I had the exact same experience watching Goodfellas on my parents' TV. It felt like a cheap soap opera and I was thoroughly confused about what's happening. Afterwards I did some research and learned about motion interpolation in modern TVs.
Because they felt they were being ripped off, with all that unused space. They paid for widescreen!
Didn't matter that people looked all fat in the face, or that the effect was logarithmic near the edges. A car driving by got wider as it neared the edge of screen!
Nope, only mattered it was widescreen now.
And until I mentioned it, they did not even notice.
When I thought of it, I realised this sort of matches everything. Whether food, or especially politics, nuance is entirely lost on the average person.
I feel, as a place for tech startups, we should realise this. If you plan to market to the public, just drop the nuance. You'll save, be more competitive, and win.
Do you really want this to be the world we live in? It's just hurting the people who do care about nuance.
No. But I also don't want to go bankrupt.
If I want to make a niche market product, for the discerning consumer, well that's different. But from what I see, that's not even one in a thousand... so best be careful.
Firstly, the filter that removed grain from the film also removed grain from the road, the sand, and Mel Gibson's stubble, all of which there's a lot of in the Road Warrior. Everything looked quite a bit too clean.
But the super high frame rate gave the video a hyper-realistic quality. Not realistic in the sense that I'm watching actual post-apocalyptic survivors. Realistic in the sense that I'm looking at what are clearly actors wearing costumes, and it's hard not to imagine the camera and rigging crew standing just out of frame.
An interesting exercise, but not how I want to experience that movie. Having said that, this was my experience just playing around with ffmpeg on my desktop PC. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a dedicated professional using the right tools (presumably also ffmpeg) could manage a set of adjustments and upscaling processes that really do create a better experience than the original film.