Batman Begins: Dark Cut

for people who fanedit and like to watch fanedits their number one reason for doing so is to re-watch a film with a different experience to when they first saw the film. i fondly recall seeing the batman begins at the cinema for whatever reason i didn't rush to see it but instead saw the last screening of it. they was just me and a mother with her two sons at the front but i remember just being blown away with what i saw and that ending which led us into the sequel i still believe to be one of the best endings to a film i've seen. so of course i bought it and fast forward some years later and i'm looking to re-watch the series i thought why not try a fanedit version.

the problem with this trilogy is that it has to pander to the summer blockbuster audience so often these films have humor that seems so out of place. thank god this edit cuts this out (the homeless guy and the jacket) though the cuts made are all done very well because i've seen this film a few times now it often took me out of the film (i didn't read the cut list before hand) but this happens a lot with fanedits and is in no way a negative against JMB.

so the big selling point is the voice change to Rachel, for me it's not a major concern when i first saw the original but obviously for JMB it was. so doe's it work? strangle enough i found it doe's, while cuts may have took me out of the film the new voice i found fits perfectly. i'm sure the more times i re-watch the edit the more i'll pick up the imperfections. i pretty sure you could show this edit it any casual fan and they wouldn't know the difference until you told them at the end.

the only change to the story that i feel didn't work was removing Gordon from the Batmobile. while it's done really well and to a degree i myself didn't like his involvement on repeated viewings, his removal here impacts on the characters final. overall i just felt that why did batman want gordon to have the antidote. in the original batman of course needs gordon but here it just seems like batman saves gordon and rachael but to hell with everyone else. now all gordon doe's is knock-out / chain his work college so he doesn't kill anyone.

overall i say this is a really good fanedit, it takes what was a very good film and improves certain aspects to it. i'm not sure when it comes to re-watching batman begins again that i'll go back to this version but i can say that i enjoyed watching edit and would recommend it to anyone who would like to see a different take on batman begins

This was a pretty awesome edit. The video editing was smooth, with no hard cuts. The cuts themselves are well thought out and improve the movie experience. Not a lot else to say here.

The audio, on the other hand, had some issues. I downloaded the DVD version and burned it on a dvd. When I played it on my plasma tv via blu-ray player (tv speakers only) there was a noticeable dissonance in some of the audio elements; a kind of dual-voice or overdub effect, perhaps resulting from slightly out of sync audio channels. The dissonance seemed to occur mainly in the bass range. Also, some of the voices added from the game seem muffled.

However, when I used handbrake to encode an x264 .mkv of the film, I set it for an AAC stereo mixdown. The stereo mixdown eliminated, or at least severely reduced, the effect. This would also seem to indicate a problem with the 5.1 dvd native soundtrack.

Edit: 4/5
Video: 5/5
Audio: 2/5
Disc Features: 4/5

Overall: 7.5/10

(added July 9, 2010)
...turns out that my TV speakers decided to start to go out. Odd that it happened all at once like this. TV is just out of warranty too :(

In any case, disregard my review above. Played in a pair of high end headphones, the audio track is perfect.

Again, apologies for the invalid review!