The Dark Knight RisesSave

The film opens with a CIA extraction operation in Uzbekistan. A small CIA team is interrogating a group of mercenaries believed to be working for a terrorist named Bane, attempting to extract a Russian nuclear scientist named Dr. Pavel. The interrogation goes catastrophically wrong: Bane himself is among the captured mercenaries, his identity hidden behind a sack-mask. He reveals himself, kills the CIA team, and escapes the airborne aircraft mid-flight via a parachute extraction maneuver that physically rips the rear of the cargo plane off mid-flight. Pavel is taken alive. The opening sequence establishes Bane's tactical sophistication and his immunity to standard interrogation; he wears a permanent breathing apparatus that delivers a constant stream of pain-suppressing anesthetic to keep him functional after a previous lethal injury.

Cut to Gotham City eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Batman has not been seen since Harvey Dent's death; he has taken the public blame for Dent's murders to preserve the late District Attorney's reputation as Gotham's white knight. The resulting Dent Act has given Gotham police unprecedented surveillance and detention powers, and street-level organized crime has been almost entirely eliminated. Bruce Wayne lives as a recluse in Wayne Manor, walking with a cane after years of accumulated combat injuries, and has not appeared in public for nearly a decade. Wayne Enterprises is in financial crisis after Bruce's sponsored fusion-reactor research project was abandoned for safety reasons years earlier; the unfinished reactor sits in a hidden underground lab.

Two new characters arrive simultaneously to disrupt Bruce's withdrawal. A cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) infiltrates Wayne Manor disguised as catering staff, steals Bruce's mother's pearl necklace from his vault, and lifts a fingerprint from his safe. Her motivation will be revealed gradually: she has been hired by a corporate entity to obtain Bruce's biometric data for stock-market manipulation. Police officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young patrol officer with intuitive insight into Bruce's covert identity, also seeks Bruce out. Blake had been raised at the same orphanage Bruce had funded throughout his adult life, and he had recognized Bruce as Batman through the orphanage's discontinued funding payments. Blake convinces Bruce that Gotham needs Batman again.

Bane's operation moves to Gotham. He has been quietly building a mercenary force in the sewers beneath the city for months. His public emergence comes at the Gotham Stock Exchange, where he and his mercenaries seize the trading floor and use Bruce's stolen biometric fingerprints to execute a series of fraudulent trades that bankrupt Wayne Enterprises overnight. Bruce, financially destroyed and forced out of his own company, accepts a takeover bid from board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), a wealthy international philanthropist who has been romantically pursuing him. Lucius Fox and Tate become co-stewards of the abandoned fusion reactor project, with Tate convincing the board the technology can still be safely commercialized.

Bane's escalation reaches its decisive moment at the Gotham underground tunnel network. He kidnaps the now-blackmailed nuclear scientist Pavel and forces him to convert the Wayne Enterprises fusion reactor into a four-megaton thermonuclear weapon. Bane detonates a section of Heinz Field stadium during a Gotham Rogues football game, killing the field-positioned scientist and destroying the city's bridge access in coordinated explosions. He simultaneously seizes the entire football stadium audience as hostages, broadcasts a televised speech declaring the liberation of Gotham from its corrupt elite, and triggers his hidden-bomb countdown. The reactor will detonate within five months unless any individual citizen of Gotham agrees to keep the trigger active. Bane has effectively imprisoned the entire city.

Bruce, having been confronted by Bane in person at his Batcave headquarters, has been beaten and dropped into an ancient subterranean prison called the Pit, located somewhere in the Middle East. The Pit is the same facility where Bane had grown up and from which the legend of his immortality had originated. Bruce's spinal injuries from Bane's beating require months of recovery. During his rehabilitation, an inmate-doctor restores his physical fitness while Bruce reads Bane's history. Bane, the doctor reveals, was not the original Pit-prisoner-turned-monster of legend; he had been the protector of a young child whose mother had been imprisoned alongside her, and he had been brutally beaten by other inmates while shielding her. The young child grew up and escaped the Pit. The child's name was Talia al Ghul. Bane is her loyal protector. Bruce, recovered, escapes the Pit through the same impossible upward climb that legend had said only the child could complete.

Bruce returns to Gotham, which has spent five months under Bane's control. The League of Shadows, never fully destroyed in Batman Begins, has been operating Gotham's terror state. The city's wealthy elites are publicly executed in show trials presided over by Crane (returning briefly from Batman Begins). The remaining Gotham Police Department, including Lieutenant Gordon, has been trapped underground for the duration. Selina Kyle has chosen sides; she helps Bruce reach the imprisoned police force and coordinate a counter-attack. The reactor's countdown is approaching its critical hour. Miranda Tate is revealed to be Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul, who has been the secret architect of Bane's Gotham terror as final completion of her father's original plan from Batman Begins.

The climactic battle takes place across Gotham's central plaza and the harbor highway leading to the truck-mounted nuclear reactor. Police forces engage Bane's mercenary army in massive street-level combat. Bruce, in the Bat (a flying tactical aircraft Lucius Fox had developed), pursues the reactor truck across the harbor. Talia drives the truck with the reactor in tow; Bruce confronts her on the truck's command-control level. She is killed in the resulting truck crash. Bane is killed by Selina Kyle, who fires the Batpod's cannons at him at point-blank range. Bruce takes the reactor in the Bat aircraft and flies it out over the open Atlantic where it detonates harmlessly above the ocean horizon. The autopilot Lucius Fox had recently completed is implied to have rescued Bruce moments before the explosion.

The film's epilogue is structured as a series of resolutions. A statue of Batman is erected in Gotham's central plaza. Bruce Wayne is officially declared dead and his estate distributed (with Wayne Manor donated to the city as an orphanage). Lucius Fox discovers the autopilot patch logs that suggest Bruce did escape. Alfred Pennyworth, vacationing in Italy, sees Bruce and Selina Kyle at a Florence cafe in the film's closing image. John Blake, given Bruce's hidden Batcave coordinates by Bruce in advance, descends into the underground complex as the implied next-generation Batman, with the post-credits-style closing shot of him discovering the abandoned Batcave equipment. The Dark Knight Rises grossed $1.085 billion globally, making it the seventh film at the time to cross the billion-dollar threshold. It closed Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy on a definitive ending that left Batman's iconic status as a permanent Gotham mythology rather than tying him to Bruce Wayne's specific continued operation.