The Dark Knight Rises Prologue: Incomprhensibility and the Masses

Today I managed to see the IMAX prologue for one of the most anticipated films of 2012, aka Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. The prologue was announced by a staff member at BFI IMAX, something which gathered a fair share of applause. When the 7min prelude ended however, the audience reaction was totally muted. The main complaint over the short is of course well documented, being the fact that the main villain's dialogue (Bane, played by Tom Hardy) is incomprehensible or inaudible. Personally, I managed to get only one sentence out of the 7-8 uttered by Bane, which might say something about my English language level, my hearing problems, or the fact that Bane's dialogue is indeed garbled. Evidence points towards the latter, and Nolan should well be forced to make some compromises in his creative vision of filmic realism and change the sound mix in the final version of the movie.

As for the prologue itself, even with the dialogue explained there are several vague points that are apparently answered by the various viral sites found online. However, that is a relative drawback of the presentation - unlike the Dark Knight prologue, it is not completely self-contained and definitely did not have the same emotional impact, although visually it was much more impressive (featuring an airplane vs. airplane highjacking in Scottish locations). So, as an IMAX presentation it gets high grades (the resolution was amazing, and in fact the IMAX cameras used were much better than the ones used in the main feature, MI:4), but as a teaser it could have been better.