Nolan isn’t wholly humorless) and Gotham sneers about the playboy who’s mutated into a Howard Hughes recluse. Gotham City is quiet and so too is life at Wayne Manor, where its master hobbles about with a cane while a prowler makes off with family jewels (the intensely serious Mr. Dent has been enshrined as a martyr, held up as an immaculate defender of law-and-order absolutism. (He looms even more in Imax, which is the way to see the film.) Eight years later in story time, Batman, having taken the fall for Dent’s death, and mourning the woman both men loved, has retreated into the shadows. The legacy of Dent, an activist district attorney turned murderous lunatic, looms over this one, the literal and metaphysical personification of good intentions gone disastrously wrong. It can look ugly, but as they like to say - and as Dent says in “The Dark Knight,” the second part of the trilogy - the night is darkest before the dawn. The politics of partisanship rule and grass-roots movements have sprung up on the right and the left to occupy streets and legislative seats. The enemy is now elusive and the home front as divided as the face of Harvey Dent, a vanquished Batman foe. Times change superheroes and villains too. Truth, justice and the American way? No - and not only because that doctrine belongs to Superman, who was bequeathed that weighty motto on the radio in August 1942, eight months after the United States entered World War II and three years after Batman, Bob Kane’s comic creation, hit. As the country enters its latest electoral brawl off screen, Batman (Christian Bale) hurtles into a parallel battle that booms with puppet-master anarchy, anti-government rhetoric and soundtrack drums of doom, entering the fray as another lone avenger and emerging as a defender of, well, what? As the title promises, day breaks in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the grave and satisfying finish to Mr. 11 epic of ambivalent good versus multidimensional evil with a burst of light. After seven years and two films that have pushed Batman ever deeper into the dark, the director Christopher Nolan has completed his postmodern, post-Sept.
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