Empire has just released its special The Dark Knight Rises preview issue in the UK, and it comes with a special cover featuring Bane. The magazine itself is filled with all sorts of images, some of which are scanned over at /Film, but definitely pick this up at newsstands as it looks like a geek dream. Suffice it to say, SPOILERS ahoy!
In addition, Empire Online has highlighted some of the story details, including Christopher Nolan’s reveal about the timeline of the film. It is set much later than The Dark Knight.
“It’s really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne’s story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he’s an older Bruce Wayne; he’s not in a great state.
The adversary in the film will be Bane, famously introduced during DC Comics’ prelude to the Knightfall saga in which the character ultimately broke Batman’s back and left Bruce Wayne incapacitated for a time. Played in the film by Tom Hardy, Nolan adds:
“With Bane, we’re looking to give Batman a challenge he hasn’t had before. With our choice of villain and with our choice of story we’re testing Batman both physically as well as mentally.”
Tom Hardy also adds his own take on the character:
“He’s brutal. Brutal. He’s a big dude who’s incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It’s not about fighting. It’s about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it’s nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action.”
Still on Bane, costume designer Lindy Hemming gives us some idea as to why Bane needs that complicated mask setup throughout the film:
“He was injured early in his story. He’s suffering from pain and needs gas to survive. He can’t survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jawline and feed into the thing at his back, where there are two cannisters.”
The Dark Knight Rises is released on 19 July 2012 in Australia from Roadshow.
