The Dark Knight RisesSave

A small CIA Hercules transport plane high over Kazakhstan. A nuclear physicist named Dr. Leonid Pavel is being interrogated by the CIA mid-flight about a Russian mercenary named Bane. Three hooded prisoners are zip-tied to the cabin floor on suspicion of being Bane's men. The lead CIA agent — Aidan Gillen, fast-talking — pulls hoods off two of them and threatens to throw them out the back. He pulls the third hood off and reveals a man in a tactical bird-cage muzzle and a fur-trimmed jacket. The man speaks in a sonorous, theatrical British baritone — Tom Hardy, eyes piercing, body the size of an icebreaker — and identifies himself as Bane. Bane outlines his plan with cool patience. A second cargo plane drops down from above. Bane's men, dressed as CIA crew, rappel onto the Hercules with grappling lines, disable the engines, transfuse Dr. Pavel's blood into a doppelganger corpse (so the CIA reports Pavel dead), and Bane himself rides the Hercules into a controlled crash with Pavel in his arms. The Hercules disintegrates in a Kazakh desert valley. Bane and Pavel walk away. The CIA has been duped. The film hasn't even shown the bat symbol yet.

Cut to Gotham, eight years later. Harvey Dent Day, the city's annual commemoration of the late white-knight DA. Commissioner Gordon — broken, exhausted, still hiding the lie about Dent that he and Batman fabricated at the end of The Dark Knight (2008) — gives the speech at the Wayne Foundation gala. He has a hidden confession folded in his coat pocket that he doesn't have the courage to read aloud. The Dent Act has cleaned Gotham's streets — organized crime is gone, the mob is dismantled, the streets are safer than they've been in fifty years. Batman is wanted for the murder of Harvey Dent and has not been seen in eight years. Bruce Wayne — Christian Bale, twenty pounds lighter, leaning on a cane with a knee injury from his Batman days, full beard — is a recluse in Wayne Manor. He's been hiding in the East Wing for almost a decade. Alfred has been pretending to bring him to social functions for years.

Selina Kyle — Anne Hathaway, jet-black hair, the most quietly capable woman in the trilogy — is a high-end cat burglar moonlighting as a French maid at the Wayne Foundation gala. She breaks into Bruce Wayne's safe upstairs, lifts his mother's pearl necklace as a calling card, and incidentally swipes his fingerprints from a security panel he keeps in a personal lockbox. The fingerprints are her actual target — she's been hired by a corrupt Wayne Enterprises board member named John Daggett to steal Wayne's fingerprints so Daggett can liquidate Wayne Enterprises' stock in a market attack. Selina is paid in a clean criminal record (an offshore wipe of her FBI file) plus cash. She leaves the gala. Bruce, watching her exit on the security feed, is impressed and intrigued.

Stock exchange attack. The next morning, Bane's men — disguised as maintenance crew — storm the Gotham Stock Exchange floor armed with assault weapons. They use Daggett's lifted Wayne fingerprints to execute thirty seconds of bogus stock trades in Bruce Wayne's name, deliberately bankrupting Wayne Enterprises in a single trading window. The bankruptcy is real. Wayne's billions are gone. The mercenaries flee on motorcycles down the Gotham streets. Bruce, watching the news, decides to come out of retirement. He puts on the Batsuit for the first time in eight years. He chases Bane's men through downtown Gotham on the Bat-pod (the dual-wheeled motorcycle from The Dark Knight) at midnight, with every Gotham PD cruiser on his tail. He breaks his cover for the first time in nearly a decade. Gordon, in a hospital bed after a separate Bane-orchestrated near-fatal attack, sees the news of Batman's return and weeps with relief.

John Blake — Joseph Gordon-Levitt, young Gotham PD officer, the kind of cop Gordon himself was in Batman Begins (2005) — is a Gotham orphan raised in the Wayne Foundation's St. Swithin's Home for Boys. Blake recognizes Bruce Wayne as Batman not from any evidence but from a quiet, instinctive familiarity — the same kind of orphan-pain in Bruce's eyes that Blake remembers seeing on the day his father was killed. Blake visits Bruce in person at Wayne Manor and breaks the secret directly. "I know who you are. I know what you've done. I think it's time you came back." Bruce, who had been planning to retire from Batman for good, listens. Blake tells him about a series of suspicious disappearances in Gotham's storm drain network — homeless people, orphans from St. Swithin's, men with skills useful to a small underground army. Something is being built below Gotham.

Beneath Gotham. Bane has spent the last year recruiting Gotham's underclass — homeless men, displaced orphans, ex-Blackgate convicts — into a private mercenary force living and training in the Gotham sewers. He has Dr. Pavel synthesizing fissile material from a Wayne Enterprises fusion reactor he stole during the stock-exchange diversion. The fusion reactor's purpose, originally peaceful, can be reverse-engineered into a 4-megaton nuclear bomb. Bane is preparing both. Bruce, having stolen Selina's identity to track her down, infiltrates a Gotham nightclub looking for her and convinces her to lead him into the sewer network where Bane is hiding. Selina double-crosses Bruce immediately — Bane has promised her the offshore identity wipe that Daggett never delivered — and Bruce walks into Bane's underground throne room alone.

The fight. Bane vs Batman in the cavernous Gotham sewer chamber. The fight is the most one-sided in the trilogy. Bane is faster, stronger, and trained at the same monastery Bruce was. "Theatricality and deception, powerful agents to the uninitiated, but we are initiated, aren't we Bruce. Members of the League of Shadows." Bane breaks the Batsuit's body plate with three punches. He overwhelms Bruce in twenty seconds. He picks Bruce up by the throat and breaks his spine over his knee. He throws the unconscious Bruce into the sewer current, where Bane's men extract him.

The pit. Bane has Bruce flown to a prison facility somewhere in the Middle East — an ancient stone well in a desert canyon called the Pit, where prisoners are kept in the bottom of a sixty-foot-deep stone cylinder watching the daylight overhead but never reaching it. Bane wants Bruce to watch Gotham fall on a wall-mounted television from the bottom of the Pit. Bruce, broken-backed, must be physically restored by a fellow prisoner who turns out to be the prison's resident doctor (and a former League of Shadows member). The doctor tells Bruce the legend of the Pit — only one prisoner has ever escaped in three hundred years, a child born in the Pit who was protected by the prison's strongest convicts during a riot and then climbed out of the Pit alone at age twelve. The child's name was never revealed. The doctor implies it might have been Ra's al Ghul's heir.

Meanwhile, Gotham. Bane returns to Gotham with the stolen fusion reactor — now a 4-megaton nuclear core. He cracks open the underground sewer system from below, blowing twelve city blocks to the surface in a series of underground explosions that swallow much of central Gotham's infrastructure. He traps three thousand Gotham PD officers underground in collapsed tunnels. He invades a Gotham Rogues football game in real time, breaking onto the field at halftime while the singer is mid-anthem. He holds up Gordon's confessional document — the one Gordon was going to read on Harvey Dent Day — and reads it aloud to the stadium and the world's broadcast cameras: "Harvey Dent was a murderer who killed five people, three of them cops. Batman killed Dent. Gordon and Batman lied to Gotham. The Dent Act is a fraud." Then Bane reveals the bomb. He's been quietly arming it across the city for weeks. Three smaller decoy bombs are in unknown locations. The real bomb is mobile, on a truck, with a hostage-driver Bane will execute at any sign of intervention. Bane announces the city is now sealed off from outside — every bridge mined, every tunnel collapsed. "The next era of Western civilization begins here, behind your borders. Take control of your city." He releases all Blackgate prisoners.

Gotham descends into anarchy. The Tumblers (the urban-combat vehicles Wayne Enterprises had been developing, now in League of Shadows hands) patrol the streets. A kangaroo court — judged by a deranged Jonathan Crane in a black robe — passes life-or-death sentences on every recognizable Gotham elite. The wealthy are dragged from their homes and have their assets distributed by the League. The Gotham underclass takes over the city's institutions. Daggett, the corrupt board member who hired Bane, is executed by Bane himself for failing to deliver his promises. Selina watches Gotham burn from a rooftop, mortified at what she has helped enable.

The Pit. Bruce, healing slowly, attempts the impossible climb. Twice. The first time he uses a safety rope and falls. The second time he uses a safety rope and falls. The local prisoners tell him the rope is the problem — to truly escape, he must climb without a rope, embracing the fear of death that the original escaping child had no choice but to embrace. The third attempt, Bruce ascends without a safety harness. He almost falls. He pulls himself over the well's edge. He stands at the rim of the Pit looking out at the desert at sunrise. He has overcome his fear of death the way he overcame his fear of bats in Batman Begins. He stays. He has to go save Gotham.

Endgame. Bruce returns to Gotham alone, sneaks past the bridges by hijacking a fuel truck, and meets up with Selina, Gordon, Blake, and the survivors of his old GCPD network. Selina has redeemed herself; she helps Bruce free Lucius Fox and a small team. Bruce reveals his Bat — a black urban-warfare VTOL aircraft prototype that Lucius has had stored in a Wayne Enterprises warehouse — and they begin to coordinate a final assault on Bane. He gives the Bat-pod to Selina. Gordon evacuates as many cops from the sewer tunnels as he can.

The final battle. The Gotham PD — three thousand officers freed from the sewers and given old riot helmets and shotguns — march down a Gotham boulevard in a single line confronting Bane's army across the open street. Bruce, in the Batsuit, slams through Bane's defenses at the head of the cop line and engages Bane personally on a frozen-over street corner. The fight is more even this time. Bruce, knowing Bane is dependent on the bird-cage mask for pain control (Bane was once a Pit prisoner himself and his face was destroyed there), targets the mask. He cracks it. Bane collapses in agony. As Bruce raises his fist to finish the fight, Miranda Tate — the philanthropist who had been on the Wayne Enterprises board and who Bruce had begun a relationship with months earlier — stabs Bruce in the stomach from behind. Miranda is revealed to be Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul, the original child who escaped the Pit. Bane has not been the mastermind — Talia has been. She is following through on her father's plan to destroy Gotham, with Bane as her loyal protector.

The Bat-pod. Selina arrives on the Bat-pod at the last second, shoots Bane through a tunnel wall and ends him with the pod's cannon. Talia escapes in the bomb truck. Bruce, in the Batsuit, gives chase in the Bat. They corner Talia's truck on a Gotham riverbank. The bomb is too unstable to disarm — the fusion-core countdown timer is at 90 seconds. Bruce engages the Bat's autopilot system (which Lucius Fox originally tagged as broken, but which Bruce has secretly fixed weeks earlier) and tows the bomb out over Gotham Bay using the Bat's grappling cable. The bomb detonates over open water six miles from shore. The mushroom cloud is visible from every Gotham rooftop. The city's most-feared moment — full nuclear annihilation in Gotham's harbor — happens at the city's edge.

Aftermath. Gotham is saved. The Batman is dead. Bruce Wayne is dead. Wayne Manor — sold off in the Bane crisis — is donated by Bruce's will to the Wayne Foundation as an orphanage. Lucius Fox discovers the Bat's autopilot system was actually fixed three weeks prior to the climax, meaning Bruce did NOT need to fly the Bat over the bay himself. Alfred, who has been alone since Bruce's apparent death, takes his annual Florence vacation he's been telling Bruce about since Batman Begins. At a Florence cafe, drinking coffee at the table next to him, is Bruce Wayne — alive — sitting across from Selina Kyle, wearing Bruce's mother's pearl necklace. Alfred and Bruce nod to each other across the cafe. Bruce smiles. He's chosen the retirement he's never let himself have.

Coda. John Blake, the orphan cop, resigns from the Gotham PD because he can no longer trust the legal system. He walks into the Wayne Foundation lawyer's office and is told that Bruce Wayne left him a coordinate — a GPS coordinate in the Gotham foothills. Blake drives out. He finds a hidden cave system. He walks in. He stands on the platform where the Batcave's storm-light projector activates automatically. The bat-shaped light shines on the cave wall. Blake's eyes go wide. The film's last shot is a smile spreading across his face as the Bat-signal-on-the-wall illuminates around him. The Wayne legacy lives. Cut to credits. Hans Zimmer's two-note theme finally resolves into the full Batman theme — the only time the trilogy lets the theme complete itself. The next Batman has just been chosen.