Re: HOT TOYS : MMS DX 12 - The Dark Knight Rises - BATMAN / BRUCE WAYNE Full Specs &
Bruce is in the house. Box has some wear along one of the creases, but no crushed corners and no tears from my initial look.
Ok, I was wrong, one corner is slightly crushed. The cardboard mailing carton is, IMO, shlt and definitely not suitable for USPS, let alone UPS (barbarian) shipping. It's thick, but it's super soft low-quality corrugated. Hot Toys definitely went cheap on the outer box for this figure. A stiffer corrugated cardboard would prevent all the issues people are seeing with crushing and banged up edges of the gift box.
Opened it up, took out the figure and parts, had a look around. Nice, very nice. But I can plainly see why so many people are interested in modifying this product. In-hand it's easy enough to see where there's room for improvement. I like all the mouth sculpts, however, I agree with the folks that say in-hand they most definitely do not look like Christian Bale. It's easy enough to compare the mouth portion of the full Bale head sculpt to even the smirk (default) insert to see the lips are not right. It's acceptable for the most part however. I do wish the mouth pieces fit a little bit better because as it stands you can see a little bit of an unsightly edge where they meet the cowl. The illusion that the cowl overlaps the face is kind of lost because of it. However, it's not something most people will notice, especially if they don't hold it in their hands and move it around to look from different angles. Almost forgot... The ears on the Bruce Wayne head sculpt are way too small and not positioned correctly - it's not a Christian-Bale specific thing, it's just basic anatomy.
The instructions (on all these products) should really be presented at the top of the box, the first thing you see, not buried under everything else - literally the bottom-most thing in the package. The cape material is excellent.... For the outside layer of a full size 1:1 cape.
At this scale however it's too stiff without enough weight to drape as has been pointed out numerous times by numerous people. A simple rayon cape would work much better and require much less futzing.
The instructions claim the legs can be spread to 120 degrees, but I haven't tried that yet. It feels like they'd have a very hard time getting even to 90 IMO. The skin-colored eyelids increase the realism but detract from the Batman ethos and probably lessen the cool/tough factor. While the figure is quite impressive in hand, I feel it's a lot more impressive in some of the great photography from other members here. I'm not terribly let down or anything like that, because I also did enough reading to temper my expectations. That said, apart from the facial sculpt, I was quite a bit more impressed with HT's DX05 Indy.
I'm definitely happy to have this Bats in my collection, so don't misconstrue that.
I didnt regret selling my Dent at all.
