AND so the hype for next year’s most keenly anticipated blockbuster begins now!

Warner Bros unveiled the first six minutes of The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX form on Wednesday, December 14, 2011, in a manner similar to the one they employed to raise anticipation ahead of The Dark Knight back in 2007.

And just as that prologue introduced Heath Ledger’s The Joker in spectacular form, so too The Dark Knight Rises concentrates on setting the scene for Tom Hardy’s Bane.

It looked impressive and was every bit as cryptic as The Joker’s scene-setter. Why, for example, was there a tiny shot of Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) lamenting the loss of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) at what looked like a memorial service? What role does Dent still have to play, particularly as director Christopher Nolan has since revealed that this concluding chapter will be set eight years after the events of the last movie?

With no explanation, we’re then thrust into an action sequence that sees a bullish CIA agent (played by The Wire‘s Aidan Gillen) forcing three masked hostages and a nervy doctor into a plane before attempting to extract information from them about Bane by threatening to throw them from the plane.

It’s not long before Hardy’s main villain is revealed, wearing a horrific and uncomfortable looking mask, and boasting the sort of over-sized physique that makes him appear somehow more than human.

When Gillan’s agent asks whether removal of the mask would be painful, Bane replies yes, before adding “for you”.

It’s one of few lines that was audible in what marked the prologue’s only real doubt: was our inability to decipher much of what Bane said because the remainder of the scene took place mid-plane heist, as Bane’s henchmen swooped to reclaim their man from a larger aircraft that had flown in from above?

Maybe so… but with concerns and doubts ringing in his ears from both US and UK critics following the footage, Nolan has got to decide whether to include subtitles or re-dub what his main villain is saying.

Needless to say, what passed as an explanation for Bane’s actions went largely unheard, which also heightened the sense of intrigue surrounding this particular sequence. Who, for example, is the body in the bag that Bane’s men appeared to be giving a transfusion to?

Reservations aside, there’s no doubt that the IMAX scenes were breathtaking in the epic nature of how they unfolded. Producer Emma Thomas had said when introducing the footage that Nolan wanted to re-introduce the same wow factor into cinema that had inspired him as a young cinema fan and there’s something about IMAX that invites jaws to be dropped.

A thrilling shot of the body of the smaller CIA plane being cut free from the larger one above it, thereby leaving Bane and an accomplice dangling in mid-air, was absolutely breathtaking and did – as the footage was supposed to – leave you pining to see more.

A sizzle reel followed, in which viewers caught blink-and-you’d-miss them scenes of Catwoman apparently in a prison jump suit, Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a policeman’s uniform running along a corridor, Batman and Bane coming to blows on the steps of City Hall and, finally, Batman’s cracked mask in Bane’s hand.

By then you really were bursting with anticipation and excitement, fairly confident that Nolan will deliver a fitting finale to this brilliant trilogy when it’s finally released in full next July.

By then, Hardy’s vocals should have been recitified… otherwise, this particular movie villain could become the Bane of Batman in more ways than one!

You can see the prologue of The Dark Knight Rises at IMAX screenings of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol.

• Delicious
• Digg
• Reddit
• Facebook
• Stumbleupon