Chen G.

So he still hasn’t gotten around to make those experimental films he’s been promising for the last fifty years? Why am I not surprised...

It was always a much cheaper-looking film than The Empire Strikes Back. That’s not a slate against Lucas, it’s just the way it is: Empire had three times the budget, and was made with a lot of the special effects techniques and production crew already in working order.

A lot of my favourite films are set in exotic, imaginative and/or pictorial environments, but the story is always what captivates me. The world is window-dressing.

Not really, no. It can be woven into the story with varying levels of effectiveness, but it never is THE story of any movie.

I don't see what's wrong with that. Ironically, there's a George Lucas quote that comes to mind: Hypocritical given who's saying it, I know, but nonetheless it is largely true.

Its a good looking movie, to be sure, but my memory of it was a resounding "meh." Nothing too bad, but not something I would rewatch.

Seems like waaaay too much work.

Yeah, you always want to scan a piece of film at a resolution where the pixels are smaller than the grains.

Probably. To say that, with a film like Star Wars, one scans the “original camera negative” is a bit misleading. In a film so laden with optical effects, the “original camera negative” is in many sections one generation away from a true camera negative, and therefore contains much more grain AND much less detail. It would be curious to know just how much resolving power the 4K version really has. Stills from a 4K scan of slow, well-exposed Super-35mm resolve 3.2K. But those kinds of slow stocks didn’t exist back then, and the composite shots will resolve less still. Probably still more than 2K, though, hence why it still looks better in 4K.

JJ Abrams made it a point to shoot VII and IX on film (just like he pandered to puppetry fans with a puppet Maz in The Rise of Skywalker) but I wouldn’t call it particularly grainy. It just didn’t undergo the DNR that Lucas did to the originals. Episode VIII was a mix of film and digital, with grain simulation on the digital footage. DP Steve Yedlin made it a point to prove to the watching audience that they wouldn’t actually be able to tell the difference, even within a single given scene. Due to using a variety of film and digital formats, all three sequel films mix spherical and anamorphic formats, which I’m less than happy about. Rogue One was digital and anamorphic. Sith was digital and spherical.

I haven't seen evidence of studio interference on Trevorrow's Jurassic films.

People tend not to not have an interest in things that they aren't very good at doing...

United Artists was a film studio... I'm just judging this on a case-to-case basis. I don't think Lynch, specifically, had a good Dune or Return of the Jedi in him. He has a very particular skillset that doesn't seem to lend itself to big spectacle films. It'd be like asking Christopher Nolan to do a comedy. Its just not in his blood.

Not always. Some directors just aren't cut-out for big blockbusters. Lynch strikes me as that kind of director. Its like back when United Artists wanted Michaelangelo Antonioni for The Lord of the Rings. Nope. Like Lynch with Dune, he was chosen not because of his skillset, but because he was the new "big" name after Blowup.

The issue with Attack of the Clones is that out of the stated 1080p resolution, they were probably only getting around 1.6K at the most, so its a pretty big upscale to 4K. Plus, its only 8-bit colour so it was never going to benefit much from HDR. I hear Revenge of the Sith fares much better, though.

So I’ve heard, but I’ve never seen any proof that it was indeed this particular scene. Plus, it never looked terribly digital to me. Certainly not in the way that Attack of the Clones looks. The Obi-Wan shot looks softer because it’s in red: the magenta layer of colour film is always less sharp and captures less detail, and so red colours and scenes lit in red would alway look softer. It’s also why one uses blue or green screens for composites: those colours look sharper. However, it does makes sense to use the digital camera for a night-time scene, so it’s certainly the prime candidate.

There's no scene in The Phantom Menace that jumps out as having been shot on a prototype digital camera. One has to wonder what that mythical digital footage is and what it amounts to. Other than the CGI scenes, the footage never quite looks digital, in spite of George Lucas' best (i.e. worst) attempts to smoothen and denoise it so as to make it uniform with its two sequels. If it doesn't look good, its probably more to do with the DI used on the film.

True, but surely any movie-going experience must boil down to "Did I enjoy what I watched? Did I dislike it?" If you didn't enjoy something - much less if you disliked it - than all the appreciation in the world makes precisely zero difference.

Does that matter if you don’t enjoy the movie?

Nope. 35mm resolves around 3K. 65mm resolves less than 7K at the most, and much less with older optics and stocks; probably closer to 5K. You’re conflating resolving power with oversampling and/or perceived temporal resolving power.

What films from 50 years ago would resolve 6K? Even those films that were shot on 65mm and DIDN’T involve any optical effects would not have resolved as much given the lenses available at the time.

Anyway, was Lynch ever a good match for this type of filmmaking? He's not the sort of director that pops to my mind when it comes to effects-laden, large-scale genre films. Maybe its just a case of a producer choosing an up-and-coming director for his name rather than his skillset?

And anything in a Middle Eastern setting in general.

I like the sequels fine. Put together, the whole thing makes for a nicely cohesive trilogy with a surprisingly poignnat ending. There should never have been a Pirates 4. I suppose part of the reason is that I wasn't too enamored with the first film to begin with. I mean, its a good action-adventure film..and?

Underwater photography loses a lot of the would-be image quality, anyway.