General Evans Above Archive for Sep 04, 2022

Fatal Attraction 4K review

Sep 04, 2022 – permalink

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Adrian Lyne’s sexual thriller Fatal Attraction, Paramount is releasing the 1987 film on 4K. This is just two year’s after it was released on Blu-ray based on the same 4K scan used to make this year’s disc, an act that has many collectors wondering if Paramount is double-dipping more than George Costanza at a funeral reception. I had a chance to take a look.

Michael Douglas plays Dan, a lawyer with a loving wife, Beth (Anne Archer), and a daughter. A reckless fling with a book editor named Alex (Glenn Close) turns dangerous when she angrily begins to stalk him. Close is simply magnificent in the role and it’s worth a viewing just to see that performance.

The 2160p HEVC / H.265 encoded native 4K digital transfer with Dolby Vision and HDR10 is presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. It’s a very sharp image with amazing details in the faces, hair and textiles and even the smoke of Alex’s cigarettes. The colour palette leans to more muted fall tones, but the HDR colour grading makes the whites pop. The black levels are a little more problematic. Though most scenes generally don’t lose any details in darker moments, in some darker scenes anyone in a dark outfit is in danger of disappearing into the background. Shot on film, the transfer does have a subtle grain structure, but occasionally it looks like Paramount has tried scrubbing the grain so you get some shots within scenes that suddenly lose a degree of detail.

On the audio side, your ears have the choice of an English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack as well as German, Spanish, French and Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks. Subtitles are available for English, English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. This is the same 5.1 track as previous Blu-ray releases. The film may be a thriller, but the soundtrack is anything but. It’s a very front-heavy soundscape and I’m sure your surrounds will be surprised when they’re very occasionally asked to play some ambient sounds. They’ll also be jealous of your subwoofer, which apparently gets the night off. Dialogue is clear and well-prioritized in the mix.

The 4K set comes with the 4K disc, 2020’s Blu-ray, and a digital code. The extras (all on the included Blu-ray) are a bit light, consisting of audio commentary from Adrian Lyne, an interview with Lyne, some rehearsal footage and an alternate ending.

The Fatal Attraction 4K has a very good video presentation (minus the grain smoothing and black levels) and an underwhelming soundtrack as well as sparse extras. I’d pick it up for the performances and most of the video presentation, but if you do have the 2020 release already, it’s not a huge upgrade.