"Well the way I see it it's exactly the same. There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics. They miss out on seeing the whole thing. Take South America for example. In South America thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go. They just like disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time when there was no people. Right?"
"Well the way I see it it's exactly the same. There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics. They miss out on seeing the whole thing. Take South America for example. In South America thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go. They just like disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time when there was no people. Right?"
You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
I too turned off the DV on the street part. No green splotches with only marginal difference so I get my head chewed off and we have two schools: ones that haven't even bought the disc and others pointing out a caps screenshot saying the details are not even anything gained by 4K.
Owning the Arrow version too and being an Arrow fanboy, you would have to be blind not to see the obvious improvement in the UHD version. This is sheer hysteria and I will be the absolute first to put down Kino if it applies. Just not the case here at all.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) 4K Dolby Vision review, US Kino UHD disc. HDR metadata: Mastering display colour primaries: DCI-P3. Mastering display luminance levels: 1000/0.0001 max/min nits. Maximum Content Light Level: 1000 nits. Maximum Frame Average Light Level: 492 nits. Disc type: UHD100.
Phil Kaufman's masterful update of Body Snatchers was lensed by Michael Chapman, who cut his teeth as Gordon Willis' camera operator and became a fine cinematographer in his own right. The filmmakers wanted a very noir-ish sensibility to the lighting and camera work, drenching it in shadow and lighting faces from below or the side to play up the other-worldly aspect, framed with canted angles and lots of negative space to further unsettle the viewer. The choice of format was unremarkable for the time, 1.85 spherical on what I'd assume was 5247, the go-to motion picture stock for the period, but that's not a knock on the imagery, far from it: it's the workaday quality of the format that makes it such a great fit for what is a very quiet, insidious alien invasion story. The lighting and composition are what do most of the work, and so it proves on this 4K HDR rendition.
Another assumption would be that this is a new transfer from the OG negative performed by MGM (good lawd I wish Kino would do "about the transfer" blurbs with their stuff) that supplants the previous HD/2K efforts that were done from the interpositive by MGM and then Shout Factory. I never saw much point in buying the latter for what seemed like a marginal upgrade, having owned the excellent Arrow BD, but this 4K UHD is a big step up. Fine detail is hugely improved, not in aggressive "sharpness" per se but in all the tiny things that make up an image, all the little background details in hair, clothing, walls, sets, buildings, cars etc, they resolve so much more information and wide shots in particular benefit significantly. Grain is very fine indeed, rendered in a tight patina that rarely spikes although the almost complete lack of opticals is a welcome twist, not just for VFX but also scene transitions, there are virtually no fades or dissolves that link one scene to the next which make the grain look all dupey and rough. The title sequence is an obvious exception but even that looks very respectable and hasn't been bludgeoned with DNR. A few early scenes have a slightly ‘hazy’ feel but that’s due to some in-camera filter that was used and has nothing to do with the transfer itself.
Colour is excellent, looking every bit like a '70s movie with a slightly pastel feel but fresher and livelier at the same time, with more differentiation to individual skin tones and less of that slightly orangey cast you see on older transfers. Green tends to leech into many background shots owing to the large amount of night exteriors, them having to contend with either fluorescent or mercury vapor lighting which both read as green on film, but skin tones mostly stay true despite that. If anything Donald Sutherland's face can run just a little too pinky at times, perhaps because of his natural complexion battling against the colour correction needed for those lighting sources (as green as they may seem, they're a LOT greener with no colour correction applied at all). Primaries are plenty bold when needed to be, like the greens of inner-city parks or the gleaming red of Brooke Adams' lipstick. The pink flowers of the alien plants really zing as well. Saturation has been given a boost in general vs prior editions but it never overdoes it, and tonally it fits very well with the exaggerated lighting style.
The HDR grading is a joy to watch, not because it's some "reference" (ugh) grade that'll melt your face off but because it provides a good kick of brightness to the speculars whilst supporting and enhancing the original photography. Interior scenes are often shown with a very dominant single light source and if that were too bright it'd distract, but they're brought up nicely without ever overpowering the actual scene. Far off lights in the city have a determined twinkle and add real depth to the darker scenes, of which there are many! The black levels don't go all the way down to 'letterbox' values but this is no bad thing as it lets you peer into the numerous shadows, and density is still maintained i.e. this is no greyblack filth. As a result the contrast looks superb when allied with those isolated spots of brightness, the interplay between light and shadow has always been part of this movie's visual DNA and the HDR grade is very much a friend to that intent. You get some more highlight detail too, notably in the bit near the end when Bennell is causing havoc at the pod farm and the sparks and fire and explosions are all going off. There's some gentle density flutter in a few of the darker scenes but no major flickering going on.
So that's the actual film transfer, and it's great, but what about the compression of it? I jumped in with a lot of words when seeing early caps from a certain poster, bemoaning the apparently horrible chroma compression (big chunks of random green/pink blocks that infest the image), but caps from other sources showed very little of this effect and in motion it's a complete and utter non-issue. This is technically a review of the Dolby Vision version, whereby the Full Enhancement Layer (FEL) would be thought of as correcting some of the chroma compression, but I went and scanned through the movie again playing the HDR10 layer on my calibrated HDR viewing mode and, again, the chroma compression is virtually transparent. How/why other users might be seeing these giant splotches of chroma noise I don't know, but on a Panasonic 820 player feeding a Sony 65ZD9 viewed from 7ft away there was no chroma issue there. There are traces of this noise in the image if I get close enough to the screen, like literal 'nose up to it' close, but the grain is dithering it away at any kind of normal viewing distance.
HOWEVER....this disc does not get away clean. People may have noticed a trend lately for encodes to fall apart in the brightest (or brightest parts of) scenes, that everything in the image looks fine except for the portions where the brightness values greatly exceed everything else and break down into very blocky bits (like properly conventional blocking, not the chroma stuff). It's the downfall of Shout's Halloween UHD, it's been mentioned as a problem on Paramount's recent UHD of Juice, and it's right here on Kino's Body Snatchers too. All three have high/very high average bitrates for their base layers, all three have FELs that are very high bitrate for what they are, and all three are from separate labels/studios, and to me that's a tiny bit worrying. Once is unfortunate, twice is careless, but three instances of this phenom on entirely separate releases is pointing to something bigger.
It helps that Body Snatchers takes place in many darkened locales so it doesn't even flag up as a problem until a fair bit into the film, but once I clocked it I couldn't help but notice it. During the scene at Kibner's book party when Bennell is on the phone and that vertical tube light is behind him, the light is a pulsing tower of blocks. In the scene when Bennell examines the 'body' at the mud baths and pulls back the sheet, the bright lampshade hanging over them is blocking all over. On the hour mark when Bennell goes outside to talk with Kibner and the SanFran skyline is visible beyond, the blue sky is a seething mass of blocking, same goes for the blue skies in the sequence when Bennell is in the phone booth trying to talk to various people in authority and shown wandering around the city. And there are several other scenes that have a much brighter portion of the image that is blocking like mad while the rest of it looks perfick - but in other scenes the brighter highlights look fine and even shots of skies look nicely fine grained! Oh, and this is IN Dolby Vision by the way, so for all of its powers of recovery with FEL even it can only do so much.
That said, the HDR10 is pretty goddamned lousy without the FEL. What I mean is that, yes, the DV output has some noticeable issues but it wasn't so bad that it became a major source of distraction because the parts in question are quite brief. The problem with the HDR10 layer is that not only does it retain these issues with luminance blocking (looking even worse in the process) it's also got several other spots where the compression craps out and it's more noticeable in the longer term. The grain in general can appear to "pulse" in HDR10 rather than looking contiguous from frame to frame as it does in DV (much like Halloween's HDR10 layer) and there are other issues. Take the scene at approx 19 minutes when Bennell and Elizabeth are eating in his garden (containing the wonderful "googly eyes" bit): the shots of Donald Sutherland are fine but every time it cuts back to Brooke Adams her face is really badly compressed, looking smeary and blocky, and yet the bitrate of this entire sequence hovers in the 70+ Mb/s range! There isn't a precipitous drop every time it goes back to her and it's just so strange that these kinds of random things are creeping in. In Dolby Vision playback the compression of this scene is MASSIVELY improved, now there's nothing obvious whenever it cuts to her and the bitrate peaks at well over 90 Mb/s in DV because of the extra information that's being folded in - but the point is that a constant 70 Mb/s should be more than enough to render such a scene! It's one thing when you get StudioCanal-type shit that drops down into literal single figures and the fidelity just totally collapses, but this sort of thing is baffling.
All told, this UHD has a gorgeous new transfer that serves this classic well, giving it a freshness and vitality that supports the imagery but doesn't seek to contemporise it to any great degree. It's fantastic and was clearly done by people with both taste and knowledge. Unfortunately it's let down by some so-so encoding, albeit with a different set of problems vs what was initially reported by some folks! The rebuilt Dolby Vision output does its best to plug the gaps and just about gets away with it, even picky ol' me was so wrapped up in the movie that the brief indiscretions weren't damaging, but I'd be less inclined to be so generous towards playback in HDR10 only.
Will we see the same compression issues watching an HDR to SDR conversion as seen when watching it in HDR10?
Good question. If the conversion is flattening the highlights then it could clip out the junk in the brighter spots, though the general meh-ness of the HDR10 layer (the “pulsing” grain) would remain.
[B]All told, this UHD has a gorgeous new transfer that serves this classic well, giving it a freshness and vitality that supports the imagery but doesn't seek to contemporise it to any great degree. It's fantastic and was clearly done by people with both taste and knowledge. Unfortunately it's let down by some so-so encoding, albeit with a different set of problems vs what was initially reported by some folks! The rebuilt Dolby Vision output does its best to plug the gaps and just about gets away with it, even picky ol' me was so wrapped up in the movie that the brief indiscretions weren't damaging, but I'd be less inclined to be so generous towards playback in HDR10 only.
Once again cat, appreciate the in-depth review/analysis of another favorite of mine in 4K. Even more now, can't wait to watch this weekend!
I finally watched my copy that I picked up during the last Kino sale, and it looked absolutely great without DV enabled on my Sony UBP-X700. No green splotches, pulsating grain or glaring compression artefacts to report.
Last edited by LeDroitDeTuer; 01-23-2022 at 01:54 PM.
Forgive this question, I'm sure it's already been asked: How does the included Blu-ray compare to the Shout Factory disc?
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