The Dark Knight Rises has a big villain twist with Bane and Talia al Ghul, but a line said by Bane actually revealed this twist, but it’s overlooked with everything else happening in the movie. Batman has gone through many ups and downs in its history on the big screen, and after the failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, the Caped Crusader got a new chance with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, released between 2005 and 2012.
First came Batman Begins, which introduced Christian Bale as the new Bruce Wayne/Batman and told his origin story, with the villains to defeat being Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) and Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy). Next was The Dark Knight, with the Joker (Heath Ledger) leading Gotham City into chaos, and becoming one of the best superhero movies ever made. Closing the trilogy was The Dark Knight Rises, which brought Bruce’s arc to an end but not before he came face to face with Bane (Tom Hardy) and was betrayed by Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who wasn’t who she claimed to be.
The Dark Knight Rises saw Bruce coming out of retirement to put on the Batman costume again and defend Gotham from Bane and his plans for the nuclear destruction of the city. During that process, Bruce met Miranda, a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board who became his lover, and was later revealed to be not only Bane’s ally but also Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter, and her real name was Talia al Ghul. Throughout The Dark Knight Rises, a story is told of a child who climbed out of a prison known as the Pit, and it’s told in a way that the audience is led to believe the child was Bane, but it was actually Talia, and Bane himself gave this away with one simple line.
During Batman and Bane’s fight in the latter’s sewer lair, Bane mocks Batman’s affinity to darkness, saying the Dark Knight merely “adopted the dark” and it wasn’t his ally as he thought, while he was born in the darkness and molded by it, adding that he “didn’t see the light until he was already a man”. That line alone reveals that Bane wasn’t the child from the story, as he didn’t see the light outside the Pit until Talia and Ra’s al Ghul returned to the prison for revenge as Talia’s mother was killed there, and she used this opportunity to save her protector. Of course, at that point it was a mystery who the child who climbed out of the Pit could have been, but at least The Dark Knight Rises made it clear early on that it wasn’t Bane.
Others have pointed out another piece of foreshadowing of the Miranda/Talia twist in The Dark Knight Rises that isn’t linked to Bane: at the charity ball, Miranda tells Bruce that he “has to invest to restore balance to the world”, and in Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul talked about restoring balance. The Dark Knight Rises, and the Dark Knight trilogy in general, have a lot of subtle hints and pieces of foreshadowing that are easy to miss during the first viewing, but they become clearer with time and make revisiting these movies a lot more entertaining and interesting.