James Cameron really is doing all he can to become the new George Lucas, isn’t he? Not content with adopting the heavily greenscreened, CGI-created atmosphere of the Star Wars prequels with Avatar, now he’s going back and “fixing” earlier movies even though no-one asked him to. Bleeding Cool caught Cameron’s reference to a new Aliens special edition in a recent interview:
I just did a complete remaster of Aliens personally with the same colorist I worked with on Avatar. It’s spectacular. We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed, color-corrected it, end-to-end, every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally. Because it was shot on a high-speed negative, that was a new negative that didn’t pan out too well and got replaced the following year. So it’s pretty grainy. We got rid of all the grain. It’s sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it’s ever looked.
Okay, so it’s only cleaning up the movie stock – No “Ripley shot first” moment here, at least that we know about – but, come on: Wasn’t the graininess part of the appeal of Aliens? I’m not sure the world really needed a brighter, shinier, glossier Space Marines, but then again: I’m not a multi-million-dollar generating movie director.
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