST! Tune-in then to see what’s coming next in Borderlands and from Gearbox Publishing! pic.twitter.com/zqFPXnJl4W
In other Borderlands 3 news, Gearbox has partnered with Direct Relief, an international humanitarian organization, to provide aid to workers responding to COVID-19 by giving away in-game masks whenever you donate $5 or more through Gearbox’s merch site.
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September is here, and a lot is happening in Pokemon Go this month. On top of all the September events taking place over the next few weeks, new Field Research tasks are now live in the game, along with a new Research Breakthrough encounter: Alolan Raichu.
Each time you achieve a Research Breakthrough in September 2020, you’ll get a chance to catch Alolan Raichu. There’s a possibility this Raichu could be Shiny as well, giving you another incentive to complete as much Field Research as you can this month.
While you’ll receive one bonus Field Research task in the game each day, Field Research is typically obtained from PokeStops. There’s no limit to how many tasks you can do daily, but you’ll receive one stamp for the first task that you complete each day. Once you amass seven stamps, you’ll achieve a Research Breakthrough, leading to the aforementioned encounter with Alolan Raichu.
The Field Research tasks you receive will be randomly drawn from a larger pool, which is refreshed at the start of every month. You can see September’s Field Research tasks as well as their potential rewards, as compiled by The Silph Road, below.
Beyond the new Field Research tasks, there are many events to look forward to in Pokemon Go this month, including Mega September–three weeks of activities that revolve around Mega Evolutions. A handful of Legendary Pokemon are also returning to Raids this month, while September’s Community Day takes place on September 20 and features Porygon.
Pokemon Go September 2020 Field Research
Catching Tasks
Field Research Task
Rewards
Catch 3 Pokemon with Weather boost
Slowpoke encounter
Catch 5 Pokemon with Weather boost
Poliwag or Vulpix encounter; 200 Stardust, 3 Razz Berries, 1 Pinap Berry, or 5 Poke Balls
Catch 10 Pokemon with Weather boost
500 Stardust, 6 Razz Berries, 2 Pinap Berries, or 5 Great Balls
It’s been a busy year or so for the Kingdom Hearts franchise, with the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts 3 finally releasing in 2019 and a follow-up expansion arriving earlier this year. The story will continue with Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory on November 13 for PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The rhythm-action game is available to preorder now at multiple retailers.
Kingdom Hearts is essentially getting the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy treatment in Melody of Memory. You move along an on-rails track and execute timing-based moves to the rhythm of beloved Kingdom Hearts and Disney tunes. All told, there will be more than 140 songs from the series, and gameplay takes place across Disney worlds such as Agrabah and Atlantica as well notable series locales like Twilight Town.
You’ll get to play as more than 20 different characters from the Kingdom Hearts series, including Sora, Donald, Goofy, Roxas, Aladdin, and Mulan. And even though this is a spinoff, Melody of Memory will tell Kairi’s story after the events of Kingdom Hearts III. You can play the levels solo or with a friend in co-op mode.
Outside of the story mode, Melody of Memory will have an online battle mode, and the Nintendo Switch version will support up to eight-player local multiplayer in its Free-For-All mode.
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory preorders are live in both physical and digital formats. Check out the details below.
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory Preorder Bonus
At this time, the only preorder bonus for Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is exclusive to the PlayStation Store. You’ll get a Melody of Memory PlayStation theme–which unlocks at launch–by purchasing a digital edition for PS4.
Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory only has one edition, and it’s $60 in both digital and physical formats on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. As of now, physical editions are only available to preorder on PS4 and Switch. You can secure a digital preorder at the PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, or Nintendo Switch eShop.
This is the second time I’ve played Scavengers, the third-person PvEvP “co-opetition” shooter from Midwinter Entertainment, led by Halo veterans Josh Holmes and Mary Olson. The first time, I came away very impressed with the mix of gameplay on offer. In its most basic form, Scavengers is a more evolved version of Halo’s Warzone Firefight – building off of its large-scale player-versus-player-versus-enemy formula with a fleshed-out world, a lot more players, and crafting elements. This second play session over a year later showed off a few smart design improvements and left me even more convinced that Scavengers could be exactly what players burned out on either battle royale games or traditional arena shooters are looking for, because it’s a refreshing mix of both.
The biggest and most obvious change is the sheer scale of the game now. Scavengers is up to 60 players per match – in 20 teams of three – which has necessitated an upscale of the frozen, post-apocalyptic Earth play spaces as well. You’ll now battle in a nine square kilometer tundra (with occasional storms that necessitate you keeping yourself warm to survive), and there are more AI foes to contend with as well. In my experience, it felt pretty good – not too big or too small. We saw other groups of players around that we needed to keep an eye out for, but as we weren’t looking for a fight, we had enough distance that we weren’t forced to duke it out with them. Though we were nevertheless close enough that we most definitely could’ve if we’d wanted to.
And you just might want to, in fact. Another new addition to Scavengers since I last played it is the ability to bank resources. See, the whole goal of the match is to, yes, scavenge as many resources as possible and bring them back to Mother, the AI that runs the orbiting ship the remnants of humanity live aboard after an ice comet brought the Scourge, a virus that’s mutated many of Earth’s remaining fauna. In a convenient narrative twist, Mother has a bit of a competitive and sadistic streak, and so she sends competing teams down to see who can gather the most resources from the snow and ice storm-ravaged surface; there’s only one dropship, so you’d better be on it when it leaves. But you can now bank those resources at select upload points in the world, meaning you won’t lose everything if another team beats you down and takes what you have.
Those are the pieces of the PvPvE experience: you’ve got to watch out for Scourge-infected humans just as much as you do fellow non-infected competitors – not to mention bears and wolves – all the while gathering materials to upgrade your class weapon or craft items like grenades or armor. And by the way, there are eight player classes who each have custom weapons and special abilities.
I wasn’t able to bank any of our team’s resources in my match – nor was I able to get a vehicle, which is another addition to Scavengers during the past year – but we did make it to the dropship at the end of the match after clearing out some Scourge bases, sliding down snowy hills we encountered in order to move a bit faster. And that end-of-match dropship moment has changed too. Instead of just being an exit door, essentially, it’s now its own combat space, offering teams one last relatively close-quarters chance to duke it out for one last crack at upping your resource count to try and win the match.
We didn’t win, but we placed respectably. More importantly, I am now even more intrigued by and interested in Scavengers. It’s part co-op shooter, part survival, and part battle royale, and I’m incredibly impressed by it so far. It heads into closed beta near the end of the year before its Early Access release in early 2021.
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has a portion of its team working on a “huge, ambitious” new project.
In an interview with Polygon, studio founder Sean Murray explained that Hello Games is now made up of 26 people. 3 have been working on new “Hello Games short” The Last Campfire, with the remaining 23 split between working on new updates for No Man’s Sky, and a brand new project, which Murray calls “a huge, ambitious game like No Man’s Sky.” He also made clear that it isn’t a sequel.
Practically nothing is known about the new game, but Hello Games confirmed to IGN that it is “very early” in development. Murray is seemingly unsure about how much to discuss the game in advance, after No Man’s Sky’s controversial release (and eventual redemption):
“I think about it a lot and I don’t know where I come down on it,” he told Polygon. “There is a really positive thing about talking about your game a lot. Where you get people interested in it who wouldn’t have played it otherwise. […] But I look back, having done a lot of different press opportunities and things like that. And I reckon about half of what we did — and a lot of where we had problems, I think, where we were naive — we didn’t really need to do and we would have had the same level of success, you know?”
It seems like we’ll have quite a wait for the new game, but Hello Games isn’t done with No Man’s Sky, with the developer telling IGN there was “plenty” more to come from the space exploration sandbox. The Last Campfire was released last week, and it seems likely that we’ll see other Hello Games shorts – designed with a similar creative impetus as Pixar’s shorts – come in future too.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Developer Double Damage Games has announced that Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is launching on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Steam on September 22. The action-packed space combat sim was previously an Epic Games Store exclusive, but it’s now making its way to other platforms.
If you were unaware, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a prequel to 2015’s Rebel Galaxy. While the first game cast you as the commander of a powerful star destroyer with combat akin to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag‘s naval skirmishes, Outlaw drops you straight into the cockpit of a nimble spaceship piloted by outlaw and smuggler, Juno Markev.
There’s a full single-player story campaign for you to play through, but you’re also free to tread off the beaten path to meet and befriend a cast of sketchy characters, gamble some of your hard-earned cash and equipment at the local watering hole, or simply cruise around the vastness of space listening to over 21 hours of Subspace Radio.
The blue-collar Americana-infused space combat sim earned a score of 8/10 in GameSpot’s Rebel Galaxy Outlaw review. “There is a lot to do in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw,” said critic James Swinbanks. “So much so that it’s easy to lose yourself among the myriad of activities beyond flying around and shooting things. Juno is a great character despite her sometimes jarring movements, as are much of the rest of the charming cast. The combat is fast, frenetic and consistently challenging, although that challenge can sometimes feel impossible without stepping back and grinding out some progress elsewhere, which quickly gets frustrating. Thankfully the core of the game–its combat, trading, and space flight–are all superb and had me launching into the stars for many hours of galactic trading and explosive firefights.”
You can pick up Rebel Galaxy Outlaw for $30 USD when it launches later this month.
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As Tenet continues its release in international markets, we’re taking a look back at filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s entire feature-length filmography, exploring each of his films one day at a time. Today we continue with his eighth feature, and his final Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.
Full spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises follow.
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The story in Christopher Nolan’s much awaited third Batman film often misses the mark. And yet, the way that story is told ranks amongst some of his finest visual filmmaking. Ranging from enormous to intimate, The Dark Knight Rises was Nolan’s seventh and final collaboration with cinematographer Wally Pfister, and was the last time all the Nolan regulars — from Pfister, to editor Lee Smith, to composer Hans Zimmer — would work in tandem. The result is a film that, despite not always coalescing, contains enough incisive parts to create a fascinating, powerful whole.
In our latest deep-dive into Nolan’s work, we look at how The Dark Knight Rises became one of Hollywood’s best-looking blockbusters in a decade defined by CGI bloat, in addition to exploring the movie’s underserved ensemble and its major failings as a piece of political filmmaking. It’s big, bold, bizarre, and feels born of Nolan’s worst creative instincts, as well as his very best.
The Dark Knight Rises often pays lip service to the era’s looming politics, a socio-economic boiling pot waiting to spill over. It taps into the same wellspring of post-Recession frustrations as Occupy Wall Street — the film was nearing the end of production when the movement began — though it seems content with merely using those anxieties as a colourful backdrop (at times literally; it even filmed at the New York Stock Exchange while Occupy was in full swing just a few blocks away).
By refusing to investigate its tale of inequality and revolution, the film approaches its themes from a wrongheaded vantage.
As a follow-up to The Dark Knight, Gotham’s descent into city-wide chaos plays like The Joker’s promise fulfilled. However, four years earlier, when the series’ concerns were questions of global security, The Joker represented abstract fears of modern terrorism and the resultant moral failings in opposing it. His target was society’s ethical foundations, and his goal was to prove that even the most upstanding citizens could be corrupted by fear. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane (Tom Hardy) positions himself as a revolutionary who gives the poor the means to overthrow the rich, and who frees those imprisoned under the “Dent Act,” a crime bill that appears to grant the police expanded powers but doesn’t fix infrastructural problems. The relationship between these two premises is unfortunate at best, conflating Bane’s social upheaval with the city’s moral rot.
Scenes of Gotham’s downtrodden displacing its wealthiest unfold as part of Bane’s master plan, which upends the city’s traditional law and order. As the poor and homeless throw the affluent out onto the streets, convening kangaroo courts for their sentencing, the film’s narrative POV sides not with the impoverished, but with the citizens in most danger from this upheaval: the police, and the well-to-do board members of Wayne Enterprises. In The Dark Knight Rises, the poor cause pandemonium, while the powerful form Gotham’s apparent moral and infrastructural backbone.
The film’s major mouthpieces against these dominant structures are a villain and an anti-hero, Bane and Catwoman/Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) respectively. While the former’s outlook is all but revealed to be a sham, the latter’s seeming anti-capitalist leanings — “You’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us” — slip away entirely during the revolt. Not only does she disapprove of the communal redistribution of wealth (which the film frames only as stealing people’s homes), she ends up eloping with a billionaire; an easy fix to her predicament.
Like Bane, the film doesn’t seem to believe in much when it comes to its economic setting. It exploits vague conservative fears of economic justice and the redistribution of means (not to mention, fears of “vaguely foreign” terrorists), but no one in the film, either for or against this revolution, ever espouses a coherent ideology. Characters occasionally quip about Gotham stockbrokers concentrating money at the top, while Officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the boys at his former youth home mention the lack of job opportunities. But the people who suffer the most onscreen economic hardship are, in fact, billionaires like Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and those in charge of running his company, who are eventually forced into hiding. Little narrative attention is paid to the film’s actual questions of economic downturn — during Bane’s revolution, or after it.
No matter what issues its characters occasionally vocalize, the film eventually falls back on the heroism of its “good capitalist” (as Slavoj Žižek calls him), a hero who seeks mostly to restore Gotham’s unequal status quo. The film’s final scenes, set to a narration from “A Tale of Two Cities,” show us the legacy Bruce Wayne leaves behind after Batman’s apparent demise. It’s Dickensian in one specific way (he turns his mansion into an orphanage), but for a trilogy that began with addressing inequality on a ground level — we have seen Gotham’s streets, and the hardship of its poorest, as far back as Batman Begins — this resolution is a cosmetic fix at best. By the end of The Dark Knight Rises, the police are back in charge, those who sided with Bane are locked up once again, and the city’s orphans, who now have a large house to hide out in, still don’t have any job prospects. (At least Bane gave them work in the sewers!)
More broadly, the film hints at vague political concepts that feel like remnants of a hasty first draft. Eight years after The Dark Knight, the “Dent Act” has helped clean up Gotham’s streets, though what powers it provided police to do so, and why revealing the murders Dent committed would undo its effects, remains a mystery. These aren’t mere background details. They’re the film’s central premise, both logistically — it’s the first time in the series Gotham is rid of organized crime — and thematically, since Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) wrestles with the Act’s apparent deception, and Batman has been able to give up his mantle, albeit temporarily.
Batman (Christian Bale) and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) in The Dark Knight Rises.
However, while this glue binding the plot tends to wear thin, the stories of Gordon and Batman are perhaps the film’s strongest suits, especially as they relate to the trilogy as a whole. If nothing else, The Dark Knight Rises makes for a worthy sequel to both prior Batman entries in how it wraps up the story arcs of these pre-existing characters, both of whom make perfect thematic additions to Nolan’s repertoire.
Batman, Gordon and “Virtuous” Lies
The final scenes of Batman Begins set up a Caped Crusader who, unlike his comic counterpart — an ink-and-pencil IP in print for perpetuity — seemed destined to give up being Batman. Finding a better alternative to vigilante crimefighting was part of Bruce’s journey in The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises is even bookended by him having hung up his cowl. The interim is populated by a quintessentially Nolan tale of lies and self-delusion.
Bruce’s story, when divorced from larger concerns of Gotham’s social strata, is particularly potent. That disconnect is undoubtedly a failing of the series’ political promises, but in isolation Bruce’s arc proves to be a moving closing chapter, doing what no other Batman story has been able to do in the character’s eight-decade history: It gives Batman a happy ending.
It’s been eight years since the death of Rachel Dawes, and like other Nolan protagonists before him, Bruce hasn’t been able to heal despite the passage of time. His Batcave and ornate mansion have now been rebuilt; he’s back to square one, trapped in amber and wasting away physically, while ignoring even the little good he could still put out in the world (the boys home he sponsored no longer receives funding). Of course, Bruce’s predicament is, in part, a result of Alfred (Michael Caine) lying to him by burning Rachel’s letter in the previous film, in which she confessed her decision to marry Harvey Dent.
Alfred admitting to this deception drives a wedge between them. This development is, in microcosm, a sign of the many release valves yet to be turned, in a film whose very premise is built on deception. While many prior Nolan works feature characters lying for an apparent greater good, those lies are often revealed toward the end of each story. Being a sequel, this is Nolan’s first film in which the ripple effects of those lies can be felt from the very beginning, and thus, those effects form an integral part of the story.
Gary Oldman, for instance, embodies this entire theme. He wears it on Gordon’s face from the get-go, turning the corrosive impact of his deceptions silently inward. Even his movements feel stilted and weighed down. His pained performance reaches its apex when Bane finally reveals the truth about Dent — reading a speech Gordon wrote himself — in a scene where Gordon angrily attempts to justify his lies to Officer Blake. Through Gordon’s eye-contact alone (or lack thereof), we know exactly how he feels about his shameful decision. It’s perhaps the most nuanced performance in the trilogy, dramatizing what even the film’s own plot mechanics often fail to: that wrestling with these “virtuous” lies can be a lonely, soul-wrenching affair.
The reckoning for Bruce’s deceptions comes in the form of Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who reveals herself to be the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson). Miranda, aka Talia, helps tie up one particular loose end which had been silently eating at the trilogy’s foundations. Bruce’s journey in Batman Begins (a film in which refusing to kill one’s enemies is a major theme) climaxes with his bizarre declaration to Ra’s, mere moments before the cult leader falls to his death: “I won’t kill you,” Bruce tells him, “but I don’t have to save you.” In practice, there’s little difference.
Neither Begins nor its immediate sequel ever confronts this moral self-deception. If anything The Dark Knight skips forward to Batman having a much more solid moral code, which prevents him from using lethal force. Talia fulfilling her father’s mission, while exacting revenge on Bruce for his death, is the impact of this moral failing finally coming full circle. However, this reckoning works better on paper than it does in execution. Talia herself doesn’t have much of an impact on the story — another two-dimensional Nolan femme fatale, she’s neither intriguing as a romantic interest, nor does she have enough screen time or narrative weight to render her “twist” particularly shocking.
Despite being a worthy conclusion to Batman and Gordon’s stories, The Dark Knight Rises is an ensemble piece, and it does little for newcomers like Bane, Selina Kyle and John Blake who, while well-rounded in isolation, remain disconnected from many of the film’s larger goings-on.
Villains and Sidekicks on Thematically Rocky Ground
The film begins with a plane heist reminiscent of The Dark Knight’s “Skyhook” scene, painting Bane as a dark mirror to Bruce Wayne. He is Batman’s equal and opposite, a member of the League of Shadows and spiritual successor to Bruce’s former mentor, Ra’s al Ghul. Though instead of turning against the extremist leader, as Bruce once did, Bane leans further toward the League’s fanatical outlook. More pertinently, where Batman contends with the emotional pain of seeing his parents gunned down, Bane exists in a state of constant physical agony — the reason for his sedative mask, which resembles skeletal hands prying open his jaw. In some other world, this could’ve been Batman.
Tom Hardy as Bane.
Tom Hardy is physically imposing in the role. He’s usually shot from below, making his mere 5-foot-7-inch frame feel colossal, even in silhouette, though he eschews traditional notions of the gruff and growling comic book villain. His voice is often goofy and high-pitched — even childlike — and his subtle head-shakes, like when he gives Gotham “back to [the people]” make him seem almost playful. He’s a predator luring his prey with a false sense of comfort, welcoming his followers with outstretched arms before flying into a fury of full-bodied punches. However, despite Hardy’s dedication to this gonzo portrayal, Bane’s actual outlook and fanaticism feel watered down, when they ought to feel like the film’s thematic backbone (as The Joker’s did in The Dark Knight).
That Bane is secretly acting out of protective love for Talia makes him all the more complex. His final scenes reveal the beating heart beneath the beast, but the film leaves the looming question of his true beliefs unanswered and unsatisfying. His plan involves extended chaos, and instilling Gotham with hope for survival before blowing it up anyway, but this sadism doesn’t gel with his supposedly pragmatic motives.
Bane is confronted with a plea of “This is a stock exchange! There’s no money you can steal.” To which he responds: “Then why are you people here?” It’s a tongue-in-cheek indictment of Gotham’s elite, in the vein of Ra’s’ own plans from Batman Begins. But while Ra’s wanted to destroy Gotham for its decadence and rampant inequality, he also hoped it would rebuild itself anew. Bane and Talia’s methods, involving a nuclear bomb, don’t mix with this apparent altruism inherited from Ra’s, but they aren’t replaced with a coherent alternative either. Bane’s plan serves a mostly recursive plot function; at best, it’s a vehicle for Batman to swoop in and save the day after some time away.
With Gotham’s revolution revealed to be a false flag, Batman has little reason to address the deep-seated social and economic malaise unearthed by Bane. Remove the nuclear bomb from the equation, and the story begins to have real potential — Bane’s motives become less about destruction and more about actual upheaval — but in doing so the film also loses its ticking clock and the urgency of its climactic action. In the end, these are more vital to the film at hand, and that’s a problem.
Selina Kyle, on the other hand, does occasionally espouse a thematically-appropriate outlook, in that she nominally disapproves of Gotham’s status quo. Hathaway plays the duplicitous Kyle with aplomb; where Gordon embodies the emotional impact of deception, Kyle embodies the act of deception itself, slipping smoothly and self-assuredly between varying states of emotional truth. It’s a magnetic performance, but Kyle is also the equal and opposite of Inception’s Ariadne, a woman who was all plot function and zero personality. In contrast, Kyle may very well be the most layered woman and the best-written femme fatale in Nolan’s filmography (a shallow list, admittedly), but excising her from the film would also have little impact on how its story plays out.
A character with a more intrinsic connection to the film’s themes is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Robin” John Blake. He’s a combination of the comics’ three key Robin sidekicks — eventual cop Dick Grayson, angsty orphan Jason Todd (whose father was gunned down by organized crime), and Tim Drake, who deduces Batman’s identity — and he eventually takes up Batman’s mantle. Blake arrives at this point by following a similar trajectory to Batman and Gordon in the series (and to characters in other Nolan films like Insomnia and Dunkirk) in that he slowly begins to lose faith in the structures meant to protect people.
When Blake leads a rescue mission by ferrying orphans across a bridge, he’s fired upon by fellow officers acting under orders, shattering his belief in the badge he once wore proudly. In the hopeless moments that follow, he watches Batman save the day by flying the nuclear device to safety; inspired, he opts instead for the altruistic lie of masked vigilantism in the film’s closing moments. His conversations with Bruce throughout the film all build to this decision, as he’s made to understand the mask not only as a symbol, but as a pragmatic deception meant to protect those he loves. He’s fully functional from both a plot and story standpoint — a low bar, but one the film doesn’t often clear.
And yet, despite its often thematically rocky ground, The Dark Knight Rises is awash with stellar technical work behind the camera.
Saved by Great Filmmaking
IMAX cameras, which run 70mm film sideways, offer a much larger frame than traditional 35mm. The Dark Knight was the first narrative feature to be shot on IMAX in any capacity; about 28 minutes of its action scenes were filmed this way, but The Dark Knight Rises features 72 minutes of IMAX footage, and not just for its action.
While the expanded (or “taller”) 4:3 frame offers a gigantic canvas — on which thousands of extras charge into battle, like an epic from the silent era — Nolan also deploys the format with more subtlety this time around, often for intimate closeups. Batman’s quiet contemplation as he flies away from Gotham takes up the entire enormity of the IMAX screen, trapping us within his moment of resignation, while Bruce Wayne waking up to an empty mansion after Alfred’s departure emphasises the haunting emptiness of this space, in all directions. What is normally a tool for visual spectacle is used to highlight Bruce’s utter isolation; video essayist Patrick Willems theorizes that the format made Nolan a better filmmaker.
Every department in the film’s making seems to be functioning at its optimum. Nolan and Pfister not only use the IMAX canvas to its fullest, but use the movement of the camera to capture the sheer magnitude of the film’s unfolding plot. Most of Nolan’s work employs a steady shoulder-mount, or at most, a camera tracking sideways or forward ever-so-slightly. In The Dark Knight Rises, he occasionally returns to the much more kinetic, free-flowing approach of his debut feature, Following, albeit on a much grander scale.
When explosions begin to engulf Gotham, the camera pushes forward overhead; Nolan’s favoured establishing shot, of a city approached by helicopter, now functions as a harbinger of doom. It captures not only mood and architecture, as it often does in his work, but the sheer scale of the destruction, with bombs going off in circular formation around Gotham Stadium (and around the island itself, as its bridges collapse one by one).
Once we return to the ground alongside Blake, he rushes to protect Gordon, and another establishing shot typical of Nolan is amped up as well: the way he follows characters into a room, in a medium shot filmed from the rear, so we can enter alongside them. Here, the push of the camera, as it tracks Blake, begins to accelerate with each new cut. It sprints forward, faster and faster through streets and doorways, charging deeper into darkened interiors as the scene reaches its climax.
Where Nolan once used these techniques to calmly establish space — following characters from a safe distance, and steadily approaching towering structures — he now uses them to disorient, suddenly placing us within a newer, more dangerous, more unpredictable status quo, injecting otherwise tranquil moments with adrenaline.
When Bane begins to explain his master plan, editor Lee Smith takes us forward in time with brief glimpses into Gotham’s descent. The camera shakes as people are ripped from their homes — a feature of the IMAX camera’s mechanical gate weave, a side-to-side shudder most visible on giant screens — as if the film itself was trembling in fear of revolution. The story’s politics are still backward, but their portrayal is no doubt effective. It feels nothing if not momentous, throwing us right in the middle of a profound and unprecedented sea change.
This beginning of Gotham’s plummet is scored by booming horns from composer Hans Zimmer — one of his many high watermarks throughout the film. The way he captures the bombast of Bane and the League of Shadows, despite their lack of thematic clarity, elevates them to the level of dramatic opera (for instance, in the perpetually rising, chant-heavy opening track “Gotham’s Reckoning”). While the music in Batman Begins was controlled and melodic, Zimmer created Bane’s theme by having his western orchestra sit on the floor and bang and pluck at their instruments free-hand in a drum-circle, as if letting loose through tribal tradition, throwing off the shackles and rigid structures of western civilization.
Zimmer’s other compositions are more subtle. His Catwoman suite, “Mind if I Cut in?” is as smooth, mysterious and alluring as the character herself, while the track “Why Do We Fall?” carries Bruce Wayne seamlessly from his ultimate despair — failing to escape the pit — to his rousing moment of victory, transitioning seamlessly to Zimmer’s and James Newton Howard’s themes from Batman Begins, as Bruce emerges reborn. The music helps bring the story full circle.
A film is, of course, much more than its individual parts, but so many of its shots, scenes and concepts in isolation feature career-best work. The costume design, by Lindy Hemming, imbues Bane with a sense of regality through the high collar of his bomber jacket alone, and the sound editing and effects, by Michael Babcock, Richard King and Michael Mitchell, provide a living, breathing feel to Nolan’s acoustic assaults. Gunshots and vehicles roar (often sampled from animal sounds) as they tear through the night, while music-less fight scenes feel visceral; every blow sounds like crunching bone.
Production designer Nathan Crowley, who’s served on every one of Nolan’s films since Insomnia, is vital to the film’s back half. Every vehicle, every surface and every street begins to have a worn-down, lived-in quality when the timeline jumps forward to the dead of winter, after Gotham has been under siege for several months. The snow never seems lily white or freshly fallen; rather, it looks like ash, as if we’re walking through the ruins of a burned down city.
Escaping the pit in The Dark Knight Rises.
When we cut to the prison pit — modeled by Crowley off the Chand Baori well in Rajasthan, India — its stair-like formations, which lead nowhere, speak to the very nature of the prison and Bane’s emotional torture, like constant reminders of an upward trajectory without the possibility of escape. It’s also the location of the film’s most vital scene.
Escaping the Pit
Of the many lies wrestled with in the film, the weaponization of hope, as a false promise, is embodied by the prison well. After Bane breaks Batman’s body and tosses him in the pit, he dangles the hope of escape in front of him like a toy. The gaping maw of this prison, and the high contrast with which its cells are lit, dramatizes a familiar Nolan/Pfister aesthetic: the idea of light invading and reflecting off darkened spaces. Here, the light is an embodiment of salvation, just out of reach.
Wrestling with hope as a double-edged sword also gives way to Nolan’s M.O. of powerful bursts of memory. When Bruce fails to climb out of the pit, he’s left dangling by the rope that was his safety net, conjuring a flashback (in the form of footage from Batman Begins) of his father rappelling down a well to save him. “Why do we fall?” asks the elder Wayne, his question echoing like a fleeting dream as Bruce finally awakens. It’s as if we’re meant to fill in the gap ourselves, with the series’ familiar retort: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
This pit is both an adaptation of the comics’ Peña Duro — the hellish Caribbean prison Bane was born into — and the Lazarus Pit, a supernatural wellspring from which dead characters emerge reborn. The Lazarus Pit is often associated with Ra’s al Ghul who, in the comics, is an immortal warrior. The Ra’s of the movies, who died in Batman Begins, confronts Bruce in the form of a hallucination, and reveals the film’s take on immortality: legacy, in the form of a living descendant. This idea also echoes Ra’s’ own words in Batman Begins about embodying an idea and becoming “more than just a man.” By the end of the film, not only does Batman, the vigilante, achieve a form of immortality through his own successor (Blake), but as a symbol, he transcends flesh and blood, painting his burning insignia on the side of a bridge to rally Gotham’s citizens.
The film’s version of the Pit being framed from below, like the boarded up well from Bruce’s childhood, is especially apt. Not only does Bruce emerge from this prison reborn, having embraced his fears rather than keeping them at bay, but in doing so he finally leaves the childhood well as a psychological space too — a prison of fear which has so tormented him for decades.
In Batman Begins, a key scene involves Bruce standing up amidst a swarm of bats after travelling deeper into the well, burying his fears in another moment of self-delusion. When Bruce attempts to escape the prison without a safety net years later, a similar swarm appears and engulfs him from all sides. Instead of standing up and keeping his emotions at bay, he continues to cower, embracing fear — of bats, of death, and of failure — as an intrinsic part of himself. “How can you move faster than possible,” a fellow prisoner asks him, “fight longer than possible, without the most powerful impulse of the spirit?” Fear, after all, was Bruce’s impetus for becoming Batman in the first place.
Unlike the Bruce Wayne at the beginning of the film, this Bruce Wayne — a man left physically and spiritually shattered — has found a way to heal through time itself, connecting with memories in the form of images from previous films as he changes the nature of one scene in particular. This time, he’s able to escape the well on his own. This time, he learns to pick himself up.
Despite the film’s numerous overarching flaws, this story at its core — of a man fighting to stay alive, emerging victorious despite not “fixing” what he believed broken within himself — resonates on a deeper level. The Dark Knight Rises may not always “click” intellectually, but it delivers some of the most rousing emotional highs of Nolan’s career. And, in a series about abstract symbols transcending the literal, that might just be enough.
