They said "You'll believe a man can fly", and you'd better believe it. STM is quite simply a wondrous film, full of movie magic that mostly still holds up brilliantly today. I actually shed a few tears during the 'can you read my mind?' scene and not for the reasons that people may think as I've always LOVED that scene. But now that both Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve have departed this world, suffering their chronic health problems as they did, it's taken on added poignance for me to see them both let loose from terra firma, 'flying' as they are with looks of sheer joy and awed wonderment on their faces (despite how uncomfortable it must've been to film that stuff), I'm even getting a bit emotional again as I type this.
The 4K HDR presentation is an interesting one. While colour on things like skin tones seems more subdued than the 2011 theatrical cut disc, Supes' suit is very much a vibrant blue and red and other primaries and secondaries also look great, like the intense reds and oranges of the approach to Krypton at the start. Those tones on his suit can subtly change from shot to shot to be sure, but such is photochemical life. They appear to have colour-corrected the opticals of the suit however, as it also looks just as blue in those shots rather than the greeny blue that was originally necessary so that it wouldn't clash with the bluescreen backing.
Spatial detail is what it is, nowhere near any kind of resolvable "4K" level because Geoff Unsworth's heavily diffused photography is cutting down the amount of resolution that's hitting the 5247 negative. And yet it's still got a slightly glossier look in 4K, resolving absolutely everything that it can and what's interesting is that the grain is extremely well refined, almost non-existent in some interior scenes. In bright exteriors like the Smallville stuff it can get chunkier, maybe even a tiny bit ill-compressed, but it's still nothing like what you'd see if this was a Sony transfer of a movie shot on the same stock e.g. CE3K. In terms of outright compression gremlins the only one that really stood out was the 'sparkler' effect during the opening credits that travels across the screen after John Williams' credit and before Siegel and Shuster's, it's got some hefty macroblocks in it but it's very much an isolated case.
Whether the lack of in-your-face-grain is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder, what I personally appreciate is that it never looks overly processed or heavily "grain managed" so if anything has been done to the grain it's been expertly handled; there are no Melting Loises here. The opticals (of which there are surprisingly few) make the grain coarser, natch, as does an apparent dupe section right when Luthor opens the chest with the Kryptonite in, and the rest of that scene looks noticeably worse off. Thankfully the myriad dissolves in the movie hold up brilliantly and never drop a generation or three, so I would guess that this was originally cut to A and B rolls to maintain this quality.
Now then, HDR. Hmmmm. I've dribbled on about highlights this and highlights that in dozens of other reviews but for the first time the revealing of that detail just didn't work for me in the Krypton scenes with the front-lit scotchlite suits. Yes, you can now see every crease and fold blah blah but the enchantment of the effect is gone, the brightness has been toned down so much that it almost looks like they're wearing white fabric rather than this dazzling reflective material. It now looks kinda utilitarian rather than other-worldly and it's such a shame, as they could've kept the brightness high AND retained the detail but the graders might've thought it to be too uncomfortably bright. Why they couldn't reach a middle ground of highlight detail and brightness I don't know.
In that scene in particular the skin tones really take a hit too, looking extremely dull and lifeless compared to the fuller faces on the 2011 theatrical Blu-ray. FWIW there's a persistent flickering to this scene on the Blu-ray (probably because of the complicated lighting set-up) which has been evened out on the 4K, and this is true for a lot of other scenes in the movie that tend to flicker on the 2011 Blu-ray in particular, the 4K is much more stable in terms of both density flutter and lateral movement.
For the usual things like bright lights and whatnot then the HDR looks fine, you can see the bulbs in their sockets etc etc versus the completely blown-out lighting as seen on the prior Blu-ray editions and that I don't have a problem with as it's very natural and never a distraction. Certain lights burn pretty brightly too, not in the interiors as they're still very softly lit and the UHD doesn't mess with that, but in certain exteriors like the lights on the roof of the Planet as the helicopter approaches the speculars can zing nicely, as does Jor-El's staff of judgement thingy when he lights it in the Zod trial scene.
Black levels are decent enough during the space shots and the opening credits, and when Krypton explodes the backing is MUCH darker so you get less of that split-second "tarps hanging in the background" look behind the exploding miniature that previous iterations had. But while
that shot looks a lot better I spotted a few garbage mattes during the sequence of Kal's ship hurtling through space which was surprising as I've never noticed those traveling mattes before on this movie (being translucent rectangular shapes moving in time with the composited effect, not on lateral shots but on shots moving towards/away from camera). Sure enough, they're invisible on both the SE Blu-ray transfer and the theatrical cut Blu-ray because the gamma is much higher (darker black) on those discs, but the lower gamma (brighter black) in the space shots in the 4K is quite unforgiving. And, funnily enough, if I lower black by a few clicks on the UHD then the mattes are gone so I'll be doing that in future whenever I watch this disc.
The iconic shot of Supes and the sunrise looks REALLY janky as well, on my ZD9 I'm getting loads of vertical 'bars' on that one shot akin to what some people call "banding", and while I'm open to this being exactly that on my TV I have never, ever seen banding like this despite having watched literally hundreds of UHDs and Blu-rays on it. I see it nowhere else in the movie and it quickly disappears on the following close-up of Reeve flying and smiling. Here's a photo, THE EXPOSURE IS BEING GREATLY EXAGGERATED TO CAPTURE THE EFFECT (the shot is actually much darker than that) but here it is anyway:
[Show spoiler]
. Again, I can only think that's it's been mastered too brightly like the other shots with the visible mattes, but unfortunately even lowering the black level doesn't help in this case. Those vertical bars are NOT there on the SE and theatrical Blu-rays either when viewed on my TV, I checked.
So, while I'd love to gush all over this disc in terms of the video it's got one too many kinks and foibles to make it a home run, a slam dunk or whatever sports simile you'd prefer. Those foibles are isolated instances, granted, and some are matters of taste (grading of the Kryptonian outfits) and some can be tweaked out (garbage mattes), but when totted up they mean that I just can't give this an unequivocal thumbs-up. As for the audio, that's something else to come in part 2 of this review...