Starship Troopers (1997) 4K HDR10 review, US Sony 20th Anniversary UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: DCI-P3. Mastering display luminance levels: 4000/0.005 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 3995 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 2345 nits. Disc type: UHD66.
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Starship Troopers (1997) 4K Dolby Vision review, US Sony 25th Anniversary UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: BT.2020. Mastering display luminance levels: 4000/0.005 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 4342 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 2342 nits. Disc type: UHD100.
I've long been banging the drum of Paul Verhoeven's satirical scifi actioner as being the closest thing to a true RoboCop sequel that we'll ever see, obviously not for continuation of character but for the extrapolation of where that quasi-fascist media-overloaded society was ultimately headed. I'll go one further and say that if it wasn't for Robo then Starship Troopers would be Verhoeven's American masterpiece, it's an extraordinary film that seems to gain prescience with every passing minute. Shot by Verhoeven's long-term cinematic partner Jost Vacano it's a film of two halves, or should I say two film stocks. This superb AmCin article goes into minute detail about the photography
https://ascmag.com/articles/starship...-exterminators but the gist of it is that the interiors and night exteriors were shot on fast, grainy 500-speed emulsion while the daylight exteriors were shot on pristine 50-speed stock, slow but *very* fine grained. The article makes mention of these stocks having different density curves, as well as the different treatments demanded by the various post houses that handled the copious amount of VFX shots, which resulted in a "slight variation to the film's overall look". Well, if it was slight in the photochemical era it's made screamingly obvious in the 4K HDR home video space.
Shot 1.85 on 35mm - so we're already dealing with losing a good chunk of the negative vs 4-perf anamorphic, say - there's a blatant demarcation between interiors/nights and exterior days in terms of the
grain in 4K. Interiors are awash with the stuff, there's a constant shower of buzzing colour noise that will always be just a bit too much for my personal taste. Now I ain't no Paramount executive which means that I love the look of film, right, but this is extreme in a way that's singular on UHD, I don't think I've seen another movie as relatively modern as this look as noisy as this in 4K HDR. And yet when they step outside it's like we've walked into a completely different movie as the rampaging colour noise is quite literally gone, replaced by the silkiest patina of
grain that's almost invisible compared to the uber-graininess of the interiors. Even in the '80s when they were switching between 125-speed 5247 and the fast stock du jour (which was usually grainy as hell) it never bumped like Troopers' stocks do, but then the old 47 was itself much grainier than the 5245 used here. Your brain might even think for a second or two that the exteriors have been DNR'ed, such is the difference here, but there's none of that nastiness in play transfer-wise: this is purely the offset in the film stocks being ruthlessly exposed by both the 4K resolution and the intensity of contrast that HDR creates.
Detail was and is absolutely phenomenal though, Vacano didn't want to shoot with a lot of filters because of the VFX (though there's just a touch of it here and there, like in the scene when Rico and Dizzy are about to make love) and his style was never really that of adding lots of arch affectations to the imagery, it's about capturing it as directly as possible to provide verisimilitude for these fantastical tales. As such the sharpness and detail of this 4K transfer is just astounding, the heavy
grain in the interiors can leech a bit of it off but when you get those big close-ups outside in the blazing sunshine on that tight 50-speed stock, oh mai goodness they're as stunning as anything I've yet seen on 4K UHD irrespective of negative gauge or shooting format. (Even back in the DVD days this had a supremely clean look which I loved, only the lower resolutions and SDR grades of previous transfers and formats never made the two film stocks bump as much as they do here.)
The movie does of coursh feature a huge number of digital VFX shots/comps as well as conventional opticals for things like dissolves and the quality of these shots varies greatly. As the AmCin article says, the usual ILM mainstay of shooting 8-perf VistaVision for VFX plates was largely ignored, shooting regular 4-perf for many VFX shots and reserving the VV capture for the stuff done by Sony's own effects people. This results in a noticeable increase in
grain for most of the live action digital shots, it's not altogether different from the extreme
grain of the VFX-less interiors anyway but in the daylight scenes the extra
grain can stand out next to that pristine live action footage. I'm not sure of the provenance of the VFX whenever they're shooting the laser guns in the training sequences, obviously they're VFX shots but the way that the
grain drops off and the dynamic range really flattens out makes me think they're opticals rather than digital composites, as none of the other digital comps in the movie look like those shots do. Or it could still be digital and that's just the signature 'look' of whatever effects house did those laser bolts.
But this is on par with VFX of the time, whether optical or digital there was usually some kind of visual penalty to be paid though I'm not throwing the CG filmouts (where all the shots with digital work were recorded back onto intermediate stock and intercut with the camera negative to form the complete picture negative) under the bus here, as aside from the increase in
grain and the occasional splotchy background they intercut brilliantly in terms of detail with the live action scenes. And the graphics in the FedNet videos look great, very sharp. This movie's VFX is still astonishingly good and it's enduring proof that CG is not the devil if it's used with surgical precision and no little amount of artistic talent, like when you have a maestro like Phil Tippett directing the CG animation of the bugs. There's loads of practical work too, like the gorgeous miniatures used for the spaceship shots and the full-size bugs that were fabricated, but CG doesn't always hold up over time, to say nothing of the extremes that a 4K HDR transfer can subject them to, but in both cases the CG (and compositing work thereof) is still amazing.
Ah yes, those HDR extremes. This HDR10 grade is perhaps THE Light Cannon™ to end all Light Cannons™, not so much for its peak brightness (which is still verr high) but for its average brightness, what I mean by that is the background brightness level across any given shot. If anyone ever says that this one looks darker than the Blu-ray then they will officially have the worst HDR TV in existence because this thing gives off so much luminance it practically hums. Oddly enough it doesn't make it hard on the eyes (though the opening TriStar logo may make ya squint!) because it maintains such a strong level throughout, what I mean is that when you have a low average level with lots of piercingly powerful highlights then your eyeses must constantly readjust - but when you've got a consistently high level of brightness (even in the darker shots, as oxymoronic as that sounds) then your peepers can settle. As for peaks, specific light sources in whatever scene damn near radiate with intensity, like the overhead fixtures behind Michael Ironside in the classroom scene as he talks to the kids or the brilliance of the bugs' plasma bursts. But as said, despite some of these things blazing away at several thousand nits they didn't have me shielding my eyeses simply because of the average brightness being so buoyant i.e. there's actually a smaller difference here in terms of relative range between the average and peaks than something that has low averages but high peaks. It means that the look is very bright, very bold, some might even consider it suitable for a movie that's as subtle as a brick through a plate glass window but it's not my cup of tea, old sports.
This has a knock-on effect on the black levels too, or rather the perception of them. The density is quite lovely, with blacks actually looking jet black and this gives a richness to the space exteriors in particular, but it's a little more troublesome when the extreme brightness is paired with the daylight exteriors. Y'see, as they were shot on that luscious 50-speed stock then they don't really get a lot of exposure into the darker areas of the image, there's not a lot of shadow detail (think of how the blacks look on Reservoir Dogs' UHD) so while you can still obtain a solid black level there's not too much depth therein. It's a nicely filmic way to get deep blacks at source rather than the ugly clipping done on far too many modern transfers, the problem is that the background portions are so luminous in the daylight scenes - at least on a television with no auto brightness limiting like my Sony ZD9 - that the perceptual effect on the human eye pollutes the blacks and make them look more plugged up and lacking in shadow definition than they already are... which doesn't help when the actors are mostly wearing black uniforms in those military scenes! This is not a unique phenom to Troopers, it's pretty much standard for any kind of moderate to high brightness being pumped out of a TV, but it's because the blacks are already so dark as per this slow 35mm emulsion that it can make the exteriors look almost comically contrasty in this case. The human visual system loves a good dollop of contrast so most of you nits nuts will love it but again it's just a bit too extreme for my liking.
I've always liked the colour of this grade though, it doesn't feel like it's reinventing Troopers (the batshit HDR brightness notwithstanding, but at least the colour doesn't 'break' under such duress). I've never felt like any previous version of the movie made big changes come to think of it, having owned the LD, original R1 DVD, R1 SE DVD, US Blu-ray and the UK Blu-ray at one point or another. What I mean is that while there have certainly been slight differences along the way it hasn't fallen foul of too many dodgy colour grading trends, there's never been a massive lean to making it too yellow or too cyan or too red or whatever, it's just always looked like Starship Troopers and the UHDs' colour follows suit. I love how the skin tones look, they're not rampantly red nor outright orangey, they're right in the sweet spot. Colour doesn't often get a chance to break out owing to the monochromatic production design of the military future but the blood looks great, rich and red, and the flames & explosions have a fiery orange hue. The deep blue lighting of several night scenes is also nicely rendered.
So far, so similar: everything I've spoken of thus far is shared between both the old and new UHD discs as the underlying 4K restoration and HDR10 grading has not changed (or if it has we're talking tiny fractions). But the new disc also has Dobly Vision, which I was greatly looking forward to watching for the way that it would tame the extreme brightness of this grade. It was then revealed by poster TbeRw01 that the DV metadata is not dynamic in any way shape or form:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...2#post20613612, that instead of setting a basic minimum, average and maximum luminance for every individual shot (which is what the automated L1 analysis pass should do) it has one fixed level for each of those aspects across the whole movie. So instead of feeding your display a dynamic level for brightness shot by shot it's just feeding it one constant level throughout. Speculation, and indeed logic itself, would dictate that if something which hits 4000 nits of peak brightness and occasionally several thousands nits of average brightness (!) were mapped as if it was 650 nits peak and 100 nits average then shirley it would look ridiculously clipped and blown out in the highlights (and the rest)?
But with my gear, a Pannysonic 820 player feeding a Sony ZD9 TV directly which uses the low-latency 'player led' version of Dobly, this simply did not happen. What I got was what I usually get with DV on these Sony Light Cannon™ UHDs, a version that's subtly dimmer and is simply not as brutish as how the HDR10 looks. It still looks like HDR, there's still a keen sense of brightness and contrast that SDR could never achieve, but there's simply a betterer balance between light and dark. Without the highlights pumping out the megawatts like before then the black levels in the daylight exteriors aren't so obscured by the light pollution, and the highlights themselves can resolve more information in DV that's being clipped off in my standard 1800-nit HDR10 viewing mode. Some would argue, using that darned logic again, that a fixed tone map is a betrayal of the preservation of artistic intent that's supposed to be DV's dynamic raison d'etre, but as I think that an HDR grade as ridonkulously overzealous as this is an inherent betrayal of artistic intent then I vastly prefer how the calmer DV output looks on a purely subjective level. It's dumb luck that two wrongs have made a right - which I know is what annoys the logic hounds more than anything - but I'll take it.
Another point of difference between the two UHDs is the compression, that for all of Sony's valiant efforts with encoding their early UHDs the 2017 iteration of Troopers fell short IMO. I guess that because it wasn't a worldwide disc (they only have US rights, Disnee owns it in the rest of the world) and didn't have a lot of language options to eat up the bitrate they thought it was fine to put a 129-minute movie onto a double layer UHD66. It wasn't. The 2017 UHD wasn't some StudioCanal-or-Paramount-style digital disaster, I wants to make that
very clear as Sony have never stooped to those levels of utter incompetence, and in the daylight exteriors it still looked fab, but on the interiors it struggled with such constantly intense
grain riddled with colour noise. The
grain looked too coarse, too bitty, and way more 'digital' than it should have, with the bright points in the highlights showing some outright blocking. But this new triple layer encode gives it the room it always needed and it looks vastly more coherent to me. Yes, the heavy
grain on interiors is still there, yes it's still noisy as hell because of the dye clouds and/or scanner noise in the
grain, but it's just way more natural looking without the digital accoutrements cluttering it up and making the colour noise play untidily across people's faces. That's what really distracted me about the old encode, there are so many close-ups of so many beautiful people in this movie and in the old one the colour noise in the
grain is just dancing about going "look at me, tra-la-la-la-la-la!". In the new encode though? It's just neater, more compact, it finally feels like I'm looking at film
grain for the most part rather than a scruffy digital facsimile, and it resolves more of the tiniest details on clothing in some scenes where the old one is frittering that detail away. Less blocking in the highlights too.
I'll wrap up by saying the usual for these Sony do-overs: if you're not a pixel peeper, don't care a jot for Dobly and want your HDR to be so bright it can be used as a replacement for Lasik then this new 25th Anniversary UHD of Starship Troopers is going to be worthless to you. The zingy HDR10 part holds true on both discs to be fair, but the values of the other two are going to have to be assessed far more subjectively. Me, I would've bought the movie again just for one or the other, but having both DV
and a roomier encode makes this an absolute win in my book. The DV metadata may well be 'fake' in a sense but somehow it's still doing everything I want it to be doing re: taming the ugliest excesses of this HDR grade, and although the improved compression can't remove the slight unease I have with such incredibly intense
grain it does at least mean I can get distracted by the
grain itself, rather than the previously iffy encoding thereof. It's just a more 'rounded' image overall, there's slightly less flash but more substance and I genuinely enjoyed the movie more than ever. I laughed more at this than I do some alleged 'comedies'. Medic!
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Nothing worse than a disc touting a new interview with a filmmaker or actor, and it's a fuzzy Zoom thing with glitchy audio. 
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