I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve only seen low-resolution copies (relatively speaking) of John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’m theoretically down with them doing a restoration of the movie. But I do wonder whether the special effects that Stephen Green rightly praises here will hold up under the impersonal glare of a 4K scanning process.
It’s the combination of time and expectations here that worry me. The Thing came out in 1982, and obviously the state of the art for special effects has improved significantly since then. And so have our standards as to what qualifies as a good special effect. It’s OK when we’re watching the movie at regular DVD levels; it looks old, and because it looks old we forgive it for being old. But if we make the image too sharp, will we be able to forgive The Thing for remaining, ah, frozen in time like that?
I don’t honestly know.