Is blockbuster language ruining our ability to tell personal stories at the studio level?

A few recent misfires suggest there are limits to what a blockbuster can do

Right now, I’m watching the brand-new Shout! Factory 4K release of Sam Raimi’s Darkman, and it’s jaw-dropping.

A friend of mine who works in home video called it “revelatory,” and he’s not wrong. That’s a good word for the way I feel about any great 4K release. There’s something about seeing a film presented in this clarity that makes it feel like a new experience, even for films I’ve seen over and over. There’s an Arrow box set release for David Lynch’s Dune that I’ve probably watched four or five times since I got it, and if I’m being honest, there’s a part of me that wants to watch it again already.

I’m not even that film’s biggest fan, but the presentation is so striking for some of these films that I find myself more forgiving than ever. I just rewatched Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead, for example, and I love that there’s such a pristine way to look at the practical effects work by Gillis and Woodruff and Rosengrant. When you take a film negative and you scan it at this resolution, there is visual information that it’s possible we’ve never seen as an audience for films that have been kicking around since the VHS era. For many of these films, I am finally seeing something that feels like the theatrical presentation that I remember, something that has always been simulated without being reproduced as we’ve gone from format to format to format.

image courtesy of Arrow Video/Universal

It’s even more powerful when it’s a favorite film of mine. Shout! also put out a new 4K edition of Oliver Stone’s JFK just before Christmas, and it’s one of those sets that makes me a little bit crazy. The longer director’s cut of that film is, without question, an inferior version of the movie, but for some reason, that is the one that Stone always gives the deluxe treatment. The original theatrical cut is included here on Blu-ray, but when you compare the image to the 4K version of the director’s cut, it is immediately apparent which one delivers superior color, reproducing the various shifts in film stock with an almost eerie fidelity. I know there is a different cost to create a genuine 4K transfer, but it confounds me when a company only restores one version. That’s one of the reasons I am delighted by Arrow’s new The Conan Chronicles release, which features new 4K transfers of both Conan The Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. I love the Milius film and can barely tolerate the Fleischer sequel, but I am impressed by the way Arrow handled the transfer on both. And with Barbarian, you can watch every version of the film in true 4K. That’s the way Warner handled it with the Blade Runner 4K release, too, and Sony did it with Close Encounters. I would urge companies that are releasing movies with multiple different cuts to make the effort to put everything in the same resolution. That gives the consumer the final choice, instead of prioritizing what may well be a version that the audience does not like as much.

I do think it’s great these new formats give a filmmaker a chance to make a new tweak to something, like the worth Gareth Evans did on the new 4K release of The Raid: Redemption. He took full advantage of this new remastering to go in and do a new color grading. The result is something more vibrant and seedy than the theatrical version, something Evans told me he prefers. I couldn’t look away the entire time it was on, and considering how many films I see and how many times I’ve seen that one, that’s saying something. 4K demands my attention, which is a good thing. Right now, we live in the era of Distraction. Studios are embracing the idea that their product may now be a second screen, something that’s playing while people hop onto the Endless Scroll, slamming that dopamine drip over and over and over. That’s what everything is designed to do, and while that scratches a sort of mechanical itch, it doesn’t satisfy you at all. All it does is make you want/need more distraction in a loop that is designed to keep you staring at your phone for 30 seconds at a time. When I put on a 4K disc, it’s like when I go to a movie theater. I am making a choice that ropes off this time. I don’t want a second screen designed to add background noise while I browse Twitter. I want to be lost in the story that’s being told and the way it’s being told to me. A great 4K transfer makes a film feel like an event in a way that home video hasn’t for a while, and part of that is because there are so many boutique labels around the world trying to put together genuinely special editions of films. I just got my first discs from Australia earlier today, and I was delighted to see what Umbrella Entertainment put together for movies as oddball as 1993’s Super Mario Bros. and 1983’s Possession.