I had been waiting for an updated DVD transfer of this movie for a while. The original was released back when DVDs were fairly new, and it only had a 4:3 letterboxed image. I picked up the new box set of the first two films a few weeks ago. But while it looked good—definitely better—it was far from great. It just looked old. I appreciate the anamorphic transfer for maximizing the resolution shown on the screen. De Palma composes some crazy shots with subjects on the far edges of the wide frame, which looks very odd when edited for 4:3 on the VHS version. But it still looked like film—with all its flaws.

A lot has changed in 10 years. Not necessarily in the film production process (movies are still made the same way), but in the DVD transfer process. I think a lot more effort is put into sweetening the “look” in post production nowadays with clean digital scans of the film and stylistic coloring during that transfer process. Pretty much any DVD of a recent film has a picture that’s perfectly translated from film to digital video: no dust specs and flaws from the film; sharp, clear picture, with full, bold colors. This didn’t have it. It looked like i was watching film, not a film on DVD. Paramount could have put more effort into this new version, but they knew it would sell regardless on the hype of the recent third M:I flick.

So backing up to the film production, the dialog recording was terrible. I never noticed this before. Of course, the only other version i had of this was VHS, and it’s been 10 years since i saw it in the theater. There was a lot of high-pitch noise in the dialog—you could hear it fade in and out with a lot of the lines on several of the interior scenes. Must have been a nightmare for the dialog editor.