The marketing for The
Dark Knight Rises has been rather perplexing in one regard. The trailers and TV spots released thus far
make it hard to get a real grasp on what the underlying themes will be, and how
they will be tackled. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight addressed the war on terror. Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, one wonders
how or if Nolan will continue down that path.
One also wonders what else he’ll introduce into the fray. The riot scenes shown in the trailer seem to
allude to the Occupy Movement, but it’s hard to tell how this will figure into
the story. It’s also clear that Bane
represents a substantial threat not only to Batman, but to Gotham City as well. That being said, who is he? Is he simply another terrorist, or is he
something more? Two new featurettes have
been released to help clear up the confusion.
Both featurettes do a fairly thorough job of establishing both
the themes and scale of The Dark Knight
Rises without giving too much away. As
before, Nolan is not only drawing inspiration from the last thirty years of Batman comics, but from current
headlines and old Hollywood as well. According
to him, the film borrows many of its visual elements from the silent era. It will also be more akin to a war film than
a traditional superhero movie, just as The
Dark Knight was more of a crime film than anything else. The longer of the two featurettes offers a
profile of each character and lays out the basic plot in very broad terms. At the outset of the film, Batman has been
MIA for quite some time. With the
arrival of a new threat, Gotham is on the brink of Anarchy. The city is in dire need of its hero’s return. It all sounds eerily familiar to Batman: The Dark Knight; Returns. Of all the things I was expecting this film
to be, a live-action version of Frank Millers dystopian classic was not one of
them.
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