'Dark Knight Rises': The Latest On Runtime And Score

With "The Dark Knight Rises" a little more than two weeks away, the amount of news and sneak peeks at the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy have skyrocketed, so to keep everything straight, we've rounded up some of the week's most important updates from Gotham City in one, easy-to-digest list.

Get Comfortable
Empire reported recently that for "The Dark Knight Rises," Nolan channeled director David Lean in deciding the scope and scale of the film. The movie's war imagery certainly fits in the iconic director's oeuvre, which includes "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Bridge Over the River Kwai," but now it's confirmed that "The Dark Knight Rises" will also have a runtime to match. At 164 minutes, 27 seconds, it seems Nolan wants to make sure he doesn't leave anything out of his final film in the trilogy.

What It's All About
In addition to the official length of "The Dark Knight Rises," this week also treated us to a new official plot description that gave us a better understanding of what exactly has happened in the eight years since "The Dark Knight." Bruce Wayne has hung up the cowl in the intervening years, but the new threat from Bane will drag him back into the fray. The summary ends on an ominous note. "But even if he dons the cape and cowl again, Batman may be no match for Bane." This certainly wants us to believe that things may not end well for Wayne.

Ready Your Ears
Hans Zimmer's original score for "The Dark Knight Rises" has slowly been revealed to us through increasingly long previews of each track. Now we have minute-long snippets of music to tease our ears as we prepare to hear Zimmer's music back the action on the screen. You can listen to the entire score by itself July 17, when the album hits stores.

Study Up
Nearly 50 pages of production notes hit the Web this week, so there is plenty of reading to do if you need to kill some time before July 20. The pages contain actual lines from the movie and some interesting questions from Nolan himself about the cast and characters. In the notes, Nolan teases the epic fight between Batman and Bane. "There are plenty of other large-scale action scenes in the film, but that face-to-face confrontation between these two adversaries was something I really felt was the centerpiece of the film," he said.

"The Dark Knight Rises" opens July 20.

Check out everything we've got on "The Dark Knight Rises."

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