By I have had my reservations about Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (along with Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle/Catwoman and the eight-year gap in canon between Dark Knight and Rises). Now, after sitting through the eight minute prologue I feel a little better and a little worse about the whole shebang. Obviously, there are SPOILERS AHEAD SO DON’T READ ON IF YOU DON’T WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED UNTIL YOU GET TO SEE IT FOR YOURSELF.
That said, let’s talk about the prologue to The Dark Knight Rises.
So, it starts with a little eulogy for Harvey Dent by Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman). This felt very out of place given the context of the rest of the eight minutes. While effective, it’s quite short (maybe thirty seconds) and has jack squat to do with the rest of the prologue.
After Gordon says he believed in Harvey Dent, we shift to some mountainous terrain and a plane. Some guys have a doctor named Leonid Pavel who is apparently from the viral marketing campaign (beats me) and some other guys in black hoods and handcuffs (it’s like they really knew we were about to see a Mission: Impossible film!) and give them to Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, who is with the CIA and also kind of awesome.
So everyone gets in the plane and take off with the men in hoods and Littlefinger dangles the guys one by one out of the plane in the hopes that they’ll tell him about Bane and why Bane wears a mask that belongs on Sub-Zero in the next Mortal Kombat movie. Then one of the guys in the hoods speaks up with a mechanized voice. Could this be Bane, pulling one over on the CIA guys?
Of course it is.
What happens next confuses me. Not because the action or directing is unclear, but I could catch maybe every third word out of Tom Hardy’s mouth. If you’ve read a write-up elsewhere already, you’ve probably already heard that the big bad Bane’s dialogue is incredibly hard to understand. If you haven’t read about it anywhere else, trust me when I say it’s incredibly hard to understand.
Anyways, after Littlefinger puts on a little show of badassery since he’s not in handcuffs and Bane is, some henchmen attack the plane (surprise), Bane breaks free, and things get super action-packed as a bigger plane attaches itself to the CIA’s smaller plane and basically F’s it in the A, causing it to go vertical and knock everyone around. Except Bane who grabs hold of a chair because he is teh master tactician.
So there’s a scuffle, Bane straps Pavel to himself, and all the bad guys zip away except for one because Bane tells him that they’ll expect one of them in the wreckage (so I’m told, because I couldn’t understand him). The one who stays behind seems like he’s ready and willing to die for the cause. “We started a fire?” he asks. Then Bane zips up to the other plane with the screaming doctor.
After that, we get a bunch of teasers to whet our appetites for the rest of the movie. Batman with a big laser or something (what!?), Anne Hathaway in both her ‘costume’ and an orange jumpsuit (my new fetish), Joseph Gordon Levitt decked out as a cop, a camouflaged Bat-Tank or Tumblr or whatever it’s called, somebody on the Bat-Bike, and finally, somebody (probably Bane) kicking the broken Bat-mask from the new poster.
Did the fact that Bane sounded like a McDonalds drive-thru take away from this trailer? For me, yeah a little bit. There’s already lots of talk of the dialogue being rerecorded or fixed or whatever, which is good because after eight minutes of it I was ready to Hulk-out. The rest of the trailer was awesome though. Littlefinger was effective as the “hey that guy!” role that William Fichtner played in the opening scene of the last film. There was lots of high-flying action and you really don’t see enough sweet plane scenes anymore.
The real question is was it worth tracking down one of the IMAX theaters playing the prologue? Yeah, it was pretty cool. But, bear in mind, I was also amped as hell for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. From the way some people talked about the prologue, I feared that they might have made the trek just to see Bane ask you if you wanted fries with your Big Mac.
Basically, go see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in IMAX and enjoy the neat eight-minute prologue to The Dark Knight Rises. It’s not quite as awesome, for me, as the last film’s prologue but it’s definitely cool as hell.