I'm pissed that they remove it from the first place. I want to watch a movie the way the filmmakers originally intended, not with Netflixs modifications.
Did the filmmakers really intend for their films to have grain in them, or was it a feature forced upon them by the nature of their tools?
If non-grainy film stock had been available for the same price, do you think filmmakers would have intentionally picked the grainy film instead? Every single time?
To me it's less about what they wanted to achieve, and instead about what they actually achieved with what they had available.
As an over-the-top example: Most people (that I know) would agree with George Lucas re-edits of Star Wars with newer CGI are worse than the original edits. The only reason to choose the newer edits are because they're released in HD and the original is not.
Film grain is horribly incompressible and 100% different randomly from frame to frame. It tends to be the first thing that vanishes from MPEG-compressed video.
(and of course if your film is shot on digital, then it was never there)
In practice, you are happy with all sorts of artefacts introduced by compression, and that's all this really is – a method of encoding data about what you are looking at in a smaller space.
The thing is you can't. What the silver iodide did 100 years ago is now coupled to complex chemical processes that affect the picture quality and sometimes serious choices in restoration (see Metropolis).
