"The Terminator" iTunes 4K Review

What can be said about The Terminator? If you someone haven't seen the 1984 sci-fi action classic debut by James Cameron (no one counts Piranha II as a real debut, so stuff it, pedants) which elevated Arnold Schwarzenegger to even higher orbit of stardom and spawned five sequels, a TV series and an anime series, in the past 40 years, then I can't help your cultural deprivation much more than to say get on to watching it NOW.

If you need a recap, here's the expanded TV Guide listing: A cyborg from the future, the Terminator (Ahnuld), is sent back in time to find and kill a young waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), because her yet-to-be-born son, John, will lead the human resistance against the machines. Kill her, no resistance. Also back from the future is a soldier, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), sent by John to protect his mother. Many chase hijinks ensue.

What could've been a disposable trash B-movie is elevated by Cameron's writing & sharp directorial chops. There's a reason Sarah Connor is in the Pantheon of Bad-Ass Movie Chicks along with Princess Leia and Ellen Ripley, who Cameron would further iconize in his next film, Aliens. While her evolution into her bad-ass final form would wait until 1991's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the groundwork of this scared young woman facing down on unstoppable robot killing machine was laid here. We care about this girl and feel for the doomed soldier on a one-way mission to save the future.

 The recent remastering of Cameron's catalog has been a source of great controversy among collectors and purists, triggering an uncalled for attack on them from Cameron himself. Just like George Lucas, Cameron has an issue with the technical limitations of how his movies were film, specifically the film grain of the Super 35 format. So he used Peter Jackson's Park Road Post and their AI-powered digital noise reduction and upscaling tech to remove much of the film grain and then restore lost details with AI which led to endless still frames where overly-sharpened and weird-looking faces and details being posted online. 

When in motion these processes don't look as horribly bad as some have made out by the stills, but there is definitely a difference that sometimes isn't good. Adding insult was the fact that two of Cameron's movies, The Abyss and True Lies had never been even released in anamorphic DVD (the 16:9 "enhanced for widescreen TVs" format meaning that these movies on a modern TV, the movie play with black bars on all sides in low resolution), much less Blu-ray, so for the movies fans have been begging for two decades were finally here and adulterated.

While Terminator 2 is one of the worst 4K releases ever (I think I have every previous release of it and I refused to buy what should've been an instant "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" sale), the general consensus has been that of the remasters, The Abyss fared best; Aliens is OK, but some caveats; and True Lies is very problematic especially with people looking waxy and rubbery due to DNR scrubbing away pore detail. This is why I decided to just go with $5 sale copies on digital 4K rather than the $40 disc releases when there aren't many new extras that we're out before.

Fortunately, The Terminator on iTunes 4K falls towards the good end of the transfer spectrum with clear details in hair and fabrics and the Dolby Vision grade offers some good pop for a film that mostly occurs at night. The clarity can emphasized the few ropy special effects shots like the obvious prosthetic head used when Termie cuts out his eye, exposing the camera underneath, but that's the source. The Atmos sound mix offers some good overhead usage when HKs and helicopters fly overhead, but the gunshot foley sound is canned and stock. Again, that's source related.

On the extras front, it's rather slim pickings though it includes a retrospective piece that was omitted from the physical release for some reason. There are a handful of deleted scenes which don't add too much, though one extends the scene where Sarah calls her mother (or so she thinks) then proposes to Reese that they go and blow up Cyberdyne Systems, an idea which would be revisited in T2. Biehn's acting is a little rough in one point and I can see why Cameron cut it to keep the action going.

Retrospective pieces from previous releases go into the VFX and score with their respective creators and has Cameron and Ahnuld kibitzing about how great it was to make the movie. Rounding things out are two Q&As taped in conjunction with 30th Anniversary screenings in 2014, one with Cameron alone and the other with his producer (and ex-wife) Gale Ann Hurd who at the time was heading into the fifth season of her show The Walking Dead.

There is some overlap between the two, but also a lot a great stories like how Roger Corman fired Cameron from a production design gig for working too hard on making the sets right before the crew arrived. The solo interview drifts somewhat into questions about Avatar, but it's fascinating to hear him discussing how he was handling the sequels at a point five years after the first one blew out the box office, yet still eight years before Avatar: The Way of Water would arrive.

 Long review short, The Terminator is a seminal sci-fi/action classic that launched the career of one of the most successful filmmakers in history and with a good 4K transfer and sound, it's a bargain at twice the price (but still wait for it to go on sale for five bucks).

Score: 8.5/10. Buy it.

"Beverly Hills Cop" 4K Review

 With the Netflix Original Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hitting streaming, it's time to revisit the series which I've owned for quite a while after buying the trilogy in 4K from iTunes for $10. Before starting, I've seen the first one several times, I think I've only seen the sequel once and only remember that it was very mean-spirited, and don't think I've seen the third one, but have heard it's pretty terrible. Let's find out!

Kicking off is the OG Beverly Hills Cop from 1984 (my senior year in high school), the movie that blew Eddie Murphy up into superstar status after his first two movies, 48 Hours and Trading Places. And he was only 23 at the time.

For those unfamiliar with the movie (I'll keep spoilers for a 40-year-old movie to a minimum) somehow, Murphy plays Detroit Police Detective Axel Foley, a young hotshot we're introduced to as an attempted undercover sting involving cigarettes results in a mayhem-causing chase through Detroit's downtown streets. The aftermath has him on thin ice with his boss, Inspector Todd (real-life Detroit cop Gil Hill, who the documentary White Boy Ric alleges may've been dirty), who warns Axel that if he screws up again, he's out of a job.

Matters are complicated when Axel comes home to find an old friend, Mikey (James Russo), has broken into his apartment after getting out of jail. In his possession he has a paper bag filled with German bearer bonds. After hitting a bar and reminiscing over how they stole cars in high school and how it was odd that Axel became a cop, they return to his apartment only to be ambushed by two assailants who knock Axel out and then execute Mikey, taking the bag of bonds. 

Put on vacation by a fed-up Todd, Axel drives to Beverly Hills to find answers by checking in with art gallery manager Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher), an old friend of his and Mikey's from Detroit, who had gotten Mikey the security job at the warehouse of Very Wealthy & Obvious Bad Guy Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff). When he goes to Maitland's office to accost him, he's bum-rushed by a half-dozen security men and hurled through a plate glass window and arrested by Beverly Hills PD.

We now meet Detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) and their boss, Lt. Bogomil (Ronny Cox). They are by-the-book professionals who have no use for Axel's rogue antics and he repeatedly gives them the slip or tricks them into situations because of course the hip guy is going to get over on the squares, can you dig it? Many hijinx ensue.

Revisiting Beverly Hills Cop now is instant flashback to the era. The soundtrack was so ubiquitous with hits like Glenn Fry's opening theme "The Heat Is On", Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" (during the opening heist chase), and the omnipresent "Axel F Theme" by Harold Faltermeyer which for music store keyboard department employees was the tag-team partner to Van Halen's "Jump" for needing a sign forbidding their playing the way guitar departments have a "NO STAIRWAY!" sign.

Murphy is in full control here as he BSes his way into situation - several scenes were improvised by Murphy, which would bite the sequels in the butt as "Eddie does something funny" is not a substitute for writing - and throwing race cards at will (though without the malice you'd get nowadays). But it's not all razzle-dazzle bluster; there are moments of quiet drama where Murphy shows that he wasn't just a young buck comic, but had acting chops as well. (I still believe that he would've won an Oscar for Dreamgirls if they hadn't released Norbit while Oscar voting was still happening. If they had just waited a week, his career the past nearly 20 years would've been far different.)

Credit for holding this wacky comedy-gritty crime movie together goes to director Martin Brest who manages to balance the competing tones nicely, allowing Murphy room to cut loose without it becoming overly indulgent & obnoxious. (Which the sequel illustrates when tone is handled incorrectly.) Brest had directed the charming geezers-robbing-a-bank movie Going In Style before and would go on to direct the well-regarded Midnight Run before blowing up his career with the tag team of Meet Joe Black and the Bennifer debacle Gigli, but here he nails what the material needs.

The tropes of hip vs. square, urban street smarts vs. urbane procedure following, West Coast vs. Motown which would become stock items on the buddy cop crime comedy checklist began here and when you see how poorly things go when the balance isn't maintained, you appreciate even more what Beverly Hills Cop accomplished. It's also fun to see co-stars Paul Reiser and Bronson Pinchot (both in their second film roles ever and Pinchot pretty much converted mincing art gallery employee Serge into Cousin Balki on the Perfect Strangers sitcom) and Damon Wayans make his debut in a bit part as Banana Man.

As for the presentation, the 4K Dolby Vision is good and clear, but nothing you'd show off to demo your home theater. This is due to the look of the film being deliberately drab in Detroit before getting bright in Beverly Hills. Audio is basic 5.1, clear and dated, typical of the era.

Score: 8/10. Buy it for $5 or less.

"Mission: Impossible 2" iTunes 4K Review

Note: In the run-up to Mission: Impossible - Fallout, I'm revisiting the entire series in spiffy 4K HDR. Reviews for MI1, MI2, MI3, MI-Ghost Protocol and MI-Rogue Nation at respective links.

In all rankings of the Mission: Impossible movie series, 2000's second installment - surprisingly named Mission: Impossible 2 - is known as "the bad one." How bad is it? The only things people really remember about it are Anthony Hopkins' pithy retort to Tom Cruise's objection that Thandie Newton lacked training to help them, "To sleep with a man? To lie? She's a woman. She's had all the training she needs," and this zinger:



Har-har. Earn that paycheck, Sir Anthony! It's also best remembered as the movie that made Hugh Jackman's career despite his not even appearing in it. (More on this later.)

It's hard to know where to begin with M:I2 because there's so little to discuss plot-wise. In the cold open, Dougray Scott, masquerading as Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, tricks a scientist who trusts Hunt into giving him samples of a genetically-engineered supervirus called Chimera and its cure before killing him and crashing the airliner to cover his tracks. Then we're treated to some impressive footage of Cruise free-climbing, his being given his mission and then over a half-hour of Cruise recruiting (by shagging her) Newton in order to have her get back in bed with her ex-boyfriend Scott to find out what his plans for the disease are. There's masks, diving while firing two guns, lots of kung fu, flying birds (pigeons, not doves) and hijinks and it's all dull and noisy.

I'm not susceptible to the things that trigger the easily-triggered outrage mobs, but egads the plot is skeevy and gross. Newton is introduced as a capable thief (a weird touch), but then is immediately reduced to being a sexual prop. Scott is on to her; Cruise is supposedly in love with her despite her crashing into his Porsche in the dumbest flirting scene ever filmed; it's all just dopey despite Newton being quite cute.

But really loading things down is Scott's creepy and unimpressive turn as the villain. His motivations are thin beyond "get all back up in the ex's guts" and making money selling bottled plague - this was written by Chinatown's Robert Towne from a story by Star Trek TV series guys Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga?! - but it's Scott's glowering mien that really kills things. He's awful and it's mind-boggling to realize that he was originally cast as Wolverine for the original X-Men only losing the role when a serious injury sustained while filming MI2 forced producers to scramble for a replacement. (They "settled" for a lanky Broadway musical performer named Hugh Jackman who had only two virtually unseen Australian films made a year before on his resume. If you look closely, you'll notice Jackman isn't as jacked in some scenes as he is during the cage fight where Logan is introduced. This was due to his needing to bulk up while shooting and the makers put the fight scene at the end of the shooting schedule so he could have time to get swole.)

Legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo had already had a couple of American hits in the 1990s with Broken Arrow and the truly bugnuts Face/Off and many of his trademark stylistic flourishes are present and accounted for, but the contribute to the flabby feel of the film, like he's trying to pad out Towne's thin script.

As before, it's hard to really judge audio quality on the Apple TV 4K, but the Dolby Vision image is sharp and richly-colored, though skin tones look a tad hot (reddish). The HDR effects really pop in nighttime scenes as the deep contrast lends a lush patina to the image.

It would be six years before J.J. Abrams would step in and radically revamp the Mission: Impossible series, setting it on the path it would follow to greater artistic and commercial successes.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Mission: Impossible" iTunes 4K Review

In the run-up to the release of Mission: Impossible - Fallout - the sixth installment in the Tom Cruise-led series which has been running for 22 years(!) now - the previous five movies have been re-re-released on UHD/4K Blu-ray and digital formats. While I already own them all on regular Blu-ray, I was able to rebuy the whole series for $15 by buying cheap iTunes codes and the first one directly from iTunes for $5 (meaning, if you can do the math, I overpaid for this one).

Other than watching chunks of the last two installments while playing with home theater stuff, I haven't seen any of the movies all the way through since they were in theaters. Hearing that Fallout called back to the previous chapters, I'm going to try and watch all of them before see the new one and that means starting at the beginning with the 1996 Brian De Palma-directed Mission: Impossible.

The TV series' lead character, Jim Phelps, originally played by Peter Graves is portrayed by Jon Voight meaning Cruise is the newly-minted Ethan Hunt, part of Phelps squad which also includes Emilio Estevez. (I'd completely forgotten he was in it, albeit briefly. Other than the then-controversial twist which )

In Prague to intercept the McGuffin, a list of the cover identities of covert operatives, things go incredibly sideways leaving everyone but Hunt on the team dead and his bosses at the IMF suspecting he is the traitorous mole, forcing him to go on the run to root out the mole. Along the way he discovers not everyone previously thought dead is dead and the who-do-you-trust factor ramps up quickly.

For a series which is now know for the insane stunts Cruise performs himself like swinging off the world's tallest building or hanging off the side of an airplane in flight without bluescreen trickery, it's remarkable how small the scale of the first M:I film was. Other than the final set piece with the Chunnel bullet train and a helicopter tethered to it (which really suffers from dated VFX) and a great practical aquarium explosion, the most involved sequence is the much-parodied infiltration of CIA HQ which is nothing more than expert framing and editing, you know, the way movies used to thrill us before pixels by the megaton got cheap.

De Palma is in his usual Hitchcock-channeling form, giving David Koepp's and Robert Towne's pulpy genre script flair, especially when Phelps' wife (Emmanuelle Béart) seems to be moving instantly past her widowhood to seemingly flirting with Hunt. The cinematography De Palma regular Stephen H. Burum and editing by ace cutter Paul Hirsch (who amazingly only has TWO Oscar nominations and one win, for Star Wars) is lush and crisp. Cruise's Hunt is clearly greener than later chapters have portrayed and flashing back to a time when he was closer to Maverick than what he's doing now makes her performance seem a little cocky, but fine.

Currently the Apple TV 4K doesn't do high-quality audio well, but the Dolby Vision transfer looks good, albeit with some warmer skin tones than we're used to. Many movies nowadays desaturate colors in their grading to the point that anything with some primary color heft seems artificial, but even allowing for the throwback style De Palma was going for - seriously, this is one of her more "I WANT TO BE ALFRED HITCHCOCK!" movies on a CV filled with them - reds seem a tad hot. Checking reviews of the disc versions, I found middling scores, mostly for image softness which is misplaced because that's the look of anamorphic lenses and film, kids.

For a series that has grossed nearly $2.8B worldwide, it's interesting to revisit the Mission: Impossible series' somewhat modest beginnings when it has grown so much larger; perhaps not as far from its roots as the Fast & Furious franchise has (remember when that was about street racing?), but certainly in a higher-rent district.

Score: 7/10. Buy it for $5.