What my eyes are telling me is . . . well, I can understand where all the inconsistent impressions are coming from because this is one seriously inconsistent image. But, oddly, I think that comes from Jackson trying to impose consistency on it with an iron fist and coming up short.

It helps to remember that 16mm film can be highly variable in terms of grain, depending on light levels and other environmental conditions. No doubt, if you were to dig through the dozens of hours of original footage shot for this project, you’d see that no two angles present with the same level of grain. So, what I think is going on is that Jackson applied more digital noise reduction to the grainiest imagery and applied a lighter touch with the “cleaner” footage. 

When you look at, for example, the studio segments at Twickenham, one camera angle will show a nice, light grain structure and reasonable detail for 16mm whereas the next will be waxy, overly crisp, and devoid of any real analog qualities at all due to the heavy-handed application of digital noise reduction and A.I. upscaling. Softer background elements jump and wobble unnaturally. Faces have a lot of detail but not a lot of fine detail and nearly no texture. It looks like egregiously grainy footage that has been cleaned up a little too much and processed too aggressively in an attempt to restore some of the detail lost in the scrubbing. But then the next shot will look perfectly natural and undeniably photochemical, if perhaps ever-so-slightly too clean given the source. Unfortunately, though, the former is far more common than the latter.

The long and short of it is that Jackson had to have some metric to use as a target in trying to make the documentary series gel, visually speaking. But in apparently choosing the level of noise as his yardstick, he created a picture that sometimes looks perfectly fine, if a little soft (or a lot soft in out-of-focus shots), and sometimes ventures deep into Uncanny Valley territory, what with its unmistakable stench of pristine artificiality. 

Things are quite a bit better in the rooftop concert in the third episode, which is presented in its entirety and is an absolute treasure as a historical document. My only beef with that footage is that it appears there’s been a bit of high-pass filtering done to sharpen the edges in places, but that’s really only blatantly noticeable in the mosaic shots, as long as you’re not too close to the screen. 

Overall, that’s a good indicator of how much you’ll be bothered by these inconsistencies and oversteps. At 45-ish degrees field of view (i.e., my 75-inch screen viewed from 6.5 feet away), I found the restoration work mostly good and only occasionally distracting. At closer to 55 degrees (say, a 120-inch screen viewed from 8.5 feet), I found the too-scrubbed and too-sharpened imagery a lot more off-putting. Backing up to where the image took up approximately 33 degrees of my field of view (comparable to a 65-inch screen viewed from 8 feet), it all looked astonishingly good. 

The one thing that remained consistent no matter how far away I was from the screen, though, was the exceptional colors of Disney+’s Dolby Vision presentation, which are substantially subtler and more natural than a quick spot-check of the series with HDR disabled. I know Jackson has been accused of going too far here but I don’t think that’s the case. To get a better sense of how much tinkering he did, I found a scan of the original 16mm film, brought it into my photo-editing software, and tweaked it until I got the image as close as possible to the colors I saw on my screen. In the end, my modifications amounted to a very gentle white-balance color correction (far less than I would do on my own photography) and an increase in brightness of around 6 percent. Those minor adjustments made the color locked in those 16mm negatives absolutely pop. I would have been happier to see Jackson take as subtle an approach in cleaning up the grain and upconverting the picture for 4K displays, but it is what it is.