Rocks In The Attic #1005: Hans Zimmer – ‘The Dark Knight Rises (O.S.T.)’ (2012)

I’d like to hire one of those planes that drags advertising banners across the sky, and just fly it around Christopher Nolan’s house whenever he’s writing a new film. The message on the banner: LESS IS MORE.

I really, really want to like this film more than I do. As was quickly becoming the norm around this time (see his previous film Inception and pretty much everything since), The Dark Knight Rises reaches too far and doesn’t all quite work.

There’s so much plot crammed into every scene, you never get a chance to breathe and reflect, even in the rare moments where Hans Zimmer’s busy soundtrack score stops dead – like in the scene where the police march in silence to face Bane. The silence is deafening.

You’d think that Nolan might have learned from the excesses of The Dark Knight. That film is a flawed classic. Great, yes, but if he had shaved 30 minutes off, and maybe lost some of the extraneous sections like the tiresome ferry boat sequence, it would have been a true classic. Instead, Nolan forges ahead with a sequel that is even longer (165 minutes compared to its predecessor’s 152) with far too much going on.

Halfway through a recent rewatch of the film in 4K UHD, I was stunned with the realisation that all of the stuff with Bruce Wayne in the sandy prison and Gotham City in lockdown was still to come. Talk about cramming two or three movies’ worth of plot into one.

A different cut of the film could have started with Bane’s interruption of the NFL game. That alone would have set up a great couple of hours. Instead, that whole plot thread – and the great aesthetic of a snowy Gotham – is rushed over for an audience that’s already seen too much.

Nolan is so obsessed with driving the plot forward – like a shark in water – that he doesn’t even seem to notice when key characters meet their demise. The previous film spent time and effort setting up Nestor Carbonell’s new Mayor of Gotham, but here he’s killed off in the NFL sequence in a blink-and-you-miss-it explosion. ‘Wait, was that..?’ your brain asks, before Nolan stuffs some more exposition into your eyeballs.

It’s not all bad though. I enjoy all of the circular references to Batman Begins – Liam Neeson’s return as Ra’s Al Ghul (with the line ‘My wife…she was taken’ surely a cinematic wink to the actor’s successful franchise), Cillian Murphy’s cameo as The Scarecrow, and a lovely flashback to Gary Oldman looking after the young, newly orphaned Bruce Wayne.

By this point, Nolan’s acting alumni are struggling for screen-time. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman – both integral to the moral core of The Dark Knight – are reduced to minor characters. And while both of the early films devoted so much time to Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne, here his character arc fights for attention with newcomers Marion Cotillard, Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

One of the most interesting elements of the film is the choice to have the voice of Tom Hardy’s Bane feature so high in the sound mix. Prefacing the furore that would surround Nolan’s muddy audio treatment in Tenet, not all of Bane’s lines are audible. This is a shame as it all sounds so unique, if a little hokey at times. And even the character of Bane feels rushed, with his backstory crammed into a couple of flashbacks, and another blink-and-you-miss-it death.

For the soundtrack, Hans Zimmer continues with what he’d built up with James Newton Howard on the previous films. Howard turned down the chance to return, believing he’d feel like a third wheel after Zimmer’s successful collaboration with Nolan on Inception. Howard’s gentler, melodic ear is noticeably absent in a score that is far too hectic, yet one that perfectly fits the ADHD plotting of the film.

Hit: On Thin Ice

Hidden Gem: Rise

Rocks In The Attic #876: Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard – ‘Batman Begins (O.S.T.)’ (2005)

It sounds like the sort of thing you’d read on a scam Facebook post, but last month I won a 65” 4K UHD Sony Bravia. It wasn’t out of sheer luck though, or from a Niarobi prince who needed help transferring his millions into a New Zealand bank account. I took part in a ten-week, 100-question film quiz run by a local film-related website. All that movie-watching has finally paid off big time.

The first film we watched in 4K UHD was Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. We’re aiming to watch the rest of the trilogy over the coming weeks, particularly for the jaw-dropping IMAX sequences in both the Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. I’ve road-tested these already, and they look immense on the new television.

My favourite of the three films though is the first one. Released in 2005, it very nearly passed me by. Like most people, I was put off by the thought of another Batman film after Joel Schumacher had all but run the franchise into the ground with 1997’s Batman & Robin. I even remember being sat in a bar in Manchester’s Castlefield, when our good friends Vini and Bucko told us to wake up and go see it.

A few days later, we saw the film on Manchester’s IMAX screen, and was absolutely blown away. I had already seen Memento by this point, Christopher Nolan’s art-house breakthrough, but he landed firmly on my radar with this film. And he’s been there ever since. Oddly, I associate Batman Begins with Werther’s Originals, as I found a full, unopened packet of the sweets in that IMAX screening. Maybe somebody forgot about them as their jaw had dropped so much, watching the film.

On first watch, the training sequences at the top of the film feel old-hat. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is being trained by his mentor Henri Ducard, played by Liam Neeson. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, many times. But now, the scenes seem to have been imbued with some sense of mythology after their use as flashbacks in The Dark Knight Rises.

The narrative jumps in this first hour of the film – between the murder of the Waynes, Bruce’s ‘lost weekend’ years in Asia, and his subsequent training in Bhutan – feel effortless. A lot of time is spent setting up, but it pays off hugely. The orchestral swell at the mid-point of the film, as Batman stands atop Gotham following the scene where he takes down Falcone and his thugs, is sublime – a cinematic and musical statement to announce that a new hero is in place.

Much was said at the time of release that Batman Begins is unique in that it’s the first Batman film actually about Batman. It’s true, and the use of two fairly minor villains in Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul helps to not detract from Bruce’s story.

The casting is great – Bale all but reprising his role as American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, and one of the greatest ensemble casts this side of the turn of the century: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Rutger Hauer, Cillian Murphy, Katie Holmes, Ken Watanabe and Tom Wilkinson. That’s a lot of talent, and a lot of Oscars. We even get treated to short cameos from genre-king character actor Shane Rimmer, a young Jack Gleeson who went onto play the evil boy-King Joffrey in Game of Thrones, and one of the oddest castings of Tim Booth, vocalist of ‘90s indie band James, as Gotham serial-killer Victor Zsasz. Cillian Murphy might be the weakest link in the whole picture – too handsome / feminine for the role? You wouldn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him.

My favourite element of the film is its real-world building of the Batman character; a huge influence on Martin Campbell’s reboot of the James Bond universe with 2006’s Casino Royale. Gotham City looks amazing, a real living, breathing city; aside from a couple of too-clean CGI shots of the train entering the city at the opening of the film. Aside from this mis-step, the CGI is spot-on, particularly the drug-induced visions suggested by Scarecrow’s weaponised poison. Throughout his Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan managed to keep everything as practical and in-camera as possible, expertly deploying CGI to clean up and remove cameras from shots, for example.

The new Batmobile, the Tumbler, is awesome and the chase away from the police mid-way through the film might just be one of the greatest action sequences of the decade. It’s a perfect sequence, and doesn’t even feature an antagonist, relying purely on Batman’s need to evade the Gotham PD.

Kudos has to go to Christopher Nolan and his co-writer David S. Goyer, who not only ignored the previous films, but started afresh and rebuilt the Batman legend from the ground up. It’s a stunning achievement, setting the film up for a pair of terrific sequels. It’s a wonder that Nolan could get these films so right, but the DC Extended Universe it led to has so far failed to match his success with the character.

The other integral component to Batman Begins is the musical score, by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. A fairly obvious reflection on Danny Elfman’s thunderous, brass-heavy scores to the Tim Burton-directed Batman and Batman Returns, their collaboration manages to meld traditional, heroic orchestral tropes with modern synthesisers and sequencers. It’s a perfect marriage of sounds, and has influenced every action and super-hero soundtrack since – most notably the Marvel films, which have borrowed heavily from the Dark Knight trilogy in many ways. Who needs innovation and originality when you can build your own formula from something so strong?

Hit: Vespertilio

Hidden Gem: Antrozous