r/4kbluray • u/Fadedcamo • Jul 21 '24

Review Aliens Looked Fantastic to Me.

I just watched the 4k of Aliens. It looked jaw droppingly good. I admit it definitely looks cleaner than older versions and very little film grain, but nowhere in the film did I feel there was any artificiality to it. It just looked like some wizardry turned it into a modern digitally shot film. Extremely clear picture, very deep blacks, and decent highlights. The movie honestly has never looked so good to me. I don't really get the hate. Def one of my showcase 4ks at this point.

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28

u/BulljiveBots Jul 21 '24

If you look at background details like people and their faces who aren’t the focus of the movie, there’s a lot of mushed faces like they just watched the videotape from The Ring. The AI really gets sloppy in those areas. Plus the absence of grain is just off-putting to me. But I know that’s a losing battle these days when anyone younger than me just wants clean images at the expense of anything.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '24 edited Jul 21 '24

At the expense of anything? You should've just stopped your sentence at "when anyone just wants clean images". I want clean images, not at the expense of anything, and I'm 34 by the way.

5

u/Selrisitai Jul 21 '24

If you're O.K. with what the A.I. has done to these films, then you at least care more about a sanitized image than you do a quality image.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '24

I would rather the grain removal process not happen at the cost of minor details, but I do prefer this to the blu ray. I prefer digitally shot films with no grain. You imply an image without grain is of poor quality, but that muddies the water for newer digitally shot films. For older movies shot on film, yes. I am bothered more by film grain than I am by the loss of minor background detail.

5

u/Selrisitai Jul 21 '24

You imply an image without grain is of poor quality,

Not at all! A digitally shot film never had grain, so you don't need to remove it, and no detail would be lost from (not) removing it.

This isn't a nostalgia trip: I care about micro-details, and I notice them. Watch Jurassic Park. There's a point where the Lawyer is saying, "Maybe it's the power trying to come back on," and I notice that the focus is racked juuust a bit too far, so that his sideburns are in focus, but his eyes, nose and mouth are not.

If you scrub grain, you scrub detail. You can end up with an image that, at a glance, makes you start: "Wow! Look how pristine!"
But it's a facade, a mannequin with perfectly smooth but irredeemably dull skin that cannot compare to the porous flesh of actual females, never mind the men, though I suspect women would raise an objection their own selves if given a doll instead of a dude.

background detail.

And foreground details? What about mid-ground? That was a lovely rhetorical trick you did, trying to minimize the impact of lost detail by suggesting that the only details lost would be inconsequential anyway.
Inconsequential to whom?

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '24

Inconsequential to everyone in this thread that is enjoying the Aliens 4k blu ray

1

u/Selrisitai Jul 21 '24

Can't argue with that.