8. Bane

Real talk: Bane (Tom Hardy) is Clubber Lang from Rocky III. His whole purpose in The Dark Knight Rises is to show Bruce that he’s washed, he doesn’t have it like he used to, and that he can’t just come back from retirement. Even Alfred’s (Michael Caine) plea for Bruce to not face him early in the film feels like Mickey pleading with Rocky not to fight Lang at a similar point in that film. Rocky jokes aside, Bane’s false class savior is an excellent foil for Bruce (and Gotham) to overcome in order to finally save the city from the mistakes he and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) made after the events of Joker’s (Health Ledger) reign of terror and Harvey Dent’s (Aaron Eckhart) fall from grace.

Bane is the manifestation of those lies coming home to roost, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in real life; it plays with the idea of a rich billionaire taking it upon himself to decide the best for the city while others have less. Should Bruce have become a costumed adventurer? Was stopping that crusade the right path for everyone in Gotham? Hardy’s performance also sold the transition from the monster-heel luchador look of the comics to a captivating European populist terrorist, which has become iconic in its own right.