You can of course watch this any way you choose :-) But 720p video around 2GB, is only marginally better than DVD in terms of detail - most of the detail gets scrubbed away by the compression. I used to watch those kinds of rips too but now I can spot compression artefacts too easily (I can now even clearly see the difference for example between a 12GB 1080p and a 20GB 1080p) - they both look nice but 12GB will look much worse in comparison. And especially on a pretty grainy source like this. And that is only on my 27" screen - anything bigger would of course make the difference even more obvious. Unless of course handbrake is using some kind of futuristic compression algorithms. Could you maybe post a few screenshots from your encode from some of the darker scenes and maybe the first shot of the sunset?