It’s the holidays. That can mean only one thing. It’s time for some of the must-watch theatrical trailers to surface. The 2-minute immersions in some of the biggest films that loom over the horizon in 2012. Christopher Nolan’s finale to his Batman trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises”, is right at the top of my list alongside, “The Hobbit – Part I: An Unexpected Journey.”
The first real trailer for “The Dark Knight Rises” is being shown before “Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows” and was released on the Internet today. Here ’tis:
Intense would seem to be an apt word.
Who’s the guy in the mask wreaking all the havoc? That would be Bane. There is a very, very large portion of the Batman canon that I have not read. But I have read Dennis O’Neal’s novelization of the Knightfall story arc that introduced Bane. Interesting, scary guy. Whether or not that means I have more of a sense of the plot remains to be seen. Hopefully not. I’m hoping Christopher Nolan and Co. have put their own original spin on it. I think that’s more likely, given what they and Heath Ledger did with the Joker last time out. At the very least, I like the choice they’ve made to put a villain less well known to the general populace at the center of things. It provides contrast with the previous film, rather than trying to do what it did, only bigger and harder. And Catwoman is there for those who want a more familiar character in the mix of antagonists. She is apparently one of the members of Occupy Gotham, based on her warning to Bruce Wayne here.
The other, even longer look at the film comes in the form of a 6-minute prologue being shown in IMAX theaters running “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.” Nolan did something similar before “The Dark Knight”, releasing the opening bank robbery scene in IMAX about 6-months prior to the film coming out. I’ve seen a bootlegged copy of the new prologue and it is similar in some ways. The prologue is used to introduce the new villain using an action scene. In this case, though, most of the scene takes place in the air, and the audacity factor is cranked way higher. It’s exciting. And a little scary. One flaw though. For some reason, Bane’s dialogue is very muffled, making it difficult to understand. I would have thought that would be cleaned up more in postproduction before releasing this. His one line in the trailer is certainly clear.
And now I just have to wait a day or so to see the trailer for “The Hobbit!”
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