It looked AMAZING. Awesome plane stunt, the IMAX was huge and beautiful and it was shot wonderfully. Unfortunately, I was really disappointed by it overall, and it had everything to do with not being able to understand Bane. If the viewer is struggling just to comprehend the main character of a scene they will be pulled out of the experience and can’t enjoy it. I don’t care if it’s a directorial choice to add mystery to a character, if characters onscreen are shown to be able to communicate with a another character that the audience cannot understand, even though they’re speaking English, we have a major problem. I hope Nolan sees the reaction to this and does something about it, because if viewers are distracted and struggling just to interpret everything the main villain says it’s going to take us out of the movie and really hurt the experience. If the person he is talking to understands him the audience needs to as well.
Before looking up a copy of the script I honestly had no idea what happened other than the obvious action. Bane had some plan, part of which was to be caught by the CIA. He and his men manage to gain the upper hand via another plane and some machine guns. Bane transfers some blood from the doctor who gave him his mask(?) to a dead body, but not a whole lot. Then Bane tells one of his henchmen to stay behind to be found in the wreckage. Bane and the doctor allow the plane to fall away while they are hoisted up into the other plane. Annnnnd scene. Why did any of this happen? Beats me. At least the Joker scene had a clear intention: rob a bank. It didn’t matter whether or not it was connected to the rest of the movie, it was a mini-movie in and of itself. Even after reading the script for TDKR Prologue it seems like the only point of this was to rescue that doctor, because he is presumably important to Bane/Bane’s mask. The audience has no idea who he is yet, so should we care?
The bank heist in The Dark Knight is just so much better than this scene. It’s an easy to understand story that sets up the character of the Joker perfectly. The only thing we know about Bane from this scene is that he has loyal henchmen and if he removes his mask “it would be very painful”, unclear if he meant for him or for the person doing the removing. I really hope this is not an indication that the rest of the movie will be hard to follow and borderline pointless. Not that this scene is definitely pointless, tied in with the rest of the film it may eventually make sense. But after the prologue of The Dark Knight I expected something to at least match that. Instead we got a beautifully shot, action packed scene devoid of any real characters or point as far as the audience is currently concerned.
