The sound bites at the end of this video look entirely staged, and the ride itself appears pretty timid.

Six Flags Great Adven­ture today unveiled the highly antic­i­pated “THE DARK KNIGHT Coaster.” Based on Warner Bros. Pic­tures’ upcom­ing movie THE DARK KNIGHT, the indoor, dark coaster offers guests a one-of-kind ride experience.

More than just a ride, THE DARK KNIGHT Coaster fea­tures the most world renowned DC Comics char­ac­ters in an adven­ture that uti­lizes sto­ry­telling, phys­i­cal move­ment, video, sound and spe­cial effects to bring guests a one-of-a-kind dark ride thrill. As part of the expe­ri­ence, park guests will see, hear and feel the action of the movie the moment they enter the ride queue line, as they are trans­formed into cit­i­zens of Gotham City — caught in the mid­dle of a city under siege and torn apart by The Joker.

Guests board a Gotham City rail car and careen through six 180-degree hair­pin turns, climb unseen hills, plunge into pitch dark­ness, dip into unfore­seen dan­ger and con­tinue to be tor­mented by The Joker as they thrust onto the bat­tle­field of good vs. evil. Will THE DARK KNIGHT save them in time?

“THE DARK KNIGHT Coaster offers guests a one-of-a-kind ride expe­ri­ence that com­bines the action and excite­ment of THE DARK KNIGHT movie with the thrill of a roller coaster,” said Mark Kane, Six Flags Great Adventure’s Park Pres­i­dent. “THE DARK KNIGHT Coaster offers a unique expe­ri­ence that will appeal to both fam­ily and teen audiences.”

The attrac­tion also intro­duces new, cus­tomized footage fea­tur­ing Dis­trict Attor­ney Har­vey Dent (as por­trayed by Aaron Eck­hart), pro­duced and shot specif­i­cally for THE DARK KNIGHT Coaster. The ride also incor­po­rates audio and visual ele­ments from the film which will debut July 18, 2008, offer­ing guests a sneak peak.

The $7.5 mil­lion coaster is located in the Movi­etown sec­tion at Six Flags Great Adven­ture adja­cent to BATMAN The Ride. The height restric­tion is 42 inches to ride with an adult and 48 inches to ride alone. Guests can receive up-to-the-minute park news and pur­chase a 2008 sea­son pass online at www​.sixflags​.com.

Maya from Char­ity Buzz has asked us to men­tion their lat­est auc­tion, which has a prize a good few of you shall be inter­ested in — the chance to attend the Dark Knight pre­mière and after party in Los Ange­les this July, with flights included. The pro­ceeds will be going to the New York Restora­tion Project. Bid­ding starts at $3500, with an esti­mated value of $7500. The auc­tion ends on May 29, 2008 12:58:00 PM EDT. Avail­able to both US and Inter­na­tional bidders.

“Fly to LA with Jet­BLUE and Attend the Pre­mière and After Party of The Dark Knight“
This Pack­age Includes: 2 tick­ets to Pre­mière & After Party. Pre­mière will be held in LA, July 2008– exact date TBD PLUS roundtrip air­fare for 2 from JetBLUE.

Bid on Dark Knight pre­mière tickets

Dona­tions from the char­i­ty­buzz online auc­tion will help the non­profit New York Restora­tion Project (NYRP) to reclaim, restore, and develop under-resourced parks, com­mu­nity gar­dens, and open space in New York City, pri­mar­ily in eco­nom­i­cally dis­ad­van­taged neighborhoods.

Start­ing as of last night, Warner Bros. have began air­ing a cou­ple of tele­vi­sion spots for the Dark Knight. Thanks to all those that sent this in.

“Out of the dark­ness, comes the Knight” — not too hard to think that one up!

Here you go:

TV Spot #1:

TV Spot #2:

/Film just got an exclu­sive pack­age of 40 high res­o­lu­tion images sent their way by reader KillingJoke — 30mb of them. These include lots of Aaron Eck­hart, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Chris­t­ian Bale, Mor­gan Free­man, Heath Ledger and Chris Nolan close-ups. What’s most inter­est­ing are the pic­tures that show the film­ing of The Dark Knight.

This set appears to be for press usage, most likely for the plethora of press arti­cles we will be see­ing in the com­ing months. Some of the shots we have seen before, but maybe not at this res­o­lu­tion. No real spoil­ers in these shots either:

EDIT:

Sorry folks.

The offi­cial Dark Knight web­site has updated to include a sexy new flash intro­duc­tion and all three trail­ers. The intro sees Bat­man stand­ing against a win­dow pane, à la the poster, which then bursts (like the long hor­i­zon­tal poster), before falling to the ground amongst rain­ing Joker cards.

Thanks Zdravko (Batfan93)

The LA Times recently sat down with Mr Eck­hart (aka Har­vey Dent) to dis­cuss his role as a vil­lain in The Dark Knight. Beware, spoil­ers lurk below.

“I can tell you that, basi­cally, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stom­ach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me. It’s like you would feel if you met some­one whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. I can’t talk about it beyond that because I don’t want to give away too much of the plans by Chris.”

[…]

“The dif­fer­ence between Bat­man and Two-Face is how far they are will­ing to go and how they make their point,” Eck­hart said. “Oth­er­wise, we’re talk­ing about vig­i­lante crime-fighting. That’s what Bat­man is all about. He has a strong sense of jus­tice. And Har­vey Dent has an extremely strong sense of jus­tice. His fiancée is killed. He’s hor­ri­bly injured. But he is still true to him­self. He’s a crime fighter, he’s not killing good peo­ple. He’s not a bad guy, not purely.”

[…]

“You look at a good guy too long and it’s not that excit­ing, it’s the Boy Scout always doing the right thing. I’m inter­ested in good guys gone wrong. They’re not the bad guy, they’re the good guy doing bad things.”

[…]

“Really, all of it is more than an adven­ture tale, it’s some­what of a mir­ror of our times. It deals with some fun­da­men­tal ques­tions of what’s going on in soci­ety. To me, this film is about how Bat­man feels about jus­tice, how he takes care of the city, how he feels about the Joker when he meets him and sees what he is capa­ble of doing. How he feels when Har­vey Two-Face takes mat­ters into his own hands. It’s not sim­ple, and it gets ugly. I think peo­ple will be surprised.”

Omelette have the exclu­sive on five brand new Dark Knight posters, one of these is in the same vein as the offi­cially released poster which came through Why So Seri­ous, the oth­ers are in a com­pletely new style — and I believe, almost cer­tainly faked — their min­i­mal­ist lay­out which con­tains pre­vi­ously seen imagery that also strays away from the tra­di­tional Dark Knight font-set and lay­out are the clues. They are still sul­try and impres­sive however.

This final adap­ta­tion is almost cer­tainly a fake — reusing a Joker image seen in a pre­vi­ous poster with some poorly ren­dered burn­ing Joker card, via Film School Rejects. Though once again, I am post­ing it because it is a nice concept.

The count­down on “It’s all part of the plan” has gone down to three days, but now all the pres­i­dent por­traits are click-able. Click­ing each one reveals a larger image with a flash count­down, geo­graph­i­cal co-ordinates and these instructions:

Gather with 300 of your clos­est friends at this exact spot on April 28th.

You’ll need to be in con­tact with a partner-in-crime who has online access to relay your instruc­tions once you’re there. These instruc­tions will give you the TRAIL to fol­low, but be sure to look both ways when cross­ing the street; we wouldn’t want you to make an unsched­uled visit to the ER now, would we?

Put on a smile and plan to spend about an hour or so bond­ing with your fel­low clowns.

Check back here often for updates or changes.

Note the TRAIL-ER.

Boston | New York | Los Ange­les | Kansas City | Philadel­phia | Toronto | Chicago | San Fran­cisco | Dal­las | Lon­don | Seat­tle | Sao Paolo

Con­tinue read­ing our cov­er­age of the Why So Seri­ous scav­enger hunt with vaults and codes