So the final Dark Knight Rises trailer is out. I’ve watched it a few dozen times and have some thoughts. But in case you haven’t treated yourself yet:

Yeah. Me too. In no particular order:

* They have obviously remastered Bane’s voice. I like the result quite a lot.

* All of my fears about Selina Kyle are basically gone. The voicework Anne Hathaway does here is really impressive. She’s given her tone an edge and a hardness that, for me, does a ton of heavy lifting for the character.

* The visuals are just insane. Having this trailer play in front of the Avengers is like having Elvis open for the Backstreet Boys.

* The one thematic point I think it’s probably safe to take away from the trailer is that, like The Dark Knight, Gotham City itself is a main character. Which would further suggest that, like TDK, this may be a movie of ideas. I don’t know what Nolan’s Big Idea is this time out, but I have my suspicions.

* As a public service, I’ve put in a request to my friend Alexandra DuPont that she come out of semi-retirement to review DKR. Keep your fingers crossed.

* I have, in my head right now, an entire riff on Nolan’s Batman universe and how it relates to the character alignments from D&D–how TDK established a tripartite conflict between unlawful-good, lawful-good, and chaotic-evil. And how DKR looks to establish a different conflict–between unlawful-good, lawful-evil, and chaotic-neutral. But I’ll save that for another time.

On a side note, posting here has been incredibly light for the last several weeks. I haven’t been intentionally shirking, but between my side various side-gigs, the TWS Newsletter, my Daily column, and the real writing, I’ve been stretched pretty thin. (Also, keeping the Twitter feed going has been more work than I’d planned.)

But the big news is that my book finally has a written-in-stone title and an Amazon page: What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. More on that eventually.

Update: Rounding up some more DKR thoughts this morning:

* Most of the deep Kremlinology done about DKR has concerned Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s role. Is he Jean-Paul Valley? Is he there to take over the mantle of the Bat? Brandon at WWTDD catches something interesting: In Batman’s final line of the trailer, the voice sounds ever so slightly different. I had noticed this, but then dismissed it. Now I’m not so sure. Entirely possible that the final shot of Batman in the trailer isn’t Bruce Wayne as Batman.

* Someone in the comments doesn’t seem to think that Nolan was exploring Big Ideas in TDK. He must be new here.

* In the Transom, Ben Domenech airs his misgivings about Anne Hathaway:

My own hesitation about this one has everything to do with Anne Hathaway’s casting and my skepticism that she can pull off the femme fatale act. As I’ve noted before, Christopher Nolan’s one distinct failing as a director is his inability to cast and direct women. . . .

Katie Holmes was terrible in Batman Begins, and the idea that Sad Turtle Maggie would be fought over by Wayne and Dent in Dark Knight is just ludicrous. This last is arguably the worst: when The Joker compliments Sad Turtle on her beauty as she’s standing in a room surrounded by Russian ballerinas and supermodels, you naturally assume he’s being sarcastic.

Two points of agreement: Yes, Nolan doesn’t quite know how to use women. Yes, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes was not a raving beauty. That said, I liked her in the part and thought she was a nice bit of casting because (a) she was plausible as a lawyer and (b) she had enough light behind her eyes that I could understand why Wayne and Dent would be drawn to her. Remember–they’re not in love with Rachel Dawes, Supermodel. Wayne is just in love with the idea of the girl he knew as a child, because she’s basically the only female he’s ever been close to. And Dent falls for his co-worker, who he knows as well as anyone else in his adult life. I will brook no dissent about The Dark Knight!

And a final point of agreement: Hathaway makes me nervous–though not as nervous as the very idea of Catwoman. Preliminarily, it looks like Nolan got around this by giving us a Selina Kyle who isn’t a femme fatale at all, but more of a rogue free agent. More Han Solo than Poison Ivy. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.