4K! I bought a 4K TV and player this year. I'm really glad I did. So...why bother? Here's a good reason: "Lawrence of Arabia", a big big film with massive narrative stamina that after 3 hours 47 minutes leaves you sad there isn't any more, has come out in every goddamn home video format there is. Since Robert Harris restored the film in 1989, I've bought them all, from VHS to Laserdisc to DVD to Blu-ray.

In the middle of the first half of the film, Lawrence puts his entire mission in jeopardy when, after crossing the Nefud desert—the Sun's Anvil—he risks his life to go back to rescue Gasim, one of his company of raiders, who has fallen off his camel in the night and whom they all presume will be dead from exposure by mid-day. One of Lawrence's manservants, Daud, has decided to wait at the edge of the Nefud, even as the other raiders continue west, in case Lawrence succeeds.

There's a 12-shot sequence where Daud, who'd be well-advised to get off the Nefud before it kills him, looks up and peers at the far horizon when he sees...something. There are 11 shots from his point of view between the moment of "Wait...what?" and the confirmation that it is, in fact, Lawrence, who's got the missing Gasim clinging to him, riding his camel toward salvation. In the script, what he sees is described as an "elongated pinhead of black elevated into the blue above the horizon."

This movie has been released on home video in dozens of countries in at least 6 formats since the 1980s, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the 4K release (based on a 2012 restoration in 8K) is the FIRST TIME that we've ever seen what Daud sees, the eight-pixel-high "elongated pinhead of black" that confirms that, yes, something's coming, Lawrence and Gasim aren't dead, and "for some men nothing is written unless they write it".