The 'underwhelming' Dark Knight Rises trailer

A new trailer for "The Dark Knight Rises" offers only a brief glimpse of the Caped Crusader, but still has many fans buzzing.

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last updated 8 January 2015

The video: The Dark Knight Rises may still be a year away, but fans and critics have been given yet another preview of Christopher Nolan's eagerly anticipated Batman sequel. A teaser for the movie debuted before the midnight screenings of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 last week, but for those who valued their sleep too much to brave the late-night shows, Warner Brothers officially released the clip online Tuesday. (Watch the video below.) Disappointingly, the trailer doesn't reveal much. It begins with recycled footage from 2008's The Dark Knight, intercut with a hospitalized, wheezing Gary Oldman, who plays Commissioner Gordon. "The Batman must come back," he tells an offscreen figure, presumably Bruce Wayne. After a sequence that replicates the crumbling Gotham City skyscrapers from last week's tirelessly dissected poster and a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse at a fight between Batman and Tom Hardy's new villain, Bane, the teaser quickly concludes with a title screen reading, "The epic conclusion to the Dark Knight legend."

The reaction: "We've been hanging on to every bit of info" about The Dark Knight Rises, says Becky Kirsch at BuzzSugar, and this trailer "has definitely whet my appetite for what's poised to be one of the biggest blockbusters" of 2012. Indeed, the carefully chosen shots in the brief video preview "the visual scope of Nolan's new film even on a tiny computer screen," says Steven Zeitchik at the Los Angeles Times. Still, the teaser is "somewhat underwhelming," says Kevin Jagernauth at Indie Wire. Old footage, "boilerplate text," and only a quick look at the Caped Crusader makes it "distinctly less memorable" than the successful teasers for the franchise's previous two films. Judge for yourself: