The extended light and color palette opens up all the exterior sequences on Skull Island spectacularly, giving them more scale and creating a more three-dimensional look to the remarkably dense and detailed foliage the special effects and production design teams managed to create. Some things are worth fighting a T-Rex over. The result is frame after frame that looks beautiful in a way no ordinary Blu-ray can ever look beautiful - especially the scenes in night-time New York, sequences that feature artificial light sources, and scenes lit using the classic ‘old Hollywood’ style Jackson is so keen to replicate. Jackson’s gorgeously stylized photography, especially during the New York and on-boat scenes, lends itself particularly well to HDR’s extended contrast range, and the disc takes full advantage of it by combining gorgeously deep black levels with some phenomenally bold peak whites and bright colors. That honor belongs to the presentation’s consistently jaw-dropping combination of high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut.
Surprisingly good though it is, though, it’s not actually the 4K transfer’s resolution that steals the show. The sense of resolution improvement over the HD Blu-ray is consistently and emphatically clear - an achievement made all the more impressive given the amount of non-4K CGI the film contains. The picture really does look stunningly crisp and clean, though - more so than any other 2K upscale I can think of except, maybe, the one used for the 2016 Ghostbusters 4K Blu-ray. The relatively grain-free look of the picture also implies that this is not a 35mm scan. The film only received a 2K digital intermediate for its cinema release, and Universal’s 4K form book would suggest that an upscale of this has been used for the 4K Blu-ray rather than a new 4K scan being done from a 35mm print. King Kong, though, is definitely another one of those titles.
Much as I love 4K Blu-rays, only a few titles to date have looked outright spectacular enough to actually give me a rush over the sheer beauty of the pictures I’m watching. Key kit used for this test: Samsung UN65KS9800 TV, Oppo 203 4K Blu-ray player, Panasonic UB900 4K Blu-ray player Running time: 3hrs 8mins theatrical edition, 3hrs 20mins extended editionĮxtra Features: Feature length commentary by Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens, a ‘making of’ documentary, Production and post production diaries, deleted scenes, The Eighth Blunder of the world featurette, The making of a shot: The T-Rex fight Skull Island: A Natural History documentary Kong’s New York, 1933 production design featurette A Night In Vaudeville (a collection of Vaudeville recreation clips) Homage to the original King Kong Bringing Kong To Life documentary on Andy Serkis and motion capture techniques and much more!
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