I’ve Got Good News and Bad News About That Dark Knight Rises Prologue
The good news is this: The countdown at the DKR Operation Early Bird viral site that other nerd sites have been talking about has finally counted down, and given a list of numbers, which happen to be coordinates for movie theaters. It is assumed that these movies theaters will be showing some form of The Dark Knight Rises, presumably the prologue that is only otherwise being screened in front of Mission: Impossible: 4: Ghost: Protocolon, and the date for these screenings will apparently be on December 13th at 10pm. You can get more info (and the coordinates themselves) at Joblo.com. Thanks to Jamey B. for the tip.
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?Now that’s the good news. The bad news is that most of the major news outlets — besides Topless Robot, obviously — have watched the prologue, and no one can understand a fucking word that Tom Hardy is saying as Bane. From The AV Club:
“It may be early in the sound mixing process, but a lot of key dialogue, particularly that of Bane, who speaks via a mask, was unintelligible,” The Hollywood Reporter says of those opening scenes, which take place in and around a heist on a plane. That sentiment echoed all across the Internet in reports from Movieweb (“You can’t understand anything he is saying”), Entertainment Weekly (“Prepare to scratch your head at much of Bane’s dialogue, which had most everyone in Thursday’s screening asking each other how much, if anything, they could understand”), FirstShowing’s Alex Billington (“It’s distorted, dark, like through a vocal box. I actually couldn’t hear what he was saying half the time”), The Daily Beast (“Many of those in attendance at the IMAX event commented that between the character’s labored breathing and quasi-English accent, he was impossible to understand”)…
Obviously, there’s plenty of time to fix this before the film’s release next summer — even re-record all of Bane’s lines, if necessary — but it’s not a particularly auspicious sign. Nolan’s Batman movies have enough problems with the voices you can hear.
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.