UHD BLU-RAY

Three decades on, Bruce Willis keeps things swinging.

Bruce Willis swings into 4K action with the UHD release of ‘Die Hard’, while ‘Deadpool 2’ shows that sequels can succeed...

Sometimes it’s troubling to revisit a loved movie from the past. Especially one that originally came out when you were yourself much younger, and when you first saw it close to its release. A competent movie will strike all the right cultural notes... for its time. But then things move on and too often they can become cringe-worthy.

But not so with Die Hard. That’s why they keep on making sequels, I suppose, and probably will until Bruce Willis is too decrepit to move. The most recent one was five years ago, in 2013. A further one — McClane — has been announced. The source of all this activity first appeared 30 years ago.

The story: it’s Christmas Eve and a superbly well-prepared crime team are out to steal some US$640 million of ‘negotiable bearer bonds ’( apparently as good as cash) from the incomplete Nakatomi building in Los Angeles. The then-incomplete Fox building in LA was used. John McClane (Willis) is a New York cop who has just flown in to try to patch things up with his estranged wife. She works for Nakatomi Corporation. He joins her at the work Christmas party.

The crime team are led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in his first movie role), a former terrorist. McClane slips away into the deserted building and gets reluctantly caught up in the action. His task is not helped by the LAPD first being unwilling to believe his report, and then messing things up when they do get there.

It’s got everything, really. There’s a quite sincere love story. There are characters we love to hate: people like Harry Ellis, a man of limitless Wall Street arrogance, and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson of the LAPD. It’s hard to hate Rickman’s character because of his charm, even though he’s truly the evil one. And then there’s Karl, played by the Soviet defector, ballet dancer Alexander Godunov (his only other really significant role had been as a young Amish farmer in Witness a couple of years earlier).

And there’s Bruce Willis, who gets the ‘everyman’ thing perfect, with gallows humour and the occasional moving flash of sincerity. (And, by golly, he looks so young.)

Am I fibbing about how good this movie is? Crowd wisdom on IMDB gives it 8.2/10. It has also been selected by US Library of Congress’ National Film Registry for being ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’.

Apparently there’s a 30th anniversary version of this movie out, presumably with a Blu-ray loaded with special features. I was provided the single disc release, which contains only the UHD disc. As is common with UHD, there isn’t much in the way of special features on the disc — two commentary tracks, plus a commentary subtitle track. The bits of the last I sampled seem quite informative, explaining at least one hole I’d better not mention, since it would be quite the spoiler. Also included are bookmarks. I wish these were on all discs.

Things don’t look too good to start with. As the title starts to roll, a weirdly distorted 20th Century Fox logo fills the screen. It has been squashed flat, as though stretched horizontally from a 4:3 to 2.35:1 aspect. But then the movie proper starts with a Boeing 747 landing. It’s not sharp, but not especially soft. It looks like 1980s-era film.

The bottleneck in terms of picture quality seems to be the source material, the film itself. Or at least whatever print was used, but some of it seemed to be right from the camera. For example, a shot of the criminal’s truck approaching is very soft for its entire duration. Much of the action is shot in fairly dark environments, and all but the special effects was shot on fairly high speed, high contrast 35mm Eastman film stock, and is consequently somewhat grainy.

I did some quite close examination of individual frames on this version against the same frames on the original Blu-ray release from a decade ago. Clearly they were taken from different prints, framed differently, with different colour balance. The UHD