We watched the 4K UHD HDR Blu Ray edition of James Camerons' The Abyss the other night. I hadn't seen the movie in years, maybe decades. I had a favorable recollection, and I'd read some of the buzz about the 4K release.
The movie looks great in 4K, as one would expect. It's not the revelation that something like Mystery Men was. We watched the theatrical release, not the special edition.
I think the biggest attractions of The Abyss are the set designs, and the underwater sequences. I was an ocean engineering major and the movie pays some lip service to the deep water environment, but it's not much. And while a boomer was essential to the plot, it's not likely that a boomer would be playing around with an unidentified contact on patrol.
The plot is ok, but the ending is a bit of a mess. Maybe the special edition addresses that.
But the topic of owning physical media continues to bounce around, as I expect it likely will as the streaming industry undergoes its changes, and the possibility of favorite titles being made unavailable for marketing purposes or license disputes creates doubt and uncertainty in the minds of fans. Plus, the industry has proven you never really "own" digital media, you just have a revocable license of indeterminate duration.
That's the main reason why I've been buying physical media lately, for titles I think I'd like to ensure I can see whenever I want.
One significant downside of 4K Blu Ray is the physical media. It's much denser than DVD, and less tolerant of flaws or defects in the media. We had a couple of glitches in a brand-new, pristine disk. I wouldn't want to ever drop one of those disks data-side down on a floor, especially a hard one.
Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see an analysis of the energy costs of production, sale and distribution of physical media versus that of streaming titles. With physical media, those are likely high, but they're all at the front end, with likely similar to streaming playback demands. Streaming has costs throughout the title's availability, whether it's being viewed or not. There is the plastics issue with physical media as well.
Maybe we should just stop making and watching movies?
I think that problem is going to sort itself out relatively soon.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:29 Thursday, 14 March 2024