The dark knight returns

The most famous bat in the world returns to the cinema screens. We speak of course of Batman who in the film "The Dark Knight Returns", a new creation by Christopher Nolan. This is the third installment of the saga that began with Batman Begins, in 2005 and continued with “the dark Knight”In 2008 in which the masked hero still has the face of Christian Bale as in the films that preceded him. We had left "the bat man" who "is not a hero but the silent guardian who watches over Gotham" who was hunted down by the police whom everyone is chasing as he was forced to take the blame for the crimes committed by "Two-Face" , in order to keep the memory of the inflexible and honest prosecutor, a symbol for all the citizens of Gotham, intact, also making Gordon promise never to reveal what Prosecutor Dent had become. In this way, however, the image of Batman is completely defeated and the city is forced to give up its hero, who has fallen low as the worst of criminals. In that film, in fact, Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, fights his historical enemy, the evil Joker, alongside Harvey Dent, the new district attorney and Commissioner Jim Gordon. And it is precisely the young and indomitable prosecutor, boyfriend of Wayne's childhood friend, Rachel Dawes, the protagonist of the 2008 film. Joker convinces the leaders of the mafia to ally themselves against the Bat Man, managing to become the boss to engineer a diabolical and cruel plan to get him to reveal his true identity. He thus declares that he wants to eliminate one by one all the characters who stand between him and his plan. In fact, he begins to kill the judge who has to try the mafia, Commissioner Loeb, Mayor Garcia, and even tries to eliminate Commissioner Gordon who, on the other hand, manages to save himself but is believed dead by all. To put an end to this carnage, Dent openly declares that he is Batman. While the Joker tries to blow up the armored car that leads him to the penitentiary, the real Batman manages to stop him by having him arrested by Gordon; at the same time the bosses kidnap Dent and his girlfriend and after having tied them in two different places, they prepare a trap ready to explode, killing them. Batman is revealed by the Joker where the two are but he reverses the addresses so while Gordon goes to Rachel, the Bat Man arrives from Dent. In both cases too late. Rachel, in fact, dies and the prosecutor is horribly disfigured.

From that moment, after a confrontation with Jocker, the prosecutor lets his bad side emerge, becoming the perfidious Two-Face, starting to get justice for himself by killing all the people he holds responsible for Rachel's death and her disability; among them there is also Lieutenant Gordon and in the final battle Batman is forced to kill "Two-Face" / Dent to save the lieutenant's son.
And it is from here that the story of the famous hero resumes. At the beginning of the film we find Batman himself, considered a criminal even for the death of Dent, hunted by the police and completely disappeared from the life of Gotham, thanks also to the effect that the lie concocted between Batman and Gordon has caused. Through the "Dent Act's" and for the figure and image of champion of the good that the prosecutor has left in public opinion, the city of Gotham is experiencing a period of relative tranquility despite the absence of Batman, with prisons being they fill with criminals and with citizens who are thus calmer. The old friends of all time try to heal the wounds that these tragic events have left in the soul of Wayne and Alfred continues to follow him with his silent presence. So the Bat Man is forced to live a period of total darkness and introspective travel, until two new criminals arrive in the city and disturb this newfound tranquility again; first the arrival of a strange and cunning hi-tech thief, Selina Kyle, who takes on the role of the fascinating and mysterious Catwoman, who has a secret plan to take over the whole city and then is definitely upset by the arrival of a terrorist named Bane, an escape from the fortress of a maximum security prison on the island of Santa Prisca; endowed with extraordinary intelligence, as well as superhuman strength. Bane arrives in Gotham and discovers Batman's true identity;
Bane is a fierce being, who knocks down his opponents by taking them head-on (as opposed to Jocker's unpredictability in the second episode) after blowing up the football stadium lawn during a game, the river bridge and freeing all the prisoners of Gotham in an epic final battle, of the city and individual, hard, real, bloody, epic like the great battles of the past and where we will find characters from the first episode such as the scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul. Bane in all this seriously tests Batman / Wayne, both psychologically and physically, making him see the deep abyss of defeat with no return.

This last episode of the saga is the completion and the end of the other two episodes and they make us relive, also in a temporal sense, what happened previously; the fact of being considered a criminal takes away Bruce Wayne's strength and he realizes that he must necessarily find himself and the spirit with which he had returned to Gotham so long ago. The film also closes the circle as a philosophical message; while in the first episode Wayne decides which path to take thanks to his spirit and the final fight with the leader of the "shadow sect" Ra's al Ghul is the supreme peak, in the second episode we find Wayne who mainly uses thought, mind, and puts it above everything (the design of the machine that makes any cell phone inside Gotham become a sonar is the sublime example), everything is organized and planned (Dent's liberation, absolute silence on the false death of Gordon), in this film Wayne / Batman must find the Strength, the physical strength and the psychological strength to be able to fight that phenomenal muscle machine of Bane; spirit, mind, body united again; it is therefore absolutely natural to see "the dark knight" and "the dark knight: the return" as two pans of a scale, two sides of the same coin; in the previous film Batman was the hero who fought the most powerful organization in the world (the mafia), defeating it (memorable the escape from Hong Kong with which he captures Lo and brings him back to Gotham), he was the hero, who could everything and who solved everything, despite having a ruthless enemy like Jocker. In this final episode instead we find, especially at the beginning, Batman as a man, haunted by Wayne's doubts and fears, by the fear of not having been what he wanted to be and only the extreme danger, combined with the path of rebirth, make finally loudly returning to the hero we all know who fights for good and legality, always and in any case, even if he knows he does not have many chances of victory.
Finally, in this film, a particular figure emerges that seems of secondary importance but who returns to revive together with Lucius, Alfred (who in this episode returns to being that putative father that Wayne never had) and Gordon, the four sides of the Batman figure; is that of Blacke, a neighborhood policeman from Gotham City who almost seems to take on responsibilities that are not his own, making us glimpse all those qualities that characterized the first episode, with the spotless and fearless hero, who is the bearer of hope, justice and legality.

	Original title:	The Dark Knight Rises
	Country:	USA, UK
	Year:	2012
	Gender:	Action, Thriller
	Duration:	166 '
	Directed by:	Christopher Nolan
	Official site:	www.thedarkknightrises.com
	Actors:	Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway
	Production:	DC Entertainment, Legendary Pictures, Syncopy, Warner Bros. Pictures
	Distribution:	Warner Bros.
	Exit :	August 29, 2012

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The Dark Knight - The Return