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Originally Posted by Riddhi2011
My observations after having gone through the Titanic 4K remaster (2023):
In majority of the closeups, the skin looks rubbery, dry and has a sort of plastic laminated, reflective quality about them. The sharpness in closeups is unnaturally high, to the point that it felt strenuous to my eyes. Most of it looks overly synthetic and excessively processed.
The organic qualities of 35mm film are not apparent anymore. It's like some fan took the master copy and used Topaz to upscale it. The grain looks frozen in many places, like the scene when J.J. Astor talks with Jack during the dinner. All in all, a weird and artificial-looking image that does not feel like professional work to me, especially given how great some 4K restorations have been.
The Blu-ray looks far more pleasing to my eyes in terms of sharpness and detail, even though the colours are overly yellow and green on that one, unlike the original 35mm look that was more balanced and had better colour separation.
Given that Cameron has said "we shouldn't have to do it again," and that a higher resolution release will reveal "the grain more clearly," which he thinks we wouldn't want to see, then it's safe to say [in Cameron's own words] "this is it."
I don't think we will ever get a proper restoration of Titanic, ever again, in our lifetime. Maybe, a 100 years later, if the negative survives and if physical media survives till then. I also think, most people will like this, since it looks cleaner and shinier. The overwhelming positive response among reviewers will encourage Cameron to further damage his past photochemical films.
I feel Titanic deserved a much, much better restoration on home video than what Cameron did to it. If this was in the hands of Criterion, it would have looked glorious.
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I wouldn't say a lifetime necessarily. At least for me, I'm 24 years old. I hope that I'm gonna live for many decades after Cameron has died.
Whatever new restoration Titanic gets decades from now though, it will be released in some future format that will definitely not be discs, at least not as we know it. Maybe all films would be stored in personal hard drives for those who want to truly own their movies locally (as compression and storage capabilities get better and better, in future and cheaper services in the style of Kaleidescape), but who knows what technology they will come up with? 4K HDR blu-ray would have been way beyond the wildest dreams of people in the VHS era.
By the way, Criterion wouldn't be able to do a proper restoration, because it would still have to be supervised by Cameron. See the 4K blu-ray that Criterion released of In The Mood For Love, personally supervised by director Wong-Kar Wai, who bathed the whole film in green and said that revisiting it without changes would be pointless. Not in these exact words, but he pretty much declared himself to be revisionist.