Jurassic Park - 30th Anniversary Edition UHD - Blu-ray Forum

VickPS · 08-27-2022, 07:20 PM

Humble apologies for the premature Thread, but i've figured the earlier we start properly discussing the upcoming edition, the more chances we might have of getting the very first proper Home-Video edition of this movie. Since, with the exclusion of Jurassic Park 3D Blu-Ray (the most criticized version of the movie we got, yet only one supervised by Spielberg and actually stunning in 3D) every single Home-Video release since 1994 has been a complete disaster in capturing Dean Cundey original cinematography.

For those unfamiliar with the film's original presentation, here a video compilation of every VFX shot in their original 35mm form:

Here a long and insightful interview with the DOP after a 35mm screening:

And here an American Cinematographer article:

https://ascmag.com/articles/jurassic...the-box-office

After hearing/reading about what he had to say, how important "visual storytelling", "mood", "painting with light" and "subtract light from a scene" are to him, you might get the sense he's describing a completely different movie than what we watched in our homes for 30 years.
We know he wanted an extremely realistic look, because we had to "believe the unbelievable", a contrasty, dark and shadowy presentation because we "had to understand what's going on, but not enough to figure how they made it". We know he wanted every scene to look different from the other, from comfortable and warm to cold and pitch black in the next scene. A never flat nor samey looking movie.
The exact opposite of what Universal gave us, in short, as Jurassic Park in Home-Video always looked colorful and joyous thanks to the extreme pink push in white balance, bright and plain flat thanks to its brightened shadows and compressed highlights, and especially samey due to the adjustments carried to every single scene.

Saying this groundbreaking motion picture went from a horror, classy looking film with immortal visual effects, to a children TV serial shot on video with dated CGI, isn't actually hyperbole. But who's to blame?
While this isn't a "Star Wars Special Edition" situation in the slightest, one would still picture hardcore fans fighting for years to get the chance to see their favorite movie in its intended presentation, even just for wanting to see dinosaurs looking real again instead of dated CGI creations. But no: most fans of this movie actually love what we currently have, and are actually responsible for the UHD first release's familiar grading due to the insane level of criticism aimed towards the 3D version at the time. All you have to do is look at comments under "Sicky T" Youtube and Twitter comparisons: lots of people love pink, flat and colorful video presentation. They think that's the original movie.

[Show spoiler]

*The above 35mm video and frames are sourced from an untouched 4K scan of a positive, made on top of the line equipment by a competent and professional projectionist who also compared the finished 1080p encoding to the actual film projected.
The UHD frames are from highdefdiscnews, the absolute best when it comes to UHD uncompressed screenshots and SDR conversion, except for the last one from Caps_a_holic.

Will we finally get a faithful official release of Jurassic Park next year? And in the remote case, will it be harshly criticized for being "revisionist"? Do we actually want a faithful release, or are many among us too accustomed to colorful and "appealing" video presentations?

P.S. Apologies again for opening this Thread before an official announcement (and for such an heavy pictures loaded OP), but Universal already started announcing merchandise for the 30th Anniversary, which is where the logo on top of the Thread is from, and we know for a fact an announcement of this UHD edition is imminent.
I think between the movie presentation across formats, the severe cropping happened since LaserDisc, and the superior, Award Winning revolutionary Cinema DTS track, there's plenty to discuss regardless.

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