I recently obtained last year’s Arrow blu-ray release of Oldboy, which is one of my all-time favorite films. Knowing that the film has a new transfer approved by director Park Chan-wook and features a large selection of supplementary materials both old and new, I bought it on impulse. Of course, 2 days after receiving it, a 4K UHD release was announced and that annoyed me pretty well. But whatever, I can get over that.

What really gets me is that, while the new transfer is the most beautiful the film has ever looked, the “newly translated English subtitles” are actually inferior to the previous Tartan blu-ray release, which I also own. The grammar is a bit odd in places and there are a few lines that I know are just straight-up wrong. Even in the documentary on disk 2, they specifically talk about a line of spoken dialogue in the film that is a 100% different line than is present in the subtitles of the main feature. I don’t get how something like this can happen to, essentially, the definitive collector’s edition of one of the most revered films to come out of Asian cinema.

Of course, with foreign-language films, there’s bound to be some bits that don’t translate all that well, but this translation still could’ve been a whole lot better than it ended up being. At least the transfer and features are great, so I still don’t regret adding it to my collection. Now I just wanna rip the superior transfer from the blu-ray and hardcode some more accurate subtitles into the video file to get a more ‘true to the original vision’ version of the film.