 Starring: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn
Director: James Cameron
Year Of Release: 1989
Plot: A team of civilian deep sea divers are enlisted to help with the search for a missing nuclear submarine. They’re put under Navy control and get cut off from their support ship when a massive storm passes overhead. However the tempest is the least of their problems, as everything from malfunctioning equipment to one of the team slowly going mad threatens to kill them all – not to mention that World War III seems to be brewing in the world above. The only hope seems to be a strange non-terrestrial intelligence that lives in the depths. |
I love The Abyss. Although it is all faintly ridiculous, with James Cameron layering disaster upon disaster to almost farcical levels, it’s still an immensely entertaining movie, with plenty of stunning sequences and a great plot. However it wasn’t until I put the DVD in the player in preparation for writing about the movie, that I remembered why I haven’t actually watched the disc for years.
The problem is that when Fox first brought out the film on DVD in 2001, they formatted it as 2.35:1 letterbox release, rather than offering the movie in anamorphic widescreen. Your mind may have just clouded over at that point as you wonder what the hell I’m talking about, but as most film enthusiasts now have widescreen TVs, believe me it makes a big difference. What letterboxing the film essentially means is that the film is encoded on the disc as if the picture is going to be shown on an old-style ‘square’ (i.e. 4:3 aspect ratio) TV.
There’s a couple of problems with this, one of them being that rather than as much of the capacity of the disc as possible being dedicated to giving the best picture quality possible, a huge chunk of the DVD has to be given over to encoding the thick black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, which is just pointless. However the main problem is for those watching the movie on widescreen TVs.
Most DVD players play 4:3 content in the centre of a widescreen TV, with black bars on either side. The result is that if a DVD is letterboxed rather than anamorphic widescreen, you end up with black bars on all four sides of the screen, with the picture playing in a tiny box in the middle. You can use the player or TV to zoom in so it fills out the screen, but you completely lose picture clarity if you do that.
As a result I was trying to watch The Abyss, which is a great looking film, but with a letterbox transfer showing on a 50-inch TV, the image clarity was utterly abysmal, with everyone looking incredibly fuzzy, to the point where half the time you couldn’t tell who was who, or see exactly what was going on. It really was horrible to watch.
If you’re wondering what the difference between letterbox and anamorphic widescreen is, let me illuminate. Basically with anamorphic widescreen, technically the picture is still encoded on the disc as a 4:3 picture, however rather than wasting space encoding huge black bars at the top or bottom, it squeezes the widescreen picture horizontally, so that as much space on the disc as possible is taken up with actual picture. Then, when the DVD player decodes the picture, it unsqueezes the image to give a nice clear, anamorphic widescreen image (incidentally, if you do put discs in your player and routinely get black bars on all four sides of your widescreen TV and therefore need to use the zoom function on the TV to sort it out, it’s probably because your player is set up incorrectly, and if you go into the set-up menu and make sure the player knows it’s outputting to a widescreen TV, you may suddenly get a much better quality DVD image).
The reason why all the squeezing and unsqueezing is necessary is because when they were deciding on the standard for how DVDs would be encoded in the 1990s, nobody had widescreen TVs, and so it was initially set up purely to take advantage of 4:3 TVs. However as widescreen televisions emerged, the people behind the DVD format realised there was a problem, and while they couldn’t alter the fact an image had to be encoded at a 4:3 aspect ratio on a DVD, they could fiddle with the way it was decoded, and that offering an anamorphic option allowed a much, much better picture on a widescreen TV.
From the earliest days of DVD, most people releasing movies chose this option, as it makes no difference to people with 4:3 TVs, but is much better for those with widescreen TVs. However a few discs came out that were letterboxed, and even more surprisingly, there are still a minority of films on shop shelves that still don’t offer an anamorphic widescreen version of the movie. The Abyss is one of those films, as is Field Of Dreams and a few others (thankfully the letterboxed version of Titanic, which drove many nuts in the early days of DVD, has now been replaced by a proper anamorphic print on the Special Edition release). It’s incredibly surprising when you think about it, that we’re now well over a decade into the era of DVD, and these problems still exist.
Just to bring us up to date, it’s worth mentioning that rather than faffing around with letterboxing or any anamorphic shenanigans, Blu-ray encodes everything onto the disc as a 16:9 widescreen picture (although you will still get small black bars with a 2.35:1 film). In fact this is one of the reasons for the increased picture quality, as not only are you getting a lot more pixels to start with, but as the picture is and always has been designed for widescreen TVs, there’s no complex un-squeezing or other processes the picture needs to go through, which risks degrading the picture quality.
While most of the time you don’t need to worry about whether a DVD will be anamorphic or not, as the vast majority of them are, it’s nevertheless always worth taking a quick look on the back cover for the words ‘anamorphic widescreen’ or ‘enhanced for widescreen TVs’, as accidentally ending up with a letterboxed version of a movie and trying to watch it on a widescreen TV is insanely annoying and the quality is awful. It really shouldn’t still be happening in this day and age, but sadly it still occasionally does.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: A Ma Soeur - Or, the weirdness of watching sex at work, and how I accidentally became a hardcore pornographer
NEXT: Across The Universe - Or, why the Beatles musical deserves a lot more praise than it got
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
