The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan’s first experiment incorporating IMAX resolution into a mainstream movie was a huge success. On UHD Blu-ray with High Dynamic Range, it’s even better.
Goodness me, where has the time gone? It is ten years since The Dark Knight hit the big screen, and it instantly became a classic. Heath Ledger died six months before the release, having turned in the most distinctive performance of his career, and having created one of the most chilling villains ever to appear on screen.
Right now The Dark Knight is Christopher Nolan’s highest rated movie on IMDB with 9.0/10, fourth on IMDB’s Top 250 list.
I need say no more about the movie. If you haven’t seen it, do something about that. Perhaps by starting with this Ultra-HD release.
Picture
This, famously, is the first feature film to use significant amounts of IMAX footage. That typically gives more than seven times the resolution of 35mm film. The aspect ratio switches between 2.35:1 for the bulk of the movie and 1.78:1 for the 28 minutes shot in IMAX. Some of those minutes are at the start, which opens with a breathtakingly sharp zoomed shot of the Gotham cityscape.
I’ve noted at times that Ultra-HD Blu-ray doesn’t always deliver clear and obvious increases in sharpness and detail. That opening scene is an exception. It is razor sharp on Ultra-HD Blu-ray. Perhaps even a bit too sharp. As the camera zooms in, there are ventilation grates on the tall black building that flicker as an interference pattern forms with the pixel grid of the OLED TV I was using. It’s a very small price to pay.
The benefits of IMAX are less clear in the massive car chase, other than a demonstration that it could be done. One IMAX camera was destroyed in the making of that section of the movie.
But both there and in the stuff shot on 35mm and 65mm, the benefits of HDR were clear, with bolder blacks, deeper detail in dark scenes (there are many dark scenes in this movie) and more natural colours. Human faces in particular benefit.
Sound
As with Dunkirk, this is a straightforward 5.1 channel release. It’s in Dolby TrueHD (16 bits only) on the Blu-ray, and DTS-HD Master Audio on the Ultra-HD Blu-ray. I couldn’t tell the difference in sound, which is as it should be. Selecting Dolby Surround on playback pushed some useful content up to the height speakers, adding to an already impressive surround field.
For nerds
This pack has the Ultra-HD Blu-ray, which carries on the movie, a Blu-ray disc
with the movie and some extras, and a second BD with a lot more extras.
One of the things I do with discs is try to work out what all the content is on them. Sometimes there are files on the disc which are apparently inaccessible from the disc’s menu system. (Or perhaps they are, through a hidden sequence of keys or menu moves, like Easter Eggs.) There were two 330 megabyte files on the Bonus Disc with a run time of 9:44 each, but only one playable item of that length. Both were low bit-rate 1080p/24 files with no audio. And when I dragged them into a player, both had the same content, which was a gallery of 22 stills of Joker cards. I don’t know which one is linked in the menu system. I only mention this because, well, it’s fun to luxuriate in the space available on a medium where a file that would use up half the capacity of a CD-ROM can be accidentally placed, and hardly anyone notices.
And, yes, there’s a real Easter Egg. On the bonus disc are a bunch of trailers. Play Trailer 3 and while its playing, slowly key in 56537 (joker) with your remote. File 00015.m2ts, which contains Trailer 3, will stop playing and file 00022.mpls will play instead. This is Trailer 3, but with The Joker scribbling over it as it plays.
The Bonus BD appears to be identical to that in the long-released Blu-ray pack. The movie Blu-ray, however, is a variation on the earlier one. It has the same Focus Points — 18 points in the movie where it jumps to a mini featurette; they sum to 64 minutes of run time. It has the same VC1 video running at the same 24Mbps. And it has some of the same audio, but omits several languages, and bumps up the bit-rate of the three Dolby Digital audio tracks from 448kbps to 640kbps.