The fire sputters! About that Dark Knight Rises IMAX prologue...

It should be noted that I wasn't a huge fan of the bank robbery prologue for The Dark Knight four years ago.  It was the traditional trailer that got be uber-excited.  I will concede that the bank robbery sequence worked better in the film than it did as a stand-alone preview (as gorgeous as it looked, the dialogue was a little wonky and it was 'just a bank robbery').  Having said that, the seven-minute sequence that allegedly opens The Dark Knight Rises is actually somewhat terrible.  Whether or not it was a rush job (as I've heard), the sequence fails in several seemingly basic ways that leaves a very poor first impression about the otherwise unseen film.

As you've no doubt heard, Tom Hardy is mostly impossible to understand as Bane, but what you probably haven't heard is that Hardy's accent and relatively loose delivery makes him sound quite a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze from Batman & Robin.  On a more general note, pretty much all of the dialogue is terrible, with on-to-nose exposition and implausible exchanges that feel like a bad kid's cartoon.  Aiden Gillen (best known for being awesome in Shanghai Knights) is the focus point of the piece, and he fares worst of all.  His CIA operative gets the worst dialogue and struggles to convincingly deliver it.  Moreover, the expository verbiage actually hints at what might be a pretty huge spoiler, all in the name of explaining things about Bane that really don't need to be explained at this stage in the marketing campaign  (Why does he wear a mask?  Who cares?).

But even if we forgive the acting and writing, the scene shockingly fails as an action sequence.  I won't reveal what actually happens, but I will say that it merely operates as a pumped-up variation (in structure and content) on the Dark Knight prologue, as if someone ordered Nolan to 'do what you did four years ago... but do it BIGGER!'.  But while that film's opening was somewhat pedestrian in content (it's a bank robbery... that's nice), it was at least shot and edited for maximum coherence and clarity.  This more ambitious sequence is so tightly and confusingly edited that it's genuinely difficult to follow.  Combine incoherent action editing, aggressively obtuse cutting around the violence (has nobody told Nolan that you CAN have onscreen violence and still get a PG-13?) plus expository exposition from Bane that we can't understand, and the scene is a jumble of random images that don't make a lot of sense and barely tell a story.  The edit is so jumbled that Gillen seemingly gets no 'last scene'.  Nolan has had issues with choppy editing on both previous Batman films, but this is the first time I literally couldn't follow the sequence or place what was happening to whom.

Obviously this is just one sequence, and I care far more about how the Bruce Wayne/Jim Gordon material plays than how the picture handles its villain. But this is the first time I'm genuinely concerned that the film might not work.  Every director stumbles eventually, and it could very well be the case that Nolan should have let The Dark Knight's finale operate not as a cliffhanger but as a new status quo.  The prologue, as it stands, is such a failure on a seemingly basic level that I have to wonder why Nolan thought it was fit for release (or maybe he didn't care, knowing that fans would overlook the flaws).  We'll know more when we see the regular trailer (for what it's worth, I did enjoy the climactic 'sizzle reel'), as said 2-minute trailer will probably debut online around on Monday morning.  Yes, I've watched a bootleg trailer, but I won't post or comment until I see a genuine online version.  Please share your thoughts below.  Have you seen the IMAX prologue or the regular trailer (preferably in a theater)?  What did you think of them?

Scott Mendelson