I was watching lawrence of arabia recently, and was thinking about similar stuff. There's a few scenes (scenes around the: "my name is for my friends" and the echoey canyon in particular) where lawrence looks almost like a photorealistic game character.

I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play. - Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle. - Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail

I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.

If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.