Look, I see why Peter Jackson did it. Why he rereleased his Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with The Nasty Hobbitses movies-as I like to call them-in 4K Ultra HD. It's a very 21st-century-filmmaker thing to do, this remastering business. Enrich the colors, sharpen the blurry old images, and your films hold up at least until the next upgrade. It's practically a moral obligation, a question of clarity, and if you can clarify Legolas by pumping an extra 10 million pixels into his perfect Elven pores, which comes out to something like 100 billion photons, all twinkling immortally through the cosmic sweep of space-time, why then, shouldn't you? Let me be clear: You should not. Cosmi-cally speaking, things are supposed to get less clear over time. They're supposed to blur, as the quantum gravity guru Carlo Rovelli says in The Order of Time, and "the difference between past and future is deeply linked to this blurring." Translation: When disorder increases, you know time is passing. (If you saw Christopher Nolan's latest VFX showcase, Tenet, you might follow. Or not-that empty excuse for a film won't make sense in any era, at any time.) In the original Middle English, the word clarity meant "glory, divine splendor." It's the domain of gods, not humans, and certainly not Peter Jackson, a director of dreams. When he de-flickers and color-corrects his LotR and The Nasty Hobbitses, he violates nature, the very order of time. Besides, do you dream in high resolution? I most definitely do not. I wake up, the dragons fade, and a crisp new day dawns. To watch old fantasies in crystal-clear clarity is to remember a dream as if it were real and happening now. Sounds like my worst possible nightmare.
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