"The Dark Knight Rises" teaser trailer is finally online, if you're on the Facebook, where Warner Bros. is debuting the clip.
First come blaring, bass-heavy doom chords and an elevator-style tracking shot up the side of a grimy, towering tenament block.
Next up are two snippets that look recycled from earlier episodes. A man in Himalayan garb mounts the crest of a snow-covered mountain where he encounters a field of samurai battle flags whipping in the wind. Then we see a quick cut of Bruce Wayne in a cark cave teeming with flying bats, and another of Batman rocketing his motorcycle up a highway ramp at nighttime.
The narration features an unseen Liam Neeson, as Wayne's old mentor-nemesis Ra's al Ghul, repeating his advice from 2005's "Batman Begins."
"If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely. A legend, Mr. Wayne, a legend."
Gary Oldman, as Commissioner Jim Gordon, lies in a hospital bed, breathing through a ventilator mask, pleading with an offscreen Bruce Wayne. "We were in this together, and then you were gone. Now there's evil rising. The Batman has to come back."
More tenaments, crumbling now, their skyline arranged in the stylized bat silhouette seen on the movie's advertising poster. A couble of fleeting new images of Tom Hardy as the movie's hulking villain, Bane. And a white-on-black title card promising "The epic conclusion to the Dark Knight legend" arriving "Summer 2012." One year and two days from today, unless plans change.
It's not as enigmatic as the synapse-frying previews for Christopher Nolan's "Inception," but it doesn't give away much. That's preferable to over-sharing trailers like the one for "Crazy Stupid Love," which divulge teh plot for the entire movie.
