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Fifth Element Blu-ray Remastered: it's OK
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About a year ago, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released Luc Besson's kick-ass sci-fi film THE FIFTH ELEMENT as a Blu-ray Disc launch title. The source master used was, well, pretty crap, and the whole disc looked undetailed and underwhelming. To make matters worse, MPEG-2 compression chomped through the film's grain and created block artefacts. People were not happy.
SPHE have just last week released a remastered edition, which is supposed to be a huge improvement. Based off of screen shots, it doesn't really seem to be an improvement in any area other than Compression - it's MPEG-4 based so there are fewer compression artefacts than the MPEG-2 version.
 After a very processed opening sequence, things clear up and the film actually begins to look pretty good, yet you still get the feeling that some fine details are being suppressed. The special effects shots look pretty bad, presumably as a result of the optical processes used to make the film - it looks like Sony has tried to artifically sharpen them though.
I get the feeling that the source material is probably even the same as the last disc, but this time, Sony have run things through an Edge Enhancement/Sharpening filter to give things an etched appearance. This doesn't solve the problem that the source wasn't detailed to begin with, and you could create an almost identical look with the old disc simply by turning up your TV's sharpness control!
There's another problem which doesn't annoy me as much as the underwhelming level of detail, and that's the Deinterlacing glitches. The source material for this master looks to have been 1080i, and SPHE have tried to deinterlace this to 1080p themselves, with mixed results. In some shots, things that move too quickly leave partial combing in areas of the screen (jump to 29 minutes and 55 seconds and look at the backs of the police).
Some shots still look great, but only in a cinematic sense (jumping off the building into the traffic). It's a definite improvement over the NTSC SuperBit DVD, as you'd expect - but I don't care for the edge enhancement. Let's hope Pathé get an all-new source for the European HD DVD and give the THIRD attempt at an HD release of this great film a suitably great transfer.
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aw
You should see the HiDefDigest review lol. 4.5/5 for video