I didn’t mean to watch this. I just put on the 4K Blu-ray to see what it looked like, and then… didn’t stop. And even changed discs halfway through, old-school style.

So wow, this movie is so nerdy, so dense with proper names and histories, so full of Tolkien’s archaic language. It kind of blows my mind that this was popular. It seems like normies should have been really put off by that and this should have been an ultra-niche cult classic beloved by ultra-nerds but totally shunned broadly.

But then… it’s also easy to see why it’s popular, because it’s just so good. I know the other two movies are messier, but even controlling for that, I think that the terrible Hobbit movies had kind of mentally tarnished this for me, because really it is extremely excellent, and I don’t think I’ve disagreed with that take anytime I’ve watched it, and yet I was surprised.

Also, though, I’ve never seen this movie look or sound this good before. Every reviewer gushes about the remastering job that was done here, and they’re right. It looks incredible. I knew they didn’t redo the CGI, and I wondered if that would look distractingly bad, and the answer is nope, it somehow fits right in and looks in place with the movie (with one partial exception of a hillside ruin they walk past, which looked a bit more CG-ish than most things in the movie). CG elements like the balrog maybe don’t look as good as they would if they were digitally created and rendered afresh today, but they still look better than they’ve ever looked.

And of course, the non-CG real-world things look better and much more detailed than ever. And like, if you’ve watched all those making-of “Appendices” in the original DVD release, you know how much work they went to in putting all this fine detail into the props and costumes, even knowing that a lot of it wouldn’t be visible onscreen. Well, it’s visible now. The texture of fabrics, the grain of wood on chairs, all that “invisible” work they did is paying off twenty years later. So often when you enhance a thing beyond what it was ever meant to be, you end up seeing all the cut corners, but here you just see more faithful, careful detail.

In addition to being 4K, it’s also HDR (Dolby Vision, if your TV supports it, which mine does). The HDR is subtle but noticeable — they elected in their HDR grading to go somewhat more realistic, so like snowy mountain tops that had looked purply and shadowed in the original release now look bright white.

There’s actually kind of a more naturalistic color grade to the whole movie, tbh. This video compares screenshots from the DVD/Blu-ray/EE Blu-ray and this UHD-BD edition. If you watch it on a 4K monitor, you’ll be able to see the huge jumps in detail with each edition. (If you’re surprised as to the 1080p EE Blu-ray looking so much sharper than the 1080p regular Blu-ray, it’s because the EE was done off a new 2K master, so had a better source. The new version, of course, is done off a new 4K master.)

But resolution aside, mostly what you see looking at that video is that the EE Blu-ray was a green-tinted botch job (though when I watched it a decade ago, I remember thinking it looked really good, so that’s probably only an in-comparison thing where it looks weird). But you can definitely see that the new version is less blue/yellow/red/green/etc. Whatever color a scene in the original version was pushed to, this one’s less so. This is definitely an intentional decision from Peter Jackson; I read that it’s to harmonize it with the other two movies, and idk, maybe that’s true? I’m not totally sure I love it, but I also don’t know how much of that is just because it’s different from what I’m used to, and my memory (which I guess is shockingly good for visual things like this) is expecting things to look different.

So yeah, the visuals are great, but so is the sound. It’s difficult for me to compare sound mixes from different versions, because this is the first time I’m listening in a 5.1 system, and obviously that radically changes things, but what I can say is that even on things that don’t rely on deep bass or surround effects, it sounds much clearer than it has in the past, with dialogue that never gets lost in the music or the effects. Having a losslessly compressed Atmos soundtrack no doubt helps with that.

So yeah: This UHD-BD release is absolutely stunning. Like, even if you don’t want to go hard at Blu-ray, if you’re a fan of these movies and plan on watching them again, buy this set and watch it on your PS5 or Xbox Series X.

(Just to get a baseline comparison, I did put on the HBOMAX version to compare a few scenes. It’s… well, you know how I was saying in my big long Blu-ray screed that great 1080p Blu-ray doesn’t look like “1080p” streaming? This sure as heck looked like the streaming thing. Like, I knew it would be worse than the disc, but it was way worse. Like, I sort of legit wonder if I was for some reason getting a 720p stream or something. Just terrible.)