The Video: Sizing Up the Picture
I'm feeling a little bold today, so I'm going to go ahead and say it: 'The Thin Red Line's' 1080p AVC MPEG-4 transfer (aspect ratio: 2.35:1) is the single greatest high definition transfer I have ever seen. I mean that. The bar has been raised. And now there's something to compare all other releases against.
In the booklet, the following note is made about the transfer: "Supervised and approved by director Terrence Malick and cinematographer John Toll, this new high-definition digital transfer was created on a Spirit 4K Datacine from the original 35mm camera negative in 4K resolution. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker were manually removed using MTI's DRS system and Pixel Farm's PFClean system."
Basically, what all that means is that a whole lot of painstaking work went into restoring the movie. You really have to see this transfer for yourself.
From the opening shot, of an alligator sliding into water, you are impressed by the image clarity, the amount of depth, and the detail. But as the movie goes along, your jaw drops consistently: when they enter into the jungle and every emerald-green leaf is vividly rendered; the dirt on the actors' faces after a brutal siege; and the thousands of wild life photography instances – the birds, lizards, leaves, and the coconut with the leaf jutting out of it that ends the movie.
All the basics are covered too – skin tones look amazing, blacks are deep and bottomless (exemplified by a brief sequence of a nighttime attack on an airbase that was probably longer in a more abstract version of the movie), and for all that after-the-fact fussing, the movie never seems scrubbed clean or mushy in that typically DNR way.
Elsewhere on the disc, the small troupe of editors said that Malick was always drawn to the footage where there was a lot of depth – with soldiers marching to and fro in the background, etc. – and this transfer totally dignifies those decisions. This transfer totally outdid every expectation I had for the release, and, as I said, has set the new