Steven Spielberg’s entertainment masterpiece Raiders of the Lost Ark is finally heading back to AMC Theaters for a limited run this September. This time, fans will get to see the classic like never before, with a fully restored and remastered print that’s been up-converted from the original 35mm film to the 70mm IMAX format. The extensive conversion and remastering is all part of the reformatting for the Blu-ray release which debuts September 18th.
Spielberg was said to be skeptical about the transfer until he saw the results – which blew him away, allowing him to appreciate new visual subtleties.
Speaking with Yahoo!, Spielberg talked about his reaction to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the IMAX format:
I didn’t know if the 1981 print would stand up to a full IMAX transfer, so I came expecting a sort of grainy, muddy, and overly enlarged representation of the movie I had made [31] years ago. And I was blown away by the fact that it looked better than the movie I had made [31] years ago… All the shadows in the earlier scenes that we shot in Hawaii [were] always kind of muddy anyway on 35mm, because we couldn’t schlep all of our big arc lights down into this valley. Suddenly, there was definition in the shadows, which I had never seen before. And the shadows weren’t murky and washed out; they were sharp as a tack. I sat there, I think, probably with my mouth open a little wider than it normally is.
Not only is the visual experience enhanced, so is the audio. Talking withThe NY Times, Spielberg refers to the infamous rolling boulder scene:
When the boulder is rolling, chasing Indy through the cave, you really feel the boulder in your stomach, the way you do when a marching band passes by, and you’re standing right next to it.
Here’s the trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark in IMAX:
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