4K ULTRA HD REVIEW / HDR SCREENSHOTS
Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) and soon-to-be-retiring Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) investigate a series of gruesome murders in an unnamed urban metropolis.
(Click an image to scroll the larger versions)
“SE7EN”
4K Ultra HD, 1995; R for grisly afterviews of horrific and bizarre killings and for strong profanity; Digital copy Amazon Video (4K), Apple TV (4K), Fandango Home (4K), Movies Anywhere (4K), YouTube (4K)
Best extra: The commentary with director David Fincher, cinematographer Darius Khondji, production designer Arthur Max, editor Richard Francis-Bruce, and author Richard Dyer.
SINCE THE introduction of the 4K Ultra HD format in the spring of 2016, David Fincher’s neo-noir whodunit “Se7en” has been at the top of the most requested 4K titles list. The late film critic Roger Ebert called it, “a dark, grisly, horrifying and intelligent thriller, maybe too disturbing for many people.”
I haven’t watched it since Fincher’s 1996 Criterion Collection’s five-laserdisc box set, sourced from a 35mm low-contrast print supervised by the director. It also included a number of commentaries, with Fincher and his co-stars Morgan Freeman as the retiring Detective William Somerset and Brad Pitt as the ambitious young Detective David Mills. Other tracks feature screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, production designer Arthur Max, and special make-up designer Rob Bottin.
To celebrate its 30th Anniversary Warner Brothers is finally releasing “Se7en” on 4K Ultra HD on January 7.
Two Detectives - The First Murder
The psychological thriller continues to inhabit the Top 20 of the IMDb.com Top 250 movies list. “The Shawshank Redemption” still holds the No. 1 spot with “The Godfather” No. 2, “The Dark Knight” No. 3, and “Se7en” at No. 20. Entertainment Weekly selected “Se7en” at No. 7 within its Top 40 Crime Films of all time.
The U.K.’s Empire movie magazine selected Fincher’s film No. 2, right behind Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” for the Top 20 best Murder-Mystery Movies. Empire said, Fincher who got his start making music videos and commercials, shrugged off “the controversy and disappointment” of his first film “Alien 3,” “rebounding in fine style with this pitch-black story of deadly sins-inspired torture and slayings. The mystery itself in Walker’s impressive script is almost less important than the atmospheric feel of the case.”
VIDEO
Warner scanned the original Super 35 camera negative (2.39:1 aspect ratio) in 8K, and Peter Mavromates, head of Fincher’s post-production team, handled the mastering. The digital corrections, retouching, and color grading were rendered in 8K and then downconverted to 4K for this presentation.
The black levels are super inky black, without any crushing of shadows, as the film’s trademark blacks are the deepest and darkest possible. Cinematographer Darius Khondji (“The Lost City of Z,” “The Interpreter”) used a variety of film stocks to get the contrast levels he wanted. The production was filmed in Los Angeles, an unidentified wet urban metropolis. Sorry, the physical disc only gets the standard HDR10, while the digital gets the more flexible Dolby Vision grading.
During its theatrical run in the ‘90s, select prints went through a bleach bypass, silver retention process to produce Fincher’s desired color saturation and black levels. Now, those levels are handled perfectly with HDR.
Since it was captured in Super 35, the overall clarity is slightly down a notch from anamorphic lens films, but the many close-ups of the detectives are superb. Mavromates admits during an interview with Indiewire.com that some grain management was applied during the restoration. The grain is visible, but not at the level we would expect. Only during the finale does the grain look the most natural.
Everything was encoded onto a 100 GB disc, keeping the video bitrate in the low 40 Megabits per second to over 100 Mbps, averaging in the 60 Mbps range. The HDR peak brightness hits 549 nits and averages 97 nits.
Fincher’s “Panic Room” (2002), also captured on Super 35 with Khondji, gets a 4K release from Sony Pictures on Feb. 18, considered Hollywood’s top restoration house for keeping natural grain intact. Fincher is credited as the supervisor of the Sony release, which will include Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
AUDIO
Oddly, the soundtrack did not receive a Dolby Atmos upgrade, but American Cinematheque says the original 5.1 sound elements were restored by Ren Klyce, into a new six-channel DTS-HD soundtrack. The results are excellent, as the sound design provides an enveloping experience from front to back. Bass response provides a nice punch when the subway passes under the apartment building during the dining scene when Mills’ wife Tracy, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, invites Detective Somerset for dinner. And there’s plenty of high fidelity from Howard Shore’s (“The Lord of the Rings: Trilogy”) powerful score, and the Nine Inch Nails opening credits, showcasing a remix of their classic “Closer.”
EXTRAS
No new extras are provided, but it carries over four commentaries: The Stars, The Story, The Picture, and The Sound; storyboards, photographs, deleted scenes, and an alternate ending, a production design featurette, and opening title sequence featurette.
We can assuredly say the final 4K results of Fincher’s “Se7en” were well worth the wait.
— Bill Kelley III, High-Def Watch producer
