Batman Forever: Red Book Edition - The 15th Anniversary Enhanced Edition

This is a great (and honestly necessary) update to a classic fanedit.

The video quality looks great (the addition of film grain was a nice choice), the sound is terrific (and so are the new additions, like the thunder transition in the intro, and the giant bat).

Great job, INIGHTMARES. As Palpatine said in Phantom Menace, "We will watch your career with great interest."

Quite liking Tim Burton’s Batman (particular Dwight Fry’s “Descent into Mystery”) and loving Batman Returns, I have been reluctant to venture into the world of Joel Schumacher and his rather less well-regarded entries. This recent re-redo has prompted my interest, and will shortly be followed by MusicEd912’s “Deep Freeze” recut of Batman & Robin.

This is probably the least favourite of mine out of the three, though that in no way means it’s bad! I happily watched it straight through and never lost interest and could quite imagine myself doing so again. The feelings I have are entirely unoriginal, with the main point of annoyance being the overacting villains, even compared to the previous entries! Would be interesting to see how more cutting might help, might try some of the other edits available here.

AV generally excellent, barring the low-quality deleted scenes of course but the desaturation and added grain helps with quality consistency. Thanks Scaperat for making the original edit, and INIGHTMARES for enhancing it!

While my narrative gripes of the original "Red Book Edition" remain–

"I've always been a nostalgic fan of the original Batman Forever, but also a fan of darker takes on Batman. I think this edit did an admirable job of trying to darken it up, but just didn't measure up to my enjoyment of the original version. The addition of the deleted Arkham Asylum beginning, the "red book" subplot, and the alternate ending was excellent, but removing the exciting Batmobile sequence for a decidedly boring deleted scene between Bruce and Dick just took me right out of the movie."

–the difference is the superior audio/visual quality and editing. "Batman Forever: The Red Book Edition–The 15th Anniversary Edition" may not replace the original "Batman Forever" for me, but it is a very good alternative.

I never enjoyed the original Batman Forever despite revisiting it many times always hoping this time I would find something to enjoy.
Now I have a version that is truly a good watch.

I love the noir feel of this edit. The near black & white + red look really works well to give this a lot of style and atmosphere. The added scenes add a lot more depth to the story especially the new opening and ending, Batman/Bruce is now fleshed out and someone I care about. I still find two-face irritating but not to the same degree.

Picture quality, editing, sound are all very good.

I finally got around to watching this and I'm very happy I did. I went into this without having seen the original version of this movie in a while. Sometimes that's a better way to approach fanedits. I'm not looking for things that are different, I'm just soaking in the experience. I had read about scaperats version and INIGHTMARES version before, but not right before I watched it today. So I went into this with letting the experience speak for itself. It was amazing. I had always liked this movie, but this was probably the most enjoyable experience. The tone was a lot more serious and much more satisfying. I didn't find myself rolling my eyes a lot (thanks for cutting batmans butt). I appreciate that it attempted to be more like the previous Tim Burton installments without forcing that narrative on the viewer. It still held all of the good qualities and originality that part 3 had. The changes in color and grain of the video was awesome too. This paired with the upscaling made it feel like I was watching a bluray that still captured the feel of the 90s. I really appreciated the strong reds, greens, purples bordered with the grays and black around it- that may sound confusing if you've never seen this version, so watch it to see what I mean. But I feel this style of coloring for this particular movie captured the nostalgic feel of what made the first one great, and even the second one for that matter. The narrative and story told itself. You still get most of the movie you remember here just with some fat trimmed off. I appreciate this version a lot. There are a lot of edits that you read about and you can safely say "yeah, this needed to be done". Then there are the edits you finish watching and you realize "yeah, this needed to be done". After finising the movie, I realize the value of this to the Batman legacy. I now understand the hype around scaperats original version. I have not seen that particular one, but INIGHTMARES brought it to life for me in a high quality version. The cuts were seemless and the audio was very even. It felt like an official release with the flare of a die hard fan. There was one seen where the mouth didnt match the dialogue and a couple scenes where the video quality was slightly lower, but it was nothing to distracting, hence my 9 for visual editing. Otherwise I very very impressed with this edit and I don't think i'd change anything. Maybe I'll watch scaperats version next, or maybe I'll watch this again. Either way, I highly recommend checking this out.