The Dark Knight Rises Essay

The Dark Knight Rises

analyse how the films opening establishes genre conventions and reaches target audiences through technical codes, narrative and characterization

The Dark Knight Rises is a 2012 superhero action film which was directed by Christopher Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay along with his brother Jonathan Nolan and the story with David S. Goyer. Featuring the DC Comics characters Batman, bane, Catwoman, Alfred and many other important characters. This film is the final instalment for Nolan's Batman film trilogy, this film is based as a superhero action genre film.

In a typical action film its usually based around one or more heroes who have been thrust into a series of challenges or situations that require physical feats (of sometimes unnatural ability) , extended fights and frenetic chases and many explosions. They tend to feature a resourceful character struggling against incredible or impossible odds, which may involve life-threatening situations involving an evil villain, and/or being pursued, with victory achieved at the end of all the difficult physical efforts and violence.

In TDKR this is shown in many ways throughout the film to keep the audience engulfed by the actions of batman as the lead protagonist. Whereas with horror films they use ECU’s and jumpy music in batman they mainly focus on ELS in order to capture the fights and chase sequences. Some of the main fight sequences involve bane giving the audience a clear scenes of good and evil within the fights and showing them at opposite sides of the frame. The fast cuts also indicate that it’s a action film because in comparison to rom coms there are no fade outs but it cut really quickly to keep the audience on the edge of their seat.

In the past all action sequences were done by real people and real props however with modern technology they are able to add CGI and create fight sequences or props that aren’t real in order to aid the action. Many of these techniques are shown in TDKR by the way Nolan uses CGI to add to the action scenes. The main sequences this is incorporated into is where the football pitch blows up showing the use of CGI in order to create an action packed film and push the boundaries of the technology. However Nolan didn’t want to over use CGI and kept to using many of the actors and built many of the props such as a working batpod and tumblrs and also built the bat however this was just a life size model.

 In the opening 15 minutes Nolan is trying to set out the story straight away and introduce the characters as soon as possible to quickly build on their relationships to develop the film.  The film starts off on a landing strip with people which had been captured with bags over their heads and the emphasis of the tension builds up with non diagetic music and quick cuts building up to the action where banes men attack the plane. This scene then cuts to a extreme long shot that’s panning over the city then to the speech at Wayne manor. This scene is shown to introduce some of the other major characters such as bat man, cat women and Commissioner Gordon.  The film builds up in suspense and action in order to move the scenes along at a quick pace and keeping the tempo of th music in line with the action scenes. The majority of the shots begin with extreme close ups when it starts on the plane to give the audience a sense of the small amount of space and the emotion of the characters and has many quick shot reverse shots to keep up the pace .

In conclusion I think that TDKR keeps to the genre of superhero action film. It has a more traditional approach as they try to make as many of the props as they can to make it seem more real in comparison to CGI which is what Nolan wanted to achieve. This makes the props aesthetically real and makes the whole film seem more possible in reality. The quick scene cuts and the long shots capture the action within the frame such as the plane sequence and the fight scenes further along in the film.