Gotham Reveals First Look At Its Version Of Bane
Would Bane sporting any other get-up look as sweet?
That's the question Gotham sought to answer this week, when Fox unveiled the first official look at the superhero series' version of Bane, Batman's longtime enemy and ruthless adversary played by Nikita and Salem alum Shane West.
The verdict? Well, Bane doesn't look quite so sweet as he does like he's the love child of Max Rockatansky from the Mad Max franchise and Scorpion from the Mortal Kombat video game series, who also wants to look a bit like the T-800 model Terminator from James Cameron's sci-fi action classic or Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise.
Courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, which released the photo in an exclusive drop on Monday, the first-look picture features West's Bane wearing a muzzle-like respirator over the lower half of face to aid his breathing, a pair of brass-knuckled gloves on his hands, a huge robotic chest-plate that adds to his new cyborg aesthetic, and his hair up in a spiked sort-of-mohawk.
After EW dropped the snap, Gotham writer and producer Tze Chun shared another look at West in character as Bane, posting it to his Twitter account. "First look at our #Bane," Chun wrote in the caption, adding three flame emojis to the photo that shows Bane with wearing red eyeliner and furrowing his eyebrows in frustration or determination.
Take a look at both photos below.
Described by Gotham showrunner John Stephens as "very, very strong, and very angry," West's Bane looks more like Tom Hardy's iteration from The Dark Knight Rises than the iconic villain as he's depicted in the DC comic books. In the source material, Bane rocks attire similar to what lucha libre wrestlers wear: a red, black, and white mask paired with a black unitard and chunky boots.
The costume isn't the only thing different about Gotham's Bane, though. While Hardy's Bane was hardened from the get-go, having been brought up inside a prison, West's Bane begins as Eduardo Dorrance, a colleague and acquaintance of Gotham City police commissioner Jim Gordon who eventually transforms into the Caped Crusader-opposing supervillain.
As Stephens previously explained, Bane will be an important part of Gotham season 5's "No Man's Land" storyline, in which Gotham is sequestered from the rest of the United States.
"We made him integral to the fact of coming in as a special ops government agent," Stephens said of Bane. "We pick up at the top of season 5, at the conclusion of No Man's Land, Day 365. Then, we cycle backwards to day 87, three months into No Man's Land where Jim has created his green zone and wants his reunification. We're catching up, and for the first nine episodes, we're always catching up to that first scene we see."
Reactions to Gotham's version of Bane have been mixed — while some fans are hoping that the reveal was actually a joke and others are busy slamming it as "derivative" and "terrible," a handful have been supporting the character's new look.
Many have found it hard to form a solid opinion on Gotham's Bane based on just one official photo and a second snap Chun shared on Twitter. Waiting to see West in motion, moving and shaking and stirring up all kinds of trouble, is the best course of action for anyone who's currently unsure about their feelings towards the small-screen Bane.
Gotham is set to return midseason in 2019.
