The Most Utterly Baffling Moment in a Christopher Nolan Movie Still Leaves Me Speechless

Christopher Nolan loves to make our heads spin and knock us around with his intricate plot machinations. Nolan has yet to meet a storyline that he didn't complicate by bending time to his will and strategically remixing chronology, even in an allegedly stagnant genre like the biopic. That often leads to moments in all his films that are equally baffling, confounding, and exhilarating, with Nolan turning his ingenuity at finding new narrative angles in well-worn material into his calling card. And yet somehow, someway, the most shocked I've ever been while watching one of his films is having to sit through the death of Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) in The Dark Knight Rises, the rare moment where Nolan seems to have been possessed by Ed Wood in the shoddiness of his execution.