Rogue Nation, then. I dug this flick when I first saw it and nothing has changed my mind, it's a proper twisty-turny spy thriller (though is actually a heist movie at its heart) very much in the mold of De Palma's original, and like that film it doesn't make a great deal of sense but it tries its damndest to make it stick, has some super set pieces (LOVE dat motorcycle chase) and Rebecca Ferguson is the ace in the hole, not simply a subordinate to Ethan but a main player in her own right. This came out the same year as Spectre and there's no doubt that Bond got his ass kicked by Ethan and Ilsa.
The UHD is a very solid upgrade over the BD but it comes down to the HDR. so people looking for a boost in resolution and resolution alone will find little to cheer. The upscaled UHD does still resolve everything with a touch more crispness however, like lines on faces and with the fine pattern on Benji's shirt when he's doing his "he is not my friend" speech during his polygraph test, and the grain is tighter than the BD. Yes, there be grain here because the movie was shot entirely on 35mm apart from the underwater torus sequence which was Alexa 65 (Tom Cruise is not a fan of digital, at all, and he dictates such things on these shows, they almost didn't go with anamorphic on MI3 because he was so concerned about all the dodgy focus pulls in MI2), and the DI was ultimately finished out to 2K 10-bit DPX files with the negative scanned on an Arri, according to AC August '15.
As for dat HDR, the first thing that struck me was how warm the exteriors now looked, there's a golden tinge to it that the BD lacks which is especially obvious in the 'six months later' bit and in the Morocco stuff later on. It's kinda like what Nolan's movies look on UHD, but
unlike those films the skin tones in RN don't suffer, they actually look fresher and livelier than they do on the BD equivalent which has that usual kind of paler look to people's skin. The black level feels a bit lighter than the BD, it's not some wholesale Nolan-esque wrecking of the blacks but it raises them a touch and thankfully doesn't feel too out of place.
What this HDR grade excels at is retention of highlight detail, there's some beautiful stuff in here and yet it never feels like the brightness itself is going to cook your eyes in their sockets, as with Ghost Protocol the distribution of brightness is exceptionally well balanced across the frame. Clouds, lights, other speculars, the gang's all here and this UHD bring back a ton of it. Some shots still look a bit clipped in the highlights despite the HDR, but according to DP Robert Elswit they deliberately chose to blow out the highlights in the Morocco stuff, to make it look more "contrasty and harsh", and that intent has been maintained (although the UHD still retains more highlight information in these instances than the BD).
Spotted no encoding anomalies despite the constant presence of grain, but as this movie was shot on finer-grained modern stocks I'm not surprised that the compression can handle it better, whereas the first two MI movies both have the odd moment with some blotchy chroma noise.
I don't normally take photos these days because of andreas, capsaholic etc but I thought I'd do some anyway just so you's could understand what I'm seeing.
Always, always, ALWAYS bear in mind that these are not 100% accurate images to either source, just pay attention to what I'm trying to show you.
Crooze in the room during the 'six months later' bit, you can see how warmed up it is but note how the skin doesn't look as one-note as it does on the Nolan movies that I compared it to, there's still nuance and variation there rather than a flat orange tone smeared onto his skin. Also note the improved highlights on the wall and on his shoulder.
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BD
UHD
Opera house, don't look at how desaturated the colour is on the UHD, that's the camera, but just look at the difference in the highlights. Oh mai. (I know that the lighting then dims in that shot but that's the same frame)
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BD
UHD
Lastly something from the bike chase to show how warmed up it looks, the greenery looks more verdant as well. The hill on the right doesn't look that rusty on either version, the saturation's a bit high on the camera but it's the same for both photos so it still gives some idea of the relative difference between them.
[Show spoiler]
BD
UHD
It's been a pleasure to revisit these films on UHD, mostly, so well done Paramount and bring on Fallout, which I'm sure will be another corker of an MI flick.
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