Death Note - Director's Cut
I feel like those 2 hours were wasted. I don't know about director's cut, Death Note: Lite would've been a more appropriate title.
First of all, here's what they removed to get the first 25 episodes to fit into 2 hours:
-- The bus incident, the first real showing of Light's intelligence, was removed completely. Great.
-- Linking to the above removal, Naomi's explanation of how she knew about Kira was simplified to the extreme.
- L's reveal and the early L/Light rivalry they was removed completely. They did later try to merge the L and Light meeting scene and a scene from later on, but it was done rather badly, including a a new scene where L seemed to direct Light around some hi-tech maze in a cinema...
-- Misa finding out about Light. It was simplified so much that she just randomly saw him while she was sitting in a cafe.
-- They didn't cut out L thinking about Aoyama in the helicopter, even though the whole Aoyama thing had been cut. Sloppy.
-- Higuchi simply dying without explanation. It didn't show Light using his watch at all...I'd have been seriously confused if I hadn't already watched the series.
Put simply, this "director's cut" was a simplified and badly cut version of the first 25 episodes. That's not good when Death Note is all about story and thrilling twists that go with it.
The most annoying thing was the last 5 minutes; my reason for watching this hack job. All you get is Light's insane laughter from episode 37 changed to be at L's grave... I expected the ending to be the same as the 2nd movie. It wasn't worth the effort.
...oh, and the choice of music used was pretty bad - I couldn't believe the 2nd ED theme was used during the Higuchi chase.