Four More 'The Dark Knight Rises' Pics; Christopher Nolan Explains Where This Film Sits On His Movie Timeline

Over the weekend two new official images were revealed from The Dark Knight Rises by way of Empire's two new covers touting the mag's on-set report from the film.

Now we've got four more images from within the magazine, as well as some quotes from director Christopher Nolan and star Tom Hardy that appear within the piece. I don't think there's anything following that counts as a significant spoiler, especially if you've seen most of the set pics that have cropped up during the filming of the movie. But even if you've shied away from all but the official info, you should be safe going past the jump.

Here are the pics from Empire; when we have higher-quality scans we'll update.

UPDATE: We still don't have clean scans, but we've got higher-resolution versions of the same photos of the pages.

Of the story, Christopher Nolan says,

It's really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne's story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he's an older Bruce Wayne; he's not in a great state.

He also describes the 'prologue' that will run in front of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol:

The Prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It's the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film. With Bane we are looking to give Batman a physical challenge that he hasn't had before. In terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic.

Together, those quotes give a bit of creedence to past rumors about the plot and timeline of the film. Check out a recap of that rumor here, but beware possible spoilers at that link.

And Tom Hardy explains this version of Bane,

He's brutal. Brutal. He's a big dude who's incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It's not about fighting. It's about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it's nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action.

Perhaps most interesting is the comment from costume designer Lindy Hemming about the look of Bane's mask:

He was injured early in his story. He's suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jaw line and feed into the thing at the back where there are two canisters of what ever it is...the anesthetic.