Reaction By Harry Davenport
I was lucky enough to see the first 6 minutes of the Dark Knight Rises at the BFI Imax. The footage was introduced by producer Emma Thomas who didn’t reveal very much and simply talked about how much Christopher Nolan loves Imax.
The scene introduces Bane in a beautiful looking but rather dull action sequence. It looks stunning but feels very second hand and lacks the originality of the bank heist in the beginning of The Dark Knight. It was reminiscent of the pre credit sequence to Licence to Kill and was also very similar to the moment in The Dark Knight where Batman captures Lau in Hong Kong.
By far the most disappointing aspect of the sequence is Bane himself or to be more precise, his voice. It is a strange foreign accent that is so muffled that I only understood one thing he said. The rest of his lines I was simply left to guess. It was astonishingly frustrating. They need to fix this.
I personally dislike Christian Bale’s voice as Batman. The scenes are bearable due to the characters he speaks to. So the idea of Batman and Bane talking to each other is nightmarish. Its would be easier to understand the clay figure Morph.
So all in all, this sequence has actually taken away a lot of the excitement I felt for the film but I trust Christopher Nolan and hopefully the voice will be fixed in the next 7 months.
The footage did however show how 3D is not the future. The Imax footage was so immerse and breathtaking. I am looking forward to seeing more films utilise this technology and hopefully people will realise that this is the way forward not the headache inducing “technology” of colour loss and uncomfortable plastic glasses.
