1. The Dark Knight Rises: Making Bane Unintelligible
Way back in 2011, a young, would-be pop culture writer and some friends attended an IMAX screening of Christopher Nolan's latest opus, The Dark Knight Rises, and boy was he excited. By the spectacle, the mystery of the plot and the thrill of seeing a tiny fraction of a film that would prove to be almost 30 times the length of that sequence. But not by the dialogue. Why not? Because he couldn't make out a word of it. You couldn't tell from watching the final cut of TDKR, but that initial screening seemed to be a proving ground for just how intelligible Bane's voice would be to the general public. The answer: not even a little bit. Everyone leaving the screening was asked to fill out a survey regarding the minutes they'd seen. It'd be a safe bet that the reaction that Warner Bros. got from those select screenings made them tone down the gruff Sean Connery impersonation emanating from the cowcatcher on Tom Hardy's face. But see, the thing is...they didn't go nearly far enough. Perhaps Nolan was attempting to make a statement about the separation of evil from the rest of society, or maybe even parodying his own movies by giving another character an even sillier voice than Christian Bale's Batman growl. But all he ended up with was a character audiences had to strain to understand properly lest they had to grab the DVD remote to rewind. And that's about as irritating a crime as you can commit in a film. But what do you think? Are these some of the worst crimes in comic book cinema, or can you name some bigger offenders? Or are we totally off base and these are actually the bravest, boldest artistic decisions since the creation of film? Let us know in the comments thread below.
