It was only a scant 7-8 minutes of The Dark Knight Rises, but definitely enough time to see that Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel (the last, they say, from this team) looks great--make that, well, pretty amazing--on a massive IMAX screen.
The director himself introduced the opening sequence to a select group of journalists invited to the IMAX theater at Universal Citywalk Thursday night. He started out saying that he's always trying to recapture the magic of seeing movies he remembers as a kid, noting that the IMAX film format was created a year before he was born. This same preview will play in some 42 IMAX theaters around the country attached to 70mm print of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol with the intent, Nolan said, to give audiences a sense of what the movie will be like in the format.
Of course, we don't want to give a blow-by-blow recount of the opening scene (well, we do, but we can't -- plus, that would spoil all the fun you'll have seeing it yourself), but the gist is that it introduces the villain Bane (Tom Hardy) in a pretty spectacular airplane sequence. Unfortunately, Bane was a little hard to understand through the mask and some of his dialogue was almost unintelligible (there was something about a "master plan" -- maybe?). We hear, though, that Nolan's aware of the problem and they will fix via ADR (automated dialogue replacement). We also got to see Gary Oldman giving a brief tribute to Harvey Dent, and some quick scenes of stuff blowing up in Gotham (aka Pittsburgh). All in all, the tone seems dark, forboding, and definitely got this group of folks pumped about the movie coming next July.
So, Batfans...getting more excited by the day to see this one next summer? Will you be at an IMAX theater (if there is one near you) for the preview?