Early reviews of The Dark Knight Rises prologue had one common theme: many claimed they couldn’t understand Bane. Now that more people have seen the prologue, some are insisting that Christopher Nolan will have to clean up the audio before the film is released.A reviewer for The Telegraph claimed, “Tom Hardy’s dialogue is almost completely unintelligible.” While a reviewer for The Guardian praised the action sequence, he noted, “the rather severe issue of not being able to understand a word Hardy says.” And the complaints aren’t limited to just British reviewers, as even the Wall Street Journal reported, “Hardy’s accent and the character’s mask make the dialogue difficult to follow.”What were my own thoughts upon viewing The Dark Knight Rises prologue? I didn’t have much trouble understanding almost all of what Bane said. In fact, despite the fact that Bane had a hood over his head, his first comments actually sounded crystal clear. Later in the prologue, as the plane began to tear apart and the background music blared, I did have a little bit of difficulty understanding Bane. However, the difficulty wasn’t because of the accent or his mask, but because of all the background noise occurring at that moment in the prologue.Judging from the comments left on many of the sites claiming Bane can’t be understood, many viewers disagreed and were able to understand Bane quite well. For some to hear so well and others not, it’s possible that maybe the audio was worse in certain theaters. However, I have to wonder if the audio problems aren’t being overblown, just because it’s something interesting to talk about. If you’ve seen The Dark Knight Rises Prologue, leave your comments below on if you could understand Bane or not.
