‘The Dark Knight Rises’ At Occupy Wall Street? How The Film Could Use Them:
They may be protesting the kind of accumulated wealth that makes Bruce Wayne able to buy all that superhero stuff, but the protestors at Occupy Wall Street may end up being part of the next Batman film.
Set to film in New York City starting on October 29th, producers on the Christopher Nolan-directed epic “The Dark Knight Rises” told the Los Angeles Times that the actors have been told to prepare to shoot scenes that could include the protests in Zuccotti Park. Warner Bros. wouldn’t confirm or deny, continuing on their tradition of secrecy and head fakes when it comes to their prized franchise, so it made us think: if it is true, just how could they use the protests in the film?
What first comes to mind is the jail breakout villain Bane, played by Tom Hardy, helps lead. Scenes from that explosion of criminals were shot in Pittsburgh and captured by paparazzi, and they look like pure mayhem. Perhaps those criminals could infiltrate the park and cause mayhem, or at least drag Batman through the crowd as he pursues the monstrous bad guy.
Bane also takes over a football stadium mid-game — video of which was put online — and perhaps he’ll do the same, trying to take advantage of the energy and anger of the people protesting the state of our union.
With Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a cop, maybe he’ll be involved in monitoring the protests; or, perhaps Anne Hathaway, as Catwoman, could hide herself amongst the masked protesters. There’s also the possibility that those protesters will be asked to strike against Bruce Wayne, unaware of his secret heroism.



The criticisms are mostly happening on message boards, and fan blogs. Although the International Business Times did weigh in with an article entitled “Joke on Fans? ‘Dark Knight Rises’ Trailer Disappoints”:
The teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises does not live up to the hype… The trailer for the much-anticipated movie was an extreme letdown. It was short and revealed nothing about the plot.
Okay, so hopefully we can all agree that criticizing a teaser trailer for not giving away the movie’s plot is a bit silly.
But it’s true that Bane’s voice in the above clip does sound, as FilmDrunk puts it, “wacky.” It’s also true that Batman’s voice in both existing Nolan movies has sounded wackier than a dozen teenage stoners, and those films managed to be good. It’s also true that there’s this thing called ADR, where they can redub voices in post-production. (I’m reminded of the Matt Smith “You are the Daleks” scandal, where an audio snippet of Matt Smith shouting “I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks” in a very very silly voice came out during filming for “Victory of the Daleks” — and the internet was horrified. Luckily, when Smith actually says the line on screen in the episode, it sounds more or less normal.)
The Dark Knight Rises haterade has gotten so toxic, one of the fansites over at Comic Book Movie was forced to put out a call for people to “Cool It” with the criticism. Writes Jamedog:
I’ll admit it, I was underwhelmed when I saw the first pics of Catwoman. And yes, I wasn’t impressed by Bane’s voice either. This movie could very be Nolan’s first dud, hell, no man is perfect. I believed that Sam Raimi would give us a great third Spider-Man movie, and I believed that Bryan Singer would deliver a great Superman movie…
But Jamedog quite sensibly points out that the movie doesn’t come out for another year, and so far all we have seen officially are two photos and a teaser trailer — none of which give much away. And you can’t really judge much from set pics and fan-made videos where people talk about smoking holes.