The Dark Knight Teases

Last Thursday I drove my fiancee and a friend across state lines to see the midnight screening of Harry Potter at a very cool "cinema pub."  While I enjoy the Potter movies in their own right, I have never been able to muster up any kind of genuine excitement for the franchise.  (I attribute this attitude largely to my particular brand of geekery, namely that I've always been more a fan of sci-fi than fantasy.  Give me aliens, time travel and parallel dimensions over centaurs, swords and wizards any day.)

This is all by way of saying that the most exciting draw for me was the chance to see the first teaser for The Dark Knight Rises...which of course did not play before my particular screening.  It's a shame, because I'm a big fan of seeing a trailer for the first time in an actual theater, at proper scale and with legit ass-kicking sound.  Fortunately for those of us who lost at Harry Potter Trailer Roulette, the teaser went live on Facebook this morning in what I can only call sub-par quality.

Thankfully, the aforementioned fiancee pointed me to a proper HD version over at the YouTubes.  Check it out below:



Nolan and company are really making the hard sell on the whole "this is a trilogy and after this we're done" angle, and so we're mostly treated to a series of clips and voiceover from the first two films, followed by some fleeting glimpses of Tom Hardy as Bane and a nice utilization of that stunning poster image.  (Thankfully they didn't try to cram in a peek at the cavalcade of other new characters/villains who will be appearing.)  I really dig the tone here, and the sense of high stakes that's created with just a few images.  I also like the idea that Batman may have been laying low for a while and what that absence may have done to his legacy in Gotham.  The hospital bed conversation gave me a real Frank Miller "Dark Knight Returns" vibe and that's never a bad thing.  Then again, we're really only talking about 20 seconds of actual footage here, and out of context footage at that.  Still, I think the prominent use of Liam Neeson here is pretty telling.

Now when can get I get a peek at Snyder's Superman?