by Mike Hansen
In case you didn’t know, the Best Buy edition of The Dark Knight Rises Blu-Ray set comes with a free bonus downloadable documentary, The Dark Knight Reborn. (I’ve read that this is also on the Blu-Ray disc itself for Best Buy editions, but my copy won’t show up for a few days.)
Here’s the trailer:
Overall, it’s a bit uneven, but there are a lot of fantastic moments from the making of all three of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Nolan is featured heavily in the interview footage, and it’s nice to see one of my favorite directors reflect on his journey of creating the ultimate Bruce Wayne story.
There’s an amazing unused shot featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker – very little happens in the scene, but it highlights just how incredible Ledger’s presence was in The Dark Knight. This moment alone made watching this worth it for me.
This “documentary” is only 38 minutes long, and it’s structured more like a string of unrelated featurettes than as a fully formed behind-the-scenes story. There are way too many talking-heads shots – I understand the need for these during the initial promotional process for a film, but a lot of the dialogue here would have worked better as narration. Speaking of which – there’s a really cheesy narrator talking over a few segments who seems to think he needs to sell the Batman trilogy (hey, guy, we’ve already bought it!).
In order to download/watch it, I had to set up a (free) CinemaNow account, which was a bit of a hassle and required going back a few times to get it to download properly. But once it was fully downloaded, I got myself a .WMV file that can be played/burned however I want.
So was it worth it? For me, yes. I’m a bonus-features junkie, so even this small amount of extra material was pretty cool. Considering that The Dark Knight Rises is about the same price everywhere right now, you might as well get it at Best Buy and score this for free.
For my friends up north, here’s the cover to the Canadian edition of the Best Buy steelbook edition:
GRRR AARRRGH
