Interstellar 4K 2014 Ultra HD 2160p

With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars.

Interstellar 4K (2014) Ultra HD 2160p REMUX Review
Interstellar was director Christopher Nolan's first collaboration with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who would go on to photography the director's Dunkirk. The film saw Nolan's most extensive use of IMAX cameras up to that point, and it was released to theaters in a variety of aspect ratios, ranging from 2.39:1 for standard 35mm projection to 1.43:1 for IMAX 70mm. As on many of his other projects, Nolan has chosen a shifting aspect ratio for home video, with IMAX scenes framed at 1.78:1 and non-IMAX at 2.39:1. As I noted in reviewing Dunkirk, the practice remains controversial, with some viewers finding it unacceptably distracting, while others barely notice it.

Interstellar is a good example of the pitfalls of relying on IMDb for technical information. The film's IMDb entry claims that it was finished on a digital intermediate at 4K, which initially led me to believe that Nolan had departed from his usual insistence on both shooting and finishing his works on film. In fact, Interstellar was finished photochemically, and Warner holds the reels of original cut negative in its archives. For this 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD disc, that negative has been newly scanned at 4K, followed by color correction and HDR grading reviewed by the director at every stage.

The result is an image of jaw-dropping clarity, in both the 35mm and IMAX scenes. The fineness of the dust seeping into the Cooper household in the early Earth-bound scenes is as beautiful as it is threatening, and the fields of corn that surround the farm are made up of individual stalks rather than blending into a green mass. The mechanical textures of the several spacecraft in which Joseph Cooper and his fellow astronauts hurtle through space are so minutely rendered that you feel as if you can reach out and touch them, and the blackness that surrounds them is deeply inky and black as it frames both the manned vehicles and a variety of celestial bodies. The alien landscapes on which the team lands are even more beautiful and threatening, the one with its vast rippling oceans and the other with its forbidding mountain peaks. In the climactic sequence where Cooper finds himself in what can only be described as an alternate dimension, the individual strands of pulsating light that comprise the environment are separately rendered, each with its own rhythm and frequency, simultaneously lovely and strange.

Interstellar's Blu-ray presentation was excellent, and it still is. But put on the Blu-ray after watching the UHD, and you immediately sense that something is missing. By comparison, the image is dim, soft and sometimes even mushy (a phenomenon that Marty noted in his review). No such softness infects this 4K presentation. Its gorgeous images remain sharp, tactile and immediate from first to last.