The film Christopher Nolan compared to a disaster movie: “We’ve gone to some very extreme places”
The disaster epic is usually a haven for bombastic special effects featuring scenes of citywide destruction, but when Christopher Nolan decided to channel the genre in his own work, it was inevitable that he’d find his own way to put a different spin on it.
It would undoubtedly be fun to see the Academy Award-winning director dive headlong into causing structural chaos in a movie similar to The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. However, it seems like a form of filmmaking that’s perhaps a touch too superficial to cater directly to his stylistic and thematic sensibilities.
Roland Emmerich built pretty much his entire career on the back of it, but for Nolan, simply reducing bustling urban hubs to rubble for the sake of it doesn’t hold much appeal. Instead, he leaned into the pressures that came with mounting a worthy conclusion to what had the potential to go down as one of cinema’s greatest-ever trilogies, turning Gotham City into a disaster zone in The Dark Knight Rises.
Whereas Batman Begins inadvertently gave rise to the ‘dark and gritty reboot’ era of blockbuster filmmaking, The Dark Knight became something else entirely. Not just one of the greatest comic book adaptations ever made, there was such an uproar over the movie being overlooked in that year’s ‘Best Picture’ race that the Academy Awards admitted it was one of the main reasons why the field was expanded from five to anywhere up to ten the very next year.
That’s a monumental amount of expectation to place on the shoulders of a single motion picture. While mileage varies as to whether or not The Dark Knight Rises managed to pull it off, Nolan knew going in that he had to do something completely different story-wise.
The result was Tom Hardy’s Bane mounting a hostile takeover of Gotham, isolating the city from the rest of the world and creating a walled-in society with himself as its de facto figurehead. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Nolan explained his thought process behind the driving force of the narrative.
“We’ve gone to some very extreme places with the content of the film and how much we’ve been allowed to explore ideas of society, of corruption and decay,” he said. While he knows “people often interpret the films as political,” he was adamant that “they are examining social issues” instead.
Stating the obvious, Nolan branded Batman Begins as an origin story and The Dark Knight as “that sort of crime epic idea of what a city is.” When it came to the threequel, though, Bane’s coup saw the creative team “really move more into the disaster movie.”
It may not have countless characters gazing open-mouthed in awe as the world turns to ruins around them, but The Dark Knight Rises still ticks many of the boxes associated with disaster cinema by reducing Gotham to a shell of its former self, having a dwindling band of heroes try to repair the damage done, and have the antagonist cause chaos along the way. The influences are clear. They just don’t unfold in the expected manner.
