Entertainment
New Trailer Reveals Perfect Adaptation Of The Most Iconic Batman Story
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Riddle me this, Bat-fans: what is the most iconic story to ever feature the Caped Crusader? There are many more obscure tales that might be the best Batman story (personally, I’m partial to Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), but those aren’t the ones that completely changed this character’s trajectory. For my money (which admittedly doesn’t go nearly as far as Bruce Wayne’s), the most iconic story featuring the Dark Knight is Knightfall, which pitted this character against familiar foes and someone relatively new: Bane, a genius whose one and only goal is to break the Batman.
This was a comic that put Batman through the wringer and gave the center stage to Bane, who became such a prominent villain that he’d later headline Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. While that film captured some of the coolness of Knightfall, it only had surface-level similarities to the original comic. Eventually, many fans like myself despaired that we’d never see a faithful, onscreen adaptation of this iconic ‘90s tale. Fortunately, DC is here to prove us wrong: an animated Batman: Knightfall movie is dropping on August 25, and judging by the trailer, this is one film no Dark Knight fan will want to miss.
He Is The Knight
The premise of Knightfall is that a juiced-up genius, Bane, learns that Batman is secretly Bruce Wayne. He becomes obsessed with breaking the vigilante, but he decides to soften the Dark Knight up first by releasing almost all of his rogues’ gallery from Arkham. Batman is forced to fight a gauntlet of his worst foes, and waiting at the end of this gauntlet is the seemingly unstoppable Bane. The villain actually defeats our hero, leaving him broken. Bruce appoints an unstable new guy, Jean Paul Valley, to be the new Batman while he recovers. When Bruce returns, though, he discovers his replacement has become far scarier than any of the villains he fights.
In the original DC Comics, this story was split into three parts: Knightfall (showing how Bane breaks Batman), Knightsquest (showing Bruce recovering while Jean Paul learns to be Gotham’s hero), and KnightsEnd (where Bruce returns to claim the mantle of the Bat from his crazy replacement). That’s why this movie’s full name is Batman: Knightfall, Part I: the studio will be releasing two more movies that will presumably fill out the rest of the story. This first film will be focusing entirely on the earliest arc, where Batman must fight all the escaped Arkham villains and then fight, guano a gunao, with Bane.
The Bane Of Batman’s Existence
Judging from the trailer, it looks like the upcoming film will translate this arc very faithfully. It should be a real crowdpleaser, too, because the story is filled with one showdown after another between Batman and his most famous foes. As such, the original comic didn’t have that much of a story, and what little we got was primarily meant to give context to all the nonstop fighting. Still, Knightfall is notable for illustrating the toll that Batman’s endless crusade is having on his body and mind, and the trailer emphasizes the damage our hero has endured and how much his friends and family worry about him.
The trailer is filled with cool character moments and action sequences, and the animation looks beautiful (none of the stilted movement that ruined The Killing Joke). To me, what stood out the most was the voice work. Anson Mount (most famous for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) is doing his best as Batman to channel the late, great Kevin Conroy (of Batman: The Animated Series fame). In his brief appearance, Pablo Schreiber does a great, broody job as Jean-Paul Valley. Unfortunately, Michael Mando’s Bane is pretty “meh:” his voice is neither deep nor goofy, and he sounds like a D&D DM doing a poor attempt at a creepy voice.
Bad Bane voice acting aside, the trailer for Batman: Knightfall, Part I looks very solid. Fans of the original comic can look forward to finally getting a faithful adaptation, and everyone else can get a stylish new introduction to this iconic story. Will this film successfully scratch the itch for fans as we wait for updates about DCU’s upcoming Batman film? We’ll find out together when Batman: Knightfall, Part I releases on digital on August 25.