Last night I went to the advanced preview of the prologue for The Dark Knight Rises. When The Dark Knight came out a couple years back I wasn't around anywhere that did the screenings of the prologue for it, so I missed it. But living in the Twin Cities put me in a perfect spot for this one.
I got there about half an hour early, and the theater was about half full by the time it started. There were free t-shirts, and I was able to snag one of each, the two designs being for Batman and Bane. Here are some pictures of the designs:
The prologue started with a brief scene of James Gordon at Harvey Dent's funeral. I'm not sure if this is going to actually start the film when it comes out, as it seems kind of random, and didn't really tie into anything else that was shown.
It then skips to the meat of the trailer, and our introduction to Bane. A CIA agent in, what I'm assuming is Russia but doesn't really matter, boards a plane along with a scientist, Dr. Pavel, and three prisoners. They take off, and he says that the first one of the prisoners to tell him information about who they work for gets to stay on the plane, and the other two will get tossed out. He questions the first two, and the third one finally speaks up. The third one turns out to be Bane. The two of them have a brief conversation about what Bane's plan was, which involved getting himself caught to find out what Pavel had told them.
During this, another larger plane has positioned itself above the CIA plane. Four of Bane's men repel down to the CIA plane, and hook several cables and explosives to it. Bane busts out of his restraints, and starts pretty much fucking up everyone on board the CIA plane's shit. The larger plane pulls up, ripping the CIA plane out of the air, causing it's wings to break off. The explosives on the tail go off, and Bane grabs one of the cords, hooking it to his belt. He grabs Dr. Pavel and hooks him up to some kind of device that draws his blood. He takes a hold of him, and lets go of the CIA plane as it falls to the ground, hanging from the cable, attached to the larger plane.
Let's start with what I liked about the prologue. The action was very well done, and certainly exciting, if not as exciting as the opening bank heist from The Dark Knight. The IMAX presentation made it seem truly spectacular and larger than life. As an action scene, it works very, very well.
Now with the things I didn't like. First off, despite liking him The Wire, Aidan Gillen (who played the CIA agent) was not very good in this. He was over acting to a large degree. This seems to be a problem with a lot of cops/authority figures in Nolan's Batman movies though, so he's not the only one who's guilty of it.
Second, Bane's voice. A lot of people have been saying he's "incomprehensible" due to the mask. This isn't true, with the exception of two lines near the end which were made indecipherable to me by the mask in conjunction with the music and ambient sounds. That's not really the issue. The issue is he sounds...goofy. Any sense of being intimidated or scared by him went right out the window when he opened his mouth and sounded kind of like Bela Lugosi as Dracula. To be honest, I'm still not 100% sure what accent he was even trying to do. Tom Hardy himself is British, but he didn't sound British here. Some lines he sounded Russian, others German. But most of the time he sounded, like Lugosi, Hungarian. I'm not a fan.
After the actual prologue was over there was a brief sizzle reel, with shots of a confrontation between Bane's men and cops and civilians of Gotham, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Batman holding what appeared to be the plasma rifle from Doom, Batman's new flying vehicle, and Catwoman, both in costume and in an orange jumpsuit sitting in the back of a police car. This was very, very brief but pretty much everything in it looked cool, and I don't have much to say about it due to it's length.
Overall, this hasn't really taken away any of my fears about the movie. I still think that it just might not be a very good Batman movie, even if it is a good action movie that happens to contain a character named Batman in it. Bane looked better in proper lighting than he did in all of the spy shots from the set, as did Catwoman. His voice is bad though. It's just bad, and not at all scary or tough or any of that.
Well, that's all I really have to talk about today, so I'll be back uh...next time I have something to talk about?
Gives a good idea of what you saw, expected, etc.
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