READY PLAYER ONE

Steven Spielberg channels his inner nerd, combining VR, dinosaurs and even Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ into the world of Oasis. It’s a clear justification for 4K, and perhaps beyond.

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Steven Spielberg still has it. At 71 years of age, he can deliver a techno-thriller that’s entertaining, that’s beautifully made, and that is not idiotic in depicting possible future technology. It’s 2045 and most of America’s people spend most of their time in a VR world called Oasis. Its creator (played by Mark Rylance) has died a few years earlier and has willed this halftrillion-dollar world to the first person who can complete a particular quest within Oasis. Our young stars, Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke, hope to be the ones. As does a big business led by Ben Mendolsohn. He has tasked hordes of players to win control for him.

One could quibble about Oasis. The graphics looks like a video game. But will computer graphics look like that in 27 years? Or will they be photo-realistic by then? It’s now 17 years since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and we still have not successfully traversed the uncanny valley. So perhaps it will indeed remain before us even in 2045.

The movie will be fun for everyone, but is especially rewarding for fans of 1980s popular culture. The young leads do their job well, but the stand-outs are Mendolsohn, who seems to have found a fine calling as a villain, and Rylance, who we saw last as the small boat owner in Dunkirk. I still find it hard to believe that it’s the same actor performing both roles. Dolby This disc is full-on Dolby, with both Dolby Atmos sound and Dolby Vision High Dynamic Range. The audio is fully encompassing, but do note that the disc defaults to a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. You’ll need to change it if you want intended use of the height channels. The surround is fully employed and there’s plenty of impressive bass.

There’s a gritty look to the picture, to which I’ll return shortly. It suits the somewhat decrepit future world Spielberg depicts. Blacks are impressive. Most interiors are quite dark, with bright highlights. There wasn’t any apparent crushing of whites, so as always I’m not sure how much of the 12 bits of resolution available to Dolby Vision was actually used. Dolby Vision is likely over-specified for today’s film and video productions. And that’s a good thing, because it means that everything is captured. Grain I’ve got to talk about grain. And about how this vision was produced.

I didn’t notice grain in the movie the first time I watched it through. That was on the Ultra-HD disc. Until I got to the section in Chapter 7 which is set in ‘The Shining’. Then there was grain. Film grain. And I loved it. You see, Spielberg has taken Kubrick’s The Shining — fortunately a Warner Bros property — and set a section of the action within it. Clearly he’s used actual footage from the film and digitally inserted the Oasis avatars.

What you see is The Shining in pristine condition, but with noticeable grain. Grain everywhere, as you’d expect from a 1980 movie shot non-anamorphically on 35mm film. Aside from the grain, the old footage is clean and clear. For me, this section was the highlight. It lifted the movie from clever and interesting to fascinating. Indeed, to the extent that one can apply the word to technical matters, this section is a demonstration of special effects virtuosity.

I’d watched the movie on my own 2017 model LG OLED, set up the way I like it. Which means, with the sharpness control turned down to zero. Then, later, I was reviewing a different TV, popped in this disc, and was startled by the level of grain that was also in the live action sequences. That was emphasised by the default sharpness setting of that TV, but once it had been drawn to my attention, I started watching more closely. And, yes, there is plenty of grain in the live action scenes. Far less in the Oasis scenes.

Defect? I’d say no. It’s part of the conceit of the movie. Oasis is the place to be. It’s more perfect than the messy, grubby real world. It doesn’t have grain.

Except in The Shining. And there the grain is of a different character to that of the live action scenes. In the latter, the grain is mostly in the shadings. In The Shining it’s ubiquitous.

That’s the kind of thing that you can see on Ultra-HD Blu-ray. That’s not the kind of thing you can see on regular Blu-ray.

Of course I rewatched The Shining section on the included standard Blu-ray disc. There was still a hint of grain in backgrounds, but only a hint. It was a very different experience. On Ultra-HD Blu-ray, The Shining looked like film. On regular Blu-ray it looked like... what? I doubt I would have felt this way a couple of years ago, but it looked kind of smeared and uncertain. Ready Player One is perhaps the first movie I’ve seen where you can tell almost at a glance the difference between full HD and Ultra HD.

According to IMDB a number of different video capture platforms were used for this movie. The Oasis scenes were largely digital, using 2.8K Arriraw. That would mostly be all the motion capture stuff. The live action material was captured on good old 35mm Kodak film. But that’s not the end of it. Apparently the Digital Intermediate was 2K.

If the resolution was bottlenecked down to 2K along the way to Ultra HD, why does it matter whether you watch UHD or FHD?

Usually in the film world 2K actually means 2K. That is, 2048 pixels across, not the 1920 pixels of full HD. Again according to IMDB, distribution formats for the film were digital cinema and 70mm film. I expect that Mr Spielberg mostly experienced the finished product on 70mm. All the resolution of a 2K finished product can be fully captured and presented on 70mm film. But even in digital cinema, the display format is usually 2K or 4K. Again, this means 2048 or 4096, not 1920 or 3840. Either way, all the detail in the 2K digital intermediate would have been fully presented.

But when you convert 2048 to 1920, you inevitably lose resolution. Indeed, there’s almost certainly a low pass filter involved during the transfer. That’s not needed for random stuff like film grain, but regular patterns in the fine details of the picture could produce unsightly aliasing if not filtered.

Ultra HD — 3840 pixels — would be enough to capture most of that detail.

So, what can be done? Can the cinema workflow and home formats be aligned? Unlikely. Both are here to stay. As in this movie’s split between the real world and Oasis, we must cope with two different worlds in which video standards have been set. Until now I’ve thought that the move to 8K under way in consumer video would deliver little. But now I’m starting to reconsider.