“A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.”
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I will maintain until my dying breath that what was shown in theaters was not the original ending for The Dark Knight Rises. However, since Wikipedia makes no mention of my theory (and we all know that's about as definitive as it gets), I guess I'm putting on my tinfoil hat today. If you haven't seen TDKR, or you have and loved the ending, you can pretty much stop reading now, because I'm really going to pick it apart.
Let me start by saying that I love Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, and indeed, Christopher Nolan movies in general (even Insomnia is underrated). Even with David Goyer's fingerprints all over Batman Begins, it was still the best comic book origin story ever filmed ("Nice coat" is just one example of Goyer's concern for a good one-liner over plausibility. Really David? That homeless guy just happened to be there? And didn't take off when he heard the gunfire? But this is turning into a rant within a rant.). I don't have as many complaints with TDKR as most people do. There is a general feeling that perhaps the movie bit off more than it could chew with the massive timeframe covered, but beyond that, I still love the movie. The ending, however, does it's best to ruin everything that came before.
That somehow becomes more forgivable to me if it wasn't the original ending. My complete conjecture: Christopher Nolan had Batman die at the end, but the studio made him change it because they want their Justice League movie, so Batman better be alive! To start, let's take a look at everything (I can think of) that's wrong with the ending:
That somehow becomes more forgivable to me if it wasn't the original ending. My complete conjecture: Christopher Nolan had Batman die at the end, but the studio made him change it because they want their Justice League movie, so Batman better be alive! To start, let's take a look at everything (I can think of) that's wrong with the ending:
- Those closest to him, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox, are left to grieve for his death. If he didn't die, isn't it sort of a dick move to put them all through that misery? Especially Alfred, whom Bruce had to know would take it particularly hard.
- If Batman works best as a symbol (something Batman himself ascribes to), then people can never know the true identity of Batman. It's not going to take a genius to piece together that Batman came out of hiding the minute Wayne came out of seclusion, then Wayne disappeared right when Batman died.
- We see Batman flying the Bat with 5 seconds left on the bomb timer. It is stated that the bomb had a 6 mile blast radius. Without using any cop outs like "the timer is shown out of sequence", and assuming Batman ejected with the full 5 seconds, that means the Bat had to be travelling 4,320 miles per hour, or in other words, well over 5 times the speed of sound, which is obviously ridiculous.
- Lucius talks to two technicians sitting in a Bat who tell him the autopilot had already been fixed. We can assume this is a new Bat, or Bane would've used it in pacifying Gotham (there's no way you don't use it if you have it), and since the R&D department was taken off the books, you know there's no legitimate buyer for which to build one, which means it was built for the sole purpose of looking at the computer log. Wait, what?
- Alfred never tells Bruce the location of the café he goes to, making it cosmically unlikely that he'd just happen to run into him. If you want to say that a man of Bruce's means could have found out the café, then we circle back around to my first point, only now it's even worse. He actually intended to let Alfred know he was alive, but let him go through the grief first!
- Batman is a hero and a martyr, but he is neither of those things if he abandons his stewardship of Gotham. Vacationing in Europe with the gorgeous Anne Hathaway? Sounds rough.
- Along with abandoning Gotham, he just hoists the mantle of Batman onto Blake without any training or even so much as a choice. If he was alive, sticking around (to thwart my second point) would allow him to train Blake, and as Bruce pointed out in Batman Begins, training was one of the reasons for his success.
All of those problems are resolved if Batman simply dies at the end. The more cynical ending that fixes everything would be to say that Alfred was driven insane with grief, so he hallucinates seeing Bruce Wayne alive, but I prefer a route that doesn't involve senility. So what do I have to say it was the studio's fault, and not just a poor choice by Nolan? Well, not much beyond Nolan's track record. But isn't it a simpler answer to say that a greedy studio that wanted to be able to use the wildly successful Dark Knight trilogy as backstory for a movie franchise fiddled with a script to ensure that could happen, rather than a brilliant filmmaker showed a horrendous lack of judgment? Isn't it more likely that when the studio said "change the ending", Nolan did just that, but left the build up to make the ending ridiculous as a giant "F you" to the studio? Since I'll be waiting be in line for a midnight release of Nolan's next offering, Interstellar, I prefer to believe "yes." Does the TDK trilogy have its issues? Of course, but the TKDR's ending shouldn't be one that's held against it. Just pretend Batman dies and enjoy the show.