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Sunday, September 12, 2010

BD impressions: Se7en

8:59 PM / BD Impressions / 13 Comments

Hmm... something tells me this movie didn't get offered the chance to take advantage of the City of New York's tax break programme for movies. ;) This film doesn't really need any introduction, given that it's one of the most highly regarded - and yes, genuinely one of the best - horror thrillers of the 90s, so I'm not going to say too much about it (especially given that I need to have some material left over for my review spot in an upcoming podcast venture in which I'm involved - stay tuned for more info on that). But basically - yeah, terrific movie, and now available on a terrific BD.

Image quality: There have been a handful of BD releases of SE7EN now, including a 1080i, open matte affair from Alliance Atlantis in Canada and a fairly serviceable OAR release in the Netherlands from RCV. The latter was derived from the same master used for the 2000 2-disc New Line Platinum Series DVD, for which the entire negative was scanned at 2K resolution and regraded and reframed to director David Fincher's notoriously exacting standards. Flash forward to 2010 and the whole thing has been rescanned, regraded and reframed AGAIN, with Fincher at the helm once more.

As a result, there are some noticeable differences between this and the previous master, and you might want to check out my captures from the RCV release for comparative purposes (I've duplicated some of the same frames here). It seems fairly pointless to speculate as to which of the two is "correct", given that they both constitute revisionism to a certain extent and were both supervised and approved by the same man. The bottom line is that the new release is darker, more saturated and more contrasty, and I know for a fact that some people are going to take issue with that, feeling that Fincher may have gone too far with the darker scenes (which basically account for more than half the movie). The blacks are now REALLY black, and some shadow detail is lost as a result. I get the impression it's the look Fincher has been shooting for since 1995, however: he has spoken on quite a few occasions about wishing he could get the blacks so solid that they were indistinguishable from the darkness of the movie theatre.

Questions of authenticity aside, I don't think anyone will deny that this is a stunning-looking disc. Detail is outstanding, encoding is well-handled (keep it up, Warner) and the grain looks natural and film-like. I get the impression that a few scenes have been grain reduced (see Example 10), but the selective nature of this makes me lean towards this being a stylistic choice rather than a case of some numpty playing with the controls. Scenes like the one where Brad Pitt enters the lawyer's office (victim #2), which were always pretty heavy in the grain department, are still pretty grainy. I honestly had no complaints when watching this disc, so I'm going to award it a coveted 10/10.

Se7en
studio: New Line/Warner; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: VC-1;
file size: 33.7 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 38.09 Mbit/sec

13 Comments

 
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