The 1994 James Cameron film True Lies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was recently re-released in Ultra HD 4K disc format giving viewers the opportunity to watch these classic films in unprecedented detail.
Not only True Lies but Cameron’s The Abyss and sci-fi classic Aliens were also released on Ultra HD Blu-ray with Geoff Burdick, senior vice president of Lightstorm Entertainment, who tells The New York Times that he thinks they “look the best they’ve ever looked.”
But not everyone agrees.
“It just looks weird, in ways that I have difficulty describing,” the journalist Chris Person tells The Times. “It’s plasticine, smooth, embossed at the edges. Skin texture doesn’t look correct. It all looks a little unreal.”
The long term goal is having an automated process to restore old films cheaply since doing it manually is a long process that requires expertise. A limited talent pool for a time intensive process is the obstacle they are trying to overcome.
They are not thinking about it from the viewer’s perspective, just how they can market that they did technically restore it with something that is passable as a quality improvement in the eyes of the majority of buyers.
What Peter Jackson did with They Shall Not Grow Old was great and efforts like that to actually restore old films should be supported, but movies from the 80s don’t need it.
There are plenty of films from every decade that would benefit from a good quality remaster, especially for HD.
Sure, there is also a ton of crap that aren’t a priority, but that has always been true.
“Remaster” being the key word. Creating a “master”, old or new, involves making decisions about how to best translate the author’s ideas onto a given medium, not just running a generic algorithm and calling it a day.
I bet an AI could do it… some day. But it won’t be a simple pattern matching one, which doesn’t take into account the author’s intent.