By Pete Benavides

When getting ready for “The Dark Knight Rises” prologue I couldn’t help but wonder, would it compare to the epic introduction of the Joker in “The Dark Knight”? The bank heist was on a level by itself. How the Joker carefully calculates a perfect robbery and eliminates all the men he hired in the process is truly a thing of beauty. It teased us and kept us wanting more. “The Dark Knight Rises” prologue does the exact same thing. It gives us an amazing introduction to Bane and leaves us with shot after shot of select scenes in the film. One thing is for sure, you’ll be yelling for them to play it again.

The prologue opens up on commissioner Jim Gordon giving Harvey Dents eulogy. He ends it with “I believed it Harvey Dent”(nice touch). We are then taken to a car that is driving through a field toward an airport strip with men waiting at a plane. Three men are in the truck, all with their hands tied behind their back and black masks over their faces. Presumably hostages. When its revealed that one of the men knows information about Bane, the man who appears to be in charge orders all the hostages on the plane. When the plane gets into the air the man in charge, which reveals he to be C.I.A., starts threatening all the hostages to give him information on Bane or he is going to kill them. It’s after threatening the second hostage that a muffled voice shows itself. When the hostage has his masked taken off its revealed that the hostage is Bane.

After a quickly exchange the agent asks Bane, “was this your plan, to get caught?” to which Bane replies, “No, it was to crash this plane.” We then see another plane come over the top and drop men, carrying guns, onto it and start firing away. Bane and the now free hostages start attacking all their captors. While this is happening the men outside the plane start attaching wires to it connecting both planes. The second plane now fully controls the first plane Bane and his men are on. What happens next can only be summed up one way. A nose-dive, mid air hanging blood transfusion. Confused? Well, it’s a lot easier when you watch and much harder to describe, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

As the prologue ends, we get lots of random shots from the film, Batman and Bane getting ready to beat the crap out of each other, Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, the bat plane, cops vs Banes thugs in what can only be described as a scene out of “Gangs of New York” and the final image being that of Bane walking with Batman’s cowl half ripped apart. Yea, it was freaking awesome!

However, I did have only one concern and that was with Banes voice. It’s very muffled and I had a very hard time understanding what he was saying. I can see where they are going with his voice and I like it but tweaking the sound on his voice should be Christopher Nolan’s number one concern. I’m sure he’s already on top of this. The man can do no wrong, so I remain optimistic.

So, how does it compare to “The Dark Knight” prologue? Well, I’m not going to compare the two, my mind might have another answer, so I’ll just leave it at that. But what I did see was something that I didn’t think was possible and that is Christopher Nolan, possibly, topping himself with “The Dark Knight Rises”. I may have only saw 8 minutes of the film with scattered random shots but I saw enough to get a good idea of what’s to come. July 20, 2012 can’t get here soon enough.