A couple days ago, we showed you the covers for the new issue of Empire Magazine featuring Batman (Christian Bale) and Bane (Tom Hardy) from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. The magazine has now hit stores, and scans have started hitting the Internet along with new details about the movie contained in the article. We'll update these lo-res images with higher quality versions as soon as they become available. But I can say right now that I totally love the one of Bane holding up a photo of Harvey Dent. If we ran caption contests on the site, I would use that image in a heartbeat. I look at that image and I instantly think "Has anyone seen this district attorney? He was last seen being burned alive. This image may only be half-accurate."The issue also contains some major new details about the movie including how much time has passed since The Dark Knight. Hit the jump to check out the images and new details about the film. The Dark Knight Rises opens July 20, 2012.Images via Empire.[Possible Spoilers Ahead]It's been almost four years since The Dark Knight hit theaters, but it looks like time in Gotham City passes twice as fast. Nolan tells Empire,

"It's really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne's story. We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark Knight. So he's an older Bruce Wayne; he's not in a great state."

I would love to see Bruce Wayne trolling around the Batcave eating nothing but Ho-hos, pounding back Mountain Dew, and asking Alfred where he put the X-Box controller. In all seriousness, that's an impressive jump forward and it will be interesting to see how Gotham has changed by losing the Bat and never learning the truth about what happened to Dent.

So what can audiences expect to see if they show up for the prologue that runs ahead of the IMAX version of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol? Nolan reveals:

"The Prologue is basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It's the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film. With Bane we are looking to give Batman a physical challenge that he hasn't had before. In terms of finishing our story and increasing its scope, we were trying to craft an epic."

Nolan may be trying to increase the scope and "craft an epic", but he's taking a page from the last movie by introducing the villain in the first ten minutes. It's an interesting choice since The Dark Knight had Batman fighting to be the main character in his own movie, and I'm curious to see if Nolan will give the movie over to the supporting cast again.

The Empire story also provides a lot of new detail about Bane. Nolan explained why he chose Bane to be the villain:

"So when you're looking to continue the story - in this case finish Bruce Wayne and Batman's story, as we see it - then you certainly don't want a watered-down version of a character you've already done. You want a different archetype. What Bane represents in the comics is the ultimate physical villain."

Tom Hardy elaborates on the "ultimate physical villain" aspect of his character:

"He's brutal. Brutal. He's a big dude who's incredibly clinical, in the fact that he has a result-based and oriented fighting style. It's not about fighting. It's about carnage. The style is heavy-handed, heavy-footed, it's nasty. Anything from small-joint manipulation to crushing skulls, crushing rib cages, stamping on shins and knees and necks and collarbones and snapping heads off and tearing his fists through chests, ripping out spinal columns. He is a terrorist in mentality as well as brutal action."

If Nolan wants to go in a completely different direction than The Joker when it comes to his villain, it looks like he's found it. However, I'm not sure if besting a physical challenge is as interesting as beating the moral and psychological one presented in The Dark Knight.

Finally, for everyone wondering what's going on with the mask, costume designer Lindy Hemming explains:

"He was injured early in his story. He's suffering from pain and he needs gas to survive. He cannot survive the pain without the mask. The pipes from the mask go back along his jaw line and feed into the thing at the back where there are two canisters of what ever it is...the anesthetic."

Protip for Batman: HIT THE CANISTERS.