Watched the UHD in full last night (theatrical + 4.1 audio), it really does look beautiful. Yes, it has been 'grain managed' to varying degrees and no, this isn't anything to do with "mishandled" or "poorly shot" negatives. The most overt signs of this treatment are restricted mainly to the Kane examination scene with its smeary frozen grain, and some of the exteriors of the ship on the planet can look a bit funky. Apart from those there's a decent enough layer of grain here and there, not sure if it's of the correct vintage but I'll take it.
Detail is terrific, very finely resolved apart from the obvious moments where the focus wasn't nailed back in the day, as well as a little bit of the usual anamorphic distortion like the softness at the very top and bottom of the frame in some shots. But given the lenses they used, the likely 5247 stock and that they didn't have an awful lot of light to work with in some scenes, this was a heroic effort by Derek Vanlint. I always find it funny that older movies shot anamorphic look a good bit sharper than some modern movies shot on old ana glass, but then Vanlint didn't use much diffusion owing to the slower anamorphic glass and that he was often running two cameras simultaneously (a Scott trademark, he'd be operating one and Vanlint the other) which makes it even more tricky to light it properly for both angles and to hide said lights. Again: this was a heroic effort.
HDR is nicely handled. Certain sources of light are plenty brighter than you've ever seen them but they're not so bright that they distract, instead it imparts that usual sense of depth and volume to the imagery. Highlight information is newly uncovered all over the place, unless people are fans of light bulbs then maybe it's not much to get excited about when dealing with something shot entirely on a stage but even so, it looks so much more naturalistic than the harshly blown out lighting seen on previous transfers. I LOVED how the strobe lighting looked on Sigourney Weaver's face during the climactic moments, you can see her expression frozen in place every time the strobe goes off and it comes through with so much clarity now. (Those bits will of course be uncomfortable to watch if people are sensitive to flashing lights but then they always were.) And, as with the 4K DCP, you can now see all the spotlights in the Narcissus' engines when Ripley fires them up to expel the Beast at the end.
Black levels are gorgeously dense, after watching the 4K DCP I remarked how much shadow detail seemed to have been soaked up and now I know it wasn't just that specific cinema presentation. The approach to the blacks reminds of Blade Runner's UHD vs the
BD, in that some shots which had dark crushy blacks on the Alien
BD have now been opened up a tad, and shots that had plenty of shadows on the
BD have now been darkened accordingly. Basically there isn't a blanket approach, if this kind of ultra dense black level had been applied to the whole movie it would have been a bit suffocating IMO. As it is, it's just about perfect.
Colour matches the DCP very well, definitely desaturated vs the previous attempts and a general toning down of the teal menace, though there's still a subtle green undertone to certain shots here and there. Skin tones look superb, layered and rich, and those welts on John Hurt's face (look at his lower jaw) when we first see him after he wakes up from being facehugged seem to be a fair bit angrier.
The transfer still retains a fair bit of 'wobble' during the opening and end credits but that's likely baked in to the original opticals, the rest of the movie looks rock solid (the DC 'Transmission' scene aside which is very juddery). Diligent clean-up on the dirt and scratches, the occasional little blip might still sneak through. Compression is excellent, I've griped a hell of a lot recently (I like griping) about how HEVC + HDR + YCbCr can't handle fire, smoke etc but this encode takes those notions and flushes them out the nearest airlock as it's pristine, at least to the naked eye. Perhaps it's precisely because the grain has been managed that the encoding handles it so well? In any case, I didn't spot any of the usual chroma bugs.
And the movie, OH the movie. I've seen it more times than I can count, saw it again barely five weeks ago, and it still had me rapt from start to finish. If Ash was a movie fan then he'd love Alien: it's the perfect cinematic organism.
Alien: El octavo pasajero (Alien, 1979, Ridley Scott) y secuelas/packs
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Re: Alien: El octavo pasajero (Alien, 1979, Ridley Scott) y secuelas/packs
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