generalfrevious said:
Mike O said:
Fang Zei said:
Yeah, I hate that directors can't leave well enough alone and have to digitally erase stuff from their older films. It becomes frustrating when a movie like Evil Dead gets a beautiful restoration for its blu-ray debut but is then altered from its original version because the director wanted to "fix" things.
By the way, did Cameron actually make alterations to T1? I remember reading about one or two shots that people had spotted, but I never saw screenshot comparisons. It's probably a given that he's made "fixes" to True Lies and The Abyss, which are hitting blu-ray later this year. I should probably brace myself for when the eventual remaster of T2 suffers a similar fate.
What alterations were made The Evil Dead Blu-Ray? I know it didn't include the mono. The Terminator didn't include the original mono track, and much like he did with Aliens, Cameron has changed the color timing completely to that teal and orange that he wants it to swim in. I think the sadder part is that not only will T2, The Abyss, and True Lies almost certainly suffer the same fate (I still hate myself for supporting Wal-Mart and buying the HDX True Lies from Vudu, but it was the only place to get it.), and no one will give a damn. No one cares about the kind of revisionism practiced by Lucas, there certainly isn't anyone who gives a fuck about the recoloring on those films :(. The dark side of digital, change is easier than ever, and why? Because they can. And after Cameron spoke out against what Lucas did, too. FML.
Those were minor technical points, aren't they? Cameron really hasn't done what Lucas has (right?), changing whole scenes around where another character shoots first, people screaming nooooo when they didn't in an earlier version, editing out original actors and replacing them with actors who weren't alive when the original film was out, and shoehorning CGI from the late 90s into a film from the 70s. Then deride the real films as rough drafts and letting them disintegrate and be lost forever. This is a whole new level than just color correcting.
Raimi had some of the glaring bloopers - bloopers that kinda give the movie part of its charm - digitally erased. It's even more frustrating because they made brand new masters of both the 1.37:1 and 1.85:1 versions to include on the blu-ray (just as the old dvd had both framings), and they both have the same digital revisions in them.
Cameron didn't quite do the same thing as Lucas with his newer transfers of Aliens and Titanic, no, but then again I think Cameron puts more emphasis on the original version's edit being what makes it the "original version" than any digital revisions that may be found within otherwise identical edits, and he "fixed" a whole bunch of things in Titanic for its most recent release. Funny enough, the theatrical cut of Aliens on the blu-ray can't technically be called that from an editing standpoint either: Cameron corrected the order of four shots where Ripley picks up a flamethrower, puts down a machine gun, picks up a machine gun, puts down a flamethrower. Although I guess I should simply be thankful that the only thing he erased in Aliens (AFAIK) is Lance Henricksen's torso sticking out of the ground in a shot during the final action scene. It's almost like the snake pit reflection to Aliens' RotLA.
Similarly, Cameron seems to have left T1 alone for the most part, although I don't see why it was so much troubke to include the mono track. He's given it that new color timing, yeah, but those kind of things don't tend to bother me as much. I'll admit the most recent transfer of Raiders didn't look right to my eyes when the screenshots popped up online, but then again there seems to be disagreement as to just how the movie looked in '81. The new transfers of Fellowship of the Ring and AotC (Hey, back on topic!) also look weird to me, and I suspect it has something to do with digging up movies that were some of the earliest DI's after almost a decade.