Review of The Last Emperor (1987) by Justin A — 14 Jan 2011

Great movie, long and epic but beautifully done.

Instead, I'm going to rant about the release. I don't want to bash Criterion here, because they often do amazing work. But they simply followed the whims of DP Storaro, who is a complete lunatic. So sadly, this release is cropped down to 2:1, per Storaro's long-standing loony theories about aspect ratio and DVD. Criterion doesn't need to follow his wishes on this, and it's unfortunate that it may be a long time yet before we get to see a film like this released on BD without being cropped.

Secondly, Criterion really needed to release this on two discs. One 50gb BD is not enough. This film is almost 3 hours long, and is very grainy. Sadly, because of how many hours of extra features they jammed onto this disc, the feature only averages about 26mbps, which is not enough to compress the grain properly, which becomes a sludgy macroblocky mess. You can't escape the chunkiness in the texture, and it's really unfortunate. The bitrate on this kind of material with this much entropy/grain really needed to be in the high 30s to keep the compression artifacting down, because you can see the impact all over the place if you pay attention to the grain. It's unfortunate, and while it's not quite as bad as the BD release of Kagemusha, it is still disappointing.

This really requires a re-release in the future, WITHOUT listening to Storaro and maintaining OAR, and to dedicate a full 50gb disc to the main feature so the grain stays clean and beautifully preserved without being a blocky mess.

It is also difficult to tell where in the process it snuck it, but the way the film blows out in highlights also looks pretty weird, and looks more like somewhere along the line it was clipped in the digital domain, because it doesn't look like film blowout to me. But I can't necessarily lay that at the feet of Criterion, seems like they're working from a pretty old HD master, so to do this film properly I think requires starting with a new 4k minimum scan.

Anyway, the Criterion BD is disappointing, and far from a reference-quality release.