Yesterday Warner Brothers released a new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises; the internet went mental and collectively spewed opinion over message boards everywhere.
Responses ranged from the bad to the rabidly stark raving good but one solid piece of criticism that could be distilled from all of the fawning chaos was that people were just not happy with Bane’s voice.
Firstly with the six-minute prologue that was shown to but a few and now with the universally available trailer, Tom Hardy’s villain has been adjudged to be a bit incomprehensible. Be it the muffle from his mask or the Englishness of his enunciation, people just aren’t loving it. Or more importantly understanding it.
One would think therefore that with such a fuss about so little director Christopher Nolan would just listen to the Warner executives and fix the sound mix. But never one to concede easily Nolan is digging his cinematically accomplished heels in and has stated that he will only concede “to alter the sound slightly, not to rework it completely.”
You could just say (as I think I did at the start of the article, silly me) that it’s just some Batfans kicking up a fuss about the English voices again. We could shake our fists at them and say “you can just bally well get on with it!” but it’s not the 50’s and I’ve got to say that I didn’t get on that well with Bane’s voice either. While Heath Ledger’s Joker was eminently quotable and readily meme-worthy I can’t see Bane’s repeated invocations of “murrrmuhaaa beffffuhu” catching on.
Regarding Nolan’s decision a ‘high level studio exec’ told The Hollywood Reporter “Chris wants the audience to catch up and participate rather than push everything at them. He doesn’t dumb things down,” and that “You’ve got to pedal faster to keep up.” But there’s pedalling faster and then there is not being able to pedal at all. If Bane does turn out to be as incomprehensible as everyone seems to think it’s just going to harm the film. A case of David’s unintelligible voice taking down Goliath if you will.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
