3) It Won't Follow the Knightfall Saga As Closely As You Think
As with "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight", the Nolans are picking and choosing elements from the great Batman comic book stories to create their grand telling of the character's legend. For this new film, the "Knightfall" saga looks to be their primary source of inspiration. In it Bane arrives in Gotham, releases all the inmates of Arkham to sap Batman's strength before besting him in a punishing fist fight, ultimately breaking his spine. I seriously doubt that Batman is going to get his spine broken in the film. No matter how long the film is (2 hours, 45 minutes reportedly) you can't have your main protagonist suffer a spinal injury mid-way through your film. In Chris Nolan's stringently reality-based Gotham, it would take countless months or even years to recover, if at all. It's a pacing nightmare. Batman will definitely get "broken", but it's a real stretch to imagine that he'd end up literally paralysed. It's a fan tendency to want to tie everything as closely to the comics as possible, but deviation isn't sacrilege. In "The Dark Knight Rises" they completely re-worked how Two-Face is created and no one batted an eyelid. They even had a scene that deliberately referenced the correct version (Harvey being attacked in the courtroom) and no one cried foul. There has been rampant speculation about whether Joseph Gordon Levitt is playing Robin or Azrael (The man who takes up the Bat cowl after Bruce's back is cracked), but it is just as likely that he's simply playing John Blake, a Gotham PD cop plain and simple. At this point, that would be the biggest twist of all! On a personal note, even if Batman's spine remains intact it would be a real rush to see Bane lift Bats over his head like in Knightfall. That's really all I need. I'm a sucker for the iconography. Hell, they got away with it in Batman: The Animated Series€