Why So Cyan? On the digital modernization of 'The Abyss'
Revisio-News #5: The Cameron classic shows the paradox of film preservation
In this article, I want to talk about various things related to the upcoming remastered home video release of James Cameron’s underwater sci-fi thriller The Abyss (1989). In particular, I want to focus on the subject of its new color grade and how it makes visible the fact that digital remastering effectively modernizes movies.
Before that though, I will briefly discuss the movie itself and its amazing DVD.
ContentsBrief Thoughts on the Movie
The Abyss is good but not great. I kinda feel like Cameron was trying to operate somewhat outside of his comfort zone, which is horror and action, and the results, much as in the case of Titanic, are a little mixed.
Though I laud Cameron for making an ambitious near-three-hour scifi movie with the special edition, I do think the theatrical cut is ultimately the superior version in the end, just as it is with all of his movies. It minimizes the unnecessary character development and the more grandiose scope of the special edition in favor of a tightly focused, action-oriented narrative. And this is where Cameron truly shines, creating an immersive and suspenseful experience with all his underwater filming.
In hindsight, you can see this alongside Titanic as a test run for what he’d accomplish with the superior Avatar: The Way of Water.
A Great DVD
The Abyss may not be one of my favorite James Cameron movies, but it is one of my favorite DVDs. Presumably based on a preceding laserdisc edition, the 2000 special edition DVD is a simple pleasure to own.
It comes with a collectible booklet, both the theatrical cut and the 1993 special edition via seamless branching on the first disc, and a second disc loaded with numerous special features (“supplements”) that combine text, image, and video with amazing interactive menus by Cameron collaborator Van Ling.
Those menus really go a long way to making it a unique and immersive experience: as the viewer, you are allowed to explore various ‘compartments’ of the underwater oil rig central to the movie, with each opening up its own subset of supplements.
There’s a section devoted to BTS documentaries, a section full of concept art and storyboards, a Drill Room that gives you access to an extensive 28-chapter textual database where you can, among other things, read Cameron’s excellent essay on the concept of the director’s cut and the creation of The Abyss special edition, as well as drafts of the script, including the original treatment.
Oh, and did I mention the (now sadly almost impossible-to-access) DVD-ROM features, which include the ability to watch the film side-by-side with its shooting script and storyboards, or the Aliens easter eggs that you can find by clicking on the facehuggers that suddenly appear when you arrive at the right point on the menu?*
*Sigh… they really don’t make them like that anymore.
At the time, this was the definitive release of the film. The only real issue with it?
The transfer
The video quality of The Abyss DVD wasn’t that great, even by mid-90s standards.
The highest quality releases back then had anamorphic transfers. That of the Abyss was not anamorphic (despite the claim of the packaging), and so looked kinda closer to what you’d expect from laserdisc than DVD. That’s not to say it was bad but it didn’t live up to the full potential of the format. So, of course, when BluRay and High-Definition (HD) video became the new standard, there was a natural expectation that The Abyss would get a new HD digitally remastered release.
For one reason or another, this never happened.
Though Fox and Cameron began working on the HD remaster back in 2010, the process kept getting deferred, moving in fits and starts. After almost 14 years, the digitally remastered edition of The Abyss (derived from a 4K scan) has finally been officially announced for release on home video among several other Cameron titles, including the similarly long-awaited action-comedy True Lies.
The Digital Video release is coming on December 12, while the physical BluRay/4K UHD is scheduled for March 12.
In fact, it’s even getting a theatrical (re-)release on December 6 for a 1-night only event! Cameron made a whole announcement about it on Twitter, hyping up the remastered Special Edition by throwing some shade at the theatrical version:
“If you haven’t seen the film before, this is the way to experience it. And if you have, you’ll be seeing the film I actually set out to make with some big surprises not seen in the original released version.”
I know Cameron is promoting the new version(s), so we shouldn’t take his words here at face value but I’m gonna say that I find this statement a tad disingenuous, given the fact that there is no way Cameron could’ve set out to make a movie back in the 80s that would’ve fit the 4K and HD projection technology that is standard today.*
*Though maybe Cameron is referring strictly to the editorial differences and signaling his current preference for the special edition assemblage? I am unsure.
And though I am happy that The Abyss has a new, higher quality transfer, I’d say it comes with one notable caveat, similar to the DVD: it clearly bears a new Color Grade.
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Cameron’s Recoloring History
Above are some screenshots from the trailers of the initial theatrical release of The Abyss in 1989 and the 2023 remastered version. Even if we were to make a concession for the fact these are compressed trailers and not the actual movie, as well as for computer color settings, the color differences between them are pretty obvious.
The new version definitely looks more greenish-blue, than dark blue.
Such a shift seems not uncommon in 1980s films that have a lot of dark and deep blue colors. There’s really nice clip on YouTube that showcases the differences between the colors of the 1991 director’s cut and the 2007 final cut of Blade Runner, both of which were made available on the same Blu-Ray set. A Reddit thread discussing this clip had a very interesting comment by user Happy_Television_501:
I like the clarity of the FC, but I do wonder why there is so much green. I think it’s just the current fashion.
I work in commercials and very recently I said to the colorist I wanted a blue tint to the office shots. What he sent me was very cyan, I.e. a lot of green in the blues. He said that’s blue, not cyan. I pulled it up in the meters to show him and he said, ‘well of course there’s some green in it…’ and I was like, look at the numbers. There’s more green than blue. He just said ‘we’ll that’s what blue is now…’ I was like, ‘so what do I call it if I actually want blue’, he said ‘I don’t know… purple?’
As a Not On BluRay article on how movies are recolored for HD illustrates, such changes seem to be par the course for James Cameron. The remastered Terminator and Aliens releases both had new grades that replaced dark or cool blues with more greenish-blue tones. I’ve copied an example from the article to illustrate.*
*Now, I should note that it is common to think of any such re-grading as making a film adhere to ‘teal-and-orange,’ a predominant color palette of American cinema in the 21st century. In fact, the article directly uses the recolored versions of Terminator and Aliens as examples of teal-and-orange, but I personally don’t think they completely fit that designation.
However one chooses to define the new palette, it is evident that a shift took place. But why would a filmmaker like Cameron make such color changes rather than reproduce the colors audiences are already familiar with in higher resolution?
I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer. But the simplest one might be that because this is how he thinks his films should look color-wise now. And this likely has to do with the evolution of film delivery platforms and related technologies.
The Paradox of Preservation
A seldom acknowledged fact of our media industry is that feature films must be continuously modernized for release on contemporary home video formats, be they physical (BluRay) or digital (Apple). The act of modernization is often sold to us through terms such as ‘restoration’ and ‘remastering.’
In truth, many movies that get new digitally remastered releases don’t need to actually be (and so are not) restored, for their original source materials are not in a state of tremendous degradation that actually warrants a film preservationist to recover it.
Rather, new master copies of the picture need to be produced, so new access copies (eg. BluRay discs or re-release digital projection copies) can then in turn be derived from them, so consumers can purchase those copies and access the film via constantly changing, constantly evolving delivery technologies.
And so, we get successive editions of the same movie within and across different formats, with each new remastered version being ostensibly closer to fully reproducing its source material in terms of audiovisual quality. Think of how a movie like Wizard of Oz (1939) gets ‘restored’ every few years, allowing it to go from standard-definition DVD to 2K high-definition BluRay to 4K Ultra-HD, and you get the picture.
As audiences, we get used to how a movie looks and so then come to believe that’s how movies should look. That becomes what we want, what we perceive to be good. The same thing can happen to filmmakers. Their perception of how a picture should look, or how well it looks, or what colors work best given the hardware becomes changed or reshaped gradually over time.
What this means is that how a film looks and sounds is determined, at least to an extent, by the newest delivery format’s technical, qualitative, and aesthetic standards. And so as standard practice films have to be tailored (modernized) to fit them.
In most cases, the differences resulting from the act of modernization (eg. a new 5.1 audio mix for a picture from the 1940s) tend to be invisible or imperceptible, with the new variant being disguised as a pure reproduction of some vaguely defined ‘original’ version. But occasionally, such as when a filmmaker decides to add new CGI effects to scenes that never had them or to update an older film to look more in line with contemporary pictures color-wise, the differences become rather obvious.
Get the new HD version! It’s much more like what you saw in theaters, way better than the last DVD one, which was way higher quality than laserdisc or VHS!
The 2023 version of The Abyss is illustrative of this. By digitally altering its color grade, Cameron foregrounded its status as a new version and made visible the act of modernization. His choice may very well reflect the belief that cyan or teal is the new ‘blue’ according to contemporary HD standards.
In principle, I have nothing against such changes. And I will likely enjoy the new versions when I see them. But I do wish the colors of the films as shown previously were at least an option.* I really like the dark blue colors of the initial Abyss DVD release more than the greenish colors of the remaster and would love to see them on-screen in HD resolution with the new clarity. They are more fitting for the film’s setting in the dark, deep recesses of the ocean, and for its status as an 80s film.
*I don’t know if it would be correct to refer to them as ‘original colors.’
Ultimately though, modernization is the cost of wanting a James Cameron movie to remain accessible many years after its initial theatrical release.
That’s the paradox of contemporary film preservation. For a film to be preserved, it must remain accessible. But to remain accessible, it must be modernized.
Other thoughts and notes
Will I get the new release? I’m probably going to buy the Digital Apple edition, as I already have a physical DVD copy that I hope to explore for a few more years.
The initial delay from 2010 occurred because Cameron wasn’t happy with the initial HD remastered Abyss and wanted to perform new 4K scans of his movies (a feat that would be ahead of its time, given the state of home video and television technology in 2010). You can get a much more in-depth look at the strange history of the release via a paywalled Patreon article by Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits.
Even though I don’t entirely agree with the author’s claims about film purity, I would recommend reading the full Not On Bluray article by Mac as it delves nicely into the history of teal-and-orange and contemporary recoloring.
Another article by Tod Miro from 2010 similarly looks at the use (and possibly overuse) of the teal-and-orange palette.
If there is something that’s really disappointing about the announcements is that the long-awaited True Lies special edition release is nowhere near as expansive as the other films in terms of special features. Given how packed with supplements Cameron movies tend to be, even in the era of home video decline, this seems like a missed opportunity, especially given how long the wait was for it.
But what do you think?
Do you like 'The Abyss'? Do the new colors bother you? Is their presence a sign that history has been distorted? Can a film actually be preserved without being modernized?
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"That’s the paradox of contemporary film preservation. For a film to be preserved, it must remain accessible. But to remain accessible, it must be modernized." - Well said!
I've been a portrait photographer for over 20 years. I work with and see the color.
Granted, my images have a warmer (Red/Magenta) tinge that I prefer.
That modern shift to Green/Cyan in the movies is atrocious. I don't know what to attribute that trend to. I have a couple of theories.
One is that they probably teach this "new" approach in colleges that stipulates that you should push G/C into the shadows and R/Y into the highlights. Supposedly that sort of color separation technique adds to contrast and appeal (NOT). They call it the "Hollywood" or "Blockbuster" look. I don't know who started this but IMO most younger colorists follow or are forced to follow it.
Two, and it's a silly one, another modern trend. The "bad" or "harmful" blue light from digital screens. The marketing of blue-blocking prescription and reading glasses is a heavy one. That "blue-blocking" coating add a magenta filter to the glasses. If I were to use them while color editing, of course, I'd be overcorrecting on the green side (opposite of magenta).
There you have it.