Full Metal Jacket in high-definition
High-definition offers increased picture resolution and fewer compression artefacts, though the film has sadly been reformatted specifically to suit home cinema equipment. The HD-DVD and Blu-Ray versions are both framed at 1.78:1, the HDTV standard ratio; furthermore, their soundtracks are 5.1 surround, also the standard format for home cinema.
To me, this is an unfortunate compromise. Full Metal Jacket was originally released theatrically at 1.85:1 with mono sound. Before 2001, all Warner laserdisc, VHS and DVD versions were 1.33:1 unmatted, in mono, which was Kubrick's favoured video format.
When Warner remastered A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket in 2001, they produced 5.1 surround mixes (optional for A Clockwork Orange, thankfully), though at least they kept the images 1.33:1 unmatted. Not uncoincidentally, the remastering took place after Kubrick's death.
Now, however, the new high-definition versions have no fidelity to Kubrick's intentions at all, and are instead formatted with home cinema audiences in mind. Just because people buy a 16:9 HDTV, every film shouldn't have to be exactly the same ratio. Just because people have 5.1 surround speakers, films shouldn't have to utilise all of them.
The easiest solution would have been for HDTV to have adopted the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio as a standard, instead of the almost-but-not-quite-the-same 1.77:1. Because the two ratios are different, films are being cropped to fit HDTV.
The problem was the same when the CRT TV ratio was set at 1.33:1 - ever-so-slightly different from the Academy theatrical standard 1.37:1. This means that the thousands of old films shown theatrically in Academy (basically, almost every film before the mid-1950s) has to be ever-so-slightly cropped for VHS and DVD.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray offer improved picture quality, though the version of Full Metal Jacket that most closely match Kubrick's own intentions is the unremastered Warners DVD from 1999.
Labels: Stanley_Kubrick
3 Comments:
My thought exactly. What a shame!
"The doctors told me it was Pneumonia, but I knew what it was. A victim of the modern age, poor, poor girl."
F.
With so much more storage capacity in high-definition, it would surely have been possible to make it 1.85:1 anamorphic, with an optional mono soundtrack, at least.
Why not release both ratios on the same disc, so viewers can choose for themselves? Maybe there's not enough room and the picture quality would be compromised.
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