The first time I saw the anime, it was a bootleg copy, and when it got to the eclipse, it was REALLY dark. All you could really see of the monsters were eyes and teeth, and it was really menacing.
Later on when I got a legitimate copy, (and later than that saw the actual manga material) I discovered it was all bright and you could see the monsters in detail. It lost a little something then.
I dunno that seeing the eclipse in movie quality detail would actually help it any.
@m00n:
Well it would be possible to cut the Golden Age Arc in two from a storytelling point of view. First half is the straight road to victory and ends with either the Hawks glorious return to Midland, Griffiths death or Guts leaving. The second is the derailment ending of course in the eclipse. But that's just the storytelling. I'm not sure a salesman would agree with such a proposal.
Fine. So two movies, 2 hours long each.
Still only 240 minutes compared to the shows' 500.
If its to be a reasonable adaptation of the manga at all, they have to be really committed right off the bat to doing a lot of material… compared to the "well, we're doing a movie and then uhm..." they seem to be at right now. I mean, you could cut a campaign or two, and all the Adon filler material, but that still doesn't get that run time down much. Especially when you consider that they skipped like a volume of Golden Age material in the manga before. (And pretty much all of Guts and Caska's sex scene for... obvious reasons.)
The EVA movies at least announced right up front "yes, we have a solid plan, and we're doing 4 movies." This... I dunno. Feels less promising.
OVAs really seem like the best bet all around.
Or we could end up with something akin to the Macross or Escaflowne movies, I suppose.