Ladies and Gentlemen: The Official Dark Knight Rises Trailer

After what seemed like an eternity to fans but in actuality was just three days of every news site on the internet doing a post about how there was no official online version of the Dark Knight Rises trailer in order to cash in on the search traffic, Warner Brothers has finally put it up online. So: what have we learned about the content of TDKR?

Well, we haven’t yet seen anything that disproves the “TDKR borrows heavily from KnightFall, the 1993 story arc that introduced Bane and had him destroy Batman emotionally and… spinally?”

But I think the movie is unlikely to follow the plot of Knightfall exactly. The core dialogue with Gordon here gives us the most hints at the plot: Batman leaves for a while, things get even worse than before, and Bruce isn’t certain if he can come back to Gotham in the same capacity. However, we’re given no indication to when in the film this takes place. Could be in the middle. Or it could be that quite a bit of time has passed between the end of The Dark Knight, which saw Batman taking the fall for the murder of several cops and a district attorney, and Bruce Wayne losing the last hope he had for not being Batman for the rest of his life. (And also losing one of the only reasons he had to not want to be Batman for the rest of his life.)

It’s the classic deep, deep hole that characters find themselves in at the end of the second movie in a trilogy, except this time nobody’s been nearly eaten by the mother of all giant spiders or had their hand cut off. And now it’s time for the worst evil of all to make a concrete appearance and make the climbing back up out of the hole even harder. In this case, we’re being teased with a return to Ra’s al Ghul story elements and the appearance of Bane, legendary in the DC Universe for being villain to come closest to doing away with Batman forever; and a return to a movie about the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman, who was largely overshadowed by the Joker and Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. We’re looking forward to it.

In fact, we’re not even going to ask for a look at the Catwoman costume. Nope.

(via /Film.)