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Friday, August 13, 2010
BD impressions: Gladiator (10th Anniversary Edition)
8:14 PM / BD Impressions / 
25 Comments
I'm not going to recount the entirety of GLADIATOR's less than rosy history on BD. Suffice it to say that the previous version, released less than a year ago, was a massive disappointment in the image quality department, with many people scarcely able to believe that such a high profile film could be released in so poor a state - particularly when, in the US, Paramount marketed as part of a range that offered the best films in the best quality, or words to that effect.
You can read my review and see screen captures of the original release here.
Moving swiftly on, Paramount and Universal, who own the rights to the film internationally, have conspired to provide us with a brand new remaster of the film, derived from a new 4K scan of the original negative. Depending on where you live, there are different options available for acquiring a copy of the new version, but it is complicated by the fact that, in the US, Paramount have "silently" released the new edition on to store shelves in nearly identical packaging. The situation in Europe is slightly more clear-cut, although in certain territories (the Netherlands, for example), copies of the new version do exist which come in the original packaging but with a "10th Anniversary Edition" sticker on the back cover. Both Paramount and Universal have set up replacement programmes, so if you already own either release, my recommendation would be to contact the appropriate distributor to arrange a trade (I believe you need to pay the shipping costs yourself).
My copy is the Dutch release by Universal (the one with the original steelbook packaging and a "10th Anniversary Edition" sticker), and I believe that, packaging aside, the same discs will be released throughout Europe. (It certainly includes a plethora of different languages, and the discs themselves carry Dutch, German, UK and Irish classification logos.)
Image quality: Anyway, the disc itself... I previously felt that Disney's re-release of GANGS OF NEW YORK represented the single biggest improvement I had ever seen from one high definition release to another of the same film. GLADIATOR, however, now takes the crown. Indeed, the image quality of this remastered edition is so stunning as to elevate it above MINORITY REPORT and BRAVEHEART in the catalogue title stakes. When word of the remastered version initially emerged, I like many people suspected that the best we could hope for would be something derived from the previous master before the edge enhancement and DNR that sullied it so much had been applied. Instead, Universal and Paramount have pushed the boat out and given us something that actually looks streets better than many BDs of films released in 2010. Even the opticals (GLADIATOR was photochemically colour timed, and as such any effects shots, shots with fades or on-screen text etc., obviously had to be taken from a print source a couple of generations down the line) look better than certain DI-sourced transfers I could mention (see Example 13). It's just an all-round phenomenal presentation and I for one am completely satisfied. 10/10
As regards the differences between Universal and Paramount's releases, obviously each is a different encode derived from the same master. As this comparison by Thunderbolt8 at the AV Science Forum demonstrates, some scenes in the Paramount release appear to have been slightly filtered, visible in the form of slight ringing around the letterbox bars à la their release of MINORITY REPORT (the European release of that title, by 20th Century Fox, suffered from no such ringing). Oddly enough, it is only present for parts of the film, and the effect seems to be fairly minimal (the grain does appear slightly clumpier on the US version of the first capture in the above link). My advice, if you want the best version available, is to go for Universal's version. On a mid-size display, however, or for someone not overly attuned to slight visual imperfections, the Paramount version should definitely suffice.
Gladiator (10th Anniversary Edition)
studio: Universal; country: Netherlands; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 33.01 GB (theatrical), 36.47 GB (extended);
average bit rate (including audio): 30.55 Mbit/sec (theatrical), 30.54 Mbit/sec (extended)
25 Comments
To be honest I'm not sure what the plans are for the UK and whether it will be marketed as the 10th Anniversary Edition or something else.
By the way, I've (finally) taken a look at WHERE EAGLES DARE. I won't be doing a full BD Impressions feature on it until I've watched the whole thing, so these are just my cursory impressions for the time being...
Basically, I think it's a serviceable but not particularly stunning release. It's certainly noticeably darker and murkier than the DVD, although which (if either) of the two has the correct look is probably a question best put to someone who's more familiar with the film's history. The blacks do look awfully grey... detail is fairly average... some shots look like they've been quite heavily grain reduced, while others look noticeably better... the various optical shots suffer from pronounced halos, but that was unavoidable... All in all it's no great shakes, though I'm not sure how much better it could have looked, if at all. I'm not exactly thrilled by how it looks, but I've seen a lot worse.
(Posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 8:40 PM)
Eric:
For shame! :P If you're going to invoke the words of "insiders", you could at the very least have quoted that most infamous "insider" (or so he claims to be) who told is that, if we didn't like the quality of the original GLADIATOR BD, we should get a new hobby. :D
To his credit, Jeff Kleist seems to have made an honest attempt to get to the bottom of the situation, and, as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing: I don't think anyone could have seriously predicted that GLADIATOR would one day look THIS good.
(That said, his comments about INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS in the third post you linked to are a little odd to say the least. DNR? Edge halos? I didn't see any - quite the opposite, in fact.)
Chris:
Do you see the ringing around the letterboxing in some of the shots of the US version (e.g. this first)? It's something that affects a number of Paramount titles - e.g. MINORITY REPORT, THE LOVELY BONES, TRANSFORMERS 2, the 2D version of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (though oddly enough not the 3D version) - and seems to be an ongoing problem at their end. In the first capture, the grain is also clearly (at least to my eyes) clumpier as a result of the filtering. I'm not entirely sure how much of the film has been filtered on the US release (at the very least, the Germania sequences are affected, but I'm not sure whether it resurfaces beyond then), but it certainly tips the balance firmly in favour of Universal's effort for me... as was the case with MINORITY REPORT, where Paramount's release suffered from ringing while 20th Century Fox's did not.
As for the US release having a sliver more vertical information, perhaps Paramount and Universal were simply provided with an open matte 1.78:1 master and each independently cropped it to somewhere in the region of 2.39:1. That's just speculation on my part, but I suspect it's as good an explanation as any.
Bosque:
BODY OF LIES never struck me as all that "dirty"-looking, to tell the truth. In fact, it actually compares very favourably to the new GLADIATOR, let down only by Warner's at times lacklustre VC-1 encoding. As for AMERICAN GANGSTER, it looks pretty underwhelming in HD, and while I suspect the stylistic choices play their part, a lot of the blame lies with the excessively filtered and degrained master. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, also from Universal, also photochemically colour timed and released at around the same time, looks equally "meh".
As for other films getting this kind of "make-over" treatment, Ridley Scott's own BLADE RUNNER received a similar overhaul for its final cut, with the original camera negative being rescanned at 4K and re-graded. The GODFATHER trilogy... BRAVEHEART... MINORITY REPORT... SAVING PRIVATE RYAN... The problem, as always, is presumably the costs involved.
(Posted on Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 4:13 PM)
Bosque:
Hmm... AMERICAN GANGSTER is probably a combination of artistic intent and a less than impressive master. If Ridley was going for a FRENCH CONNECTION look, I would have expected some actual grain rather than the mush we ended up with.
(Posted on Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 7:57 PM)
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1. FoxyMulder said:
I take it then that i need to wait and look for the tenth anniversary release, isn't this coming out in September in the UK. ?
(Posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 8:28 PM)