Twelve for 2012 Part Eight: The Dark Knight Rises


After The Hunger GamesAvengers Assemble, Men in Black 3, Snow White and the Huntsman, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man and Ice Age: Continental Drift, we’re onto the home stretch of Twelve for 2012, and it’s time for part eight. Kicking off the second weekend of the feature, it’s the one with the Batman, Bane, Catwoman, and the legend ending. Part eight, The Dark Knight Rises!

THE GOOD STUFF

Welcome back, Christopher Nolan and the Batman team. Four years after The Dark Knight revolutionized the superhero genre and left its competitors lying in the dust, Nolan is back for a third and final shot at Batman. You know it’s going to be good: after all, this is the guy who directed Inception. Speaking of Inception, since it only came out in 2010, Nolan will have picked up even more new fans with the multi-Oscar nominated sci-fi masterpiece. (Okay, I’m gushing. I just really liked Inception.), and those new fans will be turning up to watch Rises. And if you’ve been reading Twelve for 2012 day by day, you’ll know the result of this. MONEY.

The trailers look superb. With the first teaser trailer, released last July, redefining the phrase ‘tantalizing tease’. showing glimpses of Commissioner Gordon, seemingly dying, Batman vs Bane, and the tiniest glimpse of Bane himself. The first full trailer, released last Christmas, showed some proper footage, and God, it  looks amazing. Bane blowing up a football field mid-game, stolen Tumblers, Batman vs Bane in the snow, Bruce Wayne with a cane (more exciting than it sounds), and a proper Batcave. Not to mention Catwoman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Occupy Gotham. Rises looks just as intelligent as exciting as its predecessor.

Using Bane was a really, really good idea. In Batman Begins, Batman faced a intellectual/physical foe, Ra’s Al Ghul. In The Dark Knight, Batman came up against a hyper-intelligent, insane foe, the Joker. And in Rises, he’ll be up against a fully physical tank of a man, Bane. Bane, famously, in the comics, broke Batman’s back, in a story called Knightfall. And can you guess which story Rises is taking plot points from? Yep, that’s right, Knightfall. With Bane set to break the Bat, Batman will be facing a type of villain that he’s never come up against in the Nolan movies before.

Isn’t that chant in the trailers catchy? Maybe not, but I found it annoyingly catchy. The chant is ‘Deshay Basharah’, which means ‘He Rises’ in Moroccan. No prizes for guessing who ‘he’ is.

And finally, the prologue, which as Empire Magazine put it, ‘out-Bonded Bond’. The six minute prologue (the first six minutes of the movie), released with IMAX showings of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, introduced Bane in a similar way to how Nolan introduced the Joker in The Dark Knight. The sequence showed Bane and his uh… minions hijacking a CIA plane in mid-flight. Yes, that’s right, mid-flight. Blimey. And with Hans Zimmer’s always-brilliant score in the background, it looks promising for the whole movie Fingers crossed the full movie is as good as that.

THE BAD STUFF

Bane’s voice. It’s a problem that’s cropped up a lot, especially in the six-minute prologue where Bane has a lot of dialogue. You literally can’t hear what he’s saying. It sounds a little like this: ‘Ghasjhsjhsjhsjshjshdjhdhhhhskjlaksls’. And Bane’s solitary line in the full trailer (‘When Gotham lies in ashes, you have my permission to die’), can be heard, but only on the third or fourth viewing. Nolan seems to be not budging with altering the voice to make it sound more legible, so we could be faced with missing massively important plot points conveyed by Bane. So, Nolan, do alter Bane’s voice. Please.

The cast for The Dark Knight was brimming with Oscar-nominated or just excellent actors – Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger, to name a few, with a helluva lot of supporting cast as well as the people I’ve just named. Apart from Ledger (RIP), they’re all returning for Rises, plus new faces Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Not to mention the return of Liam Neeson. Can the movie really do all those characters justice, or will it buckle under the pressure of the cast?

Will it be good? Hell yeah. It’s Christopher Nolan and the full Batman cast returning to wrap up the Batman trilogy. Of course it’ll be good. Really, really good.

How much money will it make? The Dark Knight broke the $1 billion barrier, and it’s extremely likely that Rises will do that too. Since it’s a trilogy-capper, and Nolan’s gained fans with Inception, I’m predicting a whopping $1.5 billion.

Next time: How brave is Brave, really? I give the new Pixar movie a shake to see if it will live up to the standard of Pixar’s other movies.