Ended up buying the R1 2 disc set. What a mistake! Picture is really soft and blurry. It must have been released around the same time as the Blu-ray since the extras are the same. So same DNRed mess. But while the BD looks like wax works, it at least is not blurry. Although they can't be the exact same transfer as the DVD is slightly more opened up than the BD showing more picture information around all edges.
In hindsight I should have bought the original single disc R1 DVD, however its non-anamorphic and contains a Dolby Digital 5.0 track (not sure how it differs to the 4.0 on the 2-discer and BD).
I then compared my DVD to the German DVD on
caps-a-holic and the latter is much sharper and contains more detail/grain/noise.
So managed to grab a copy of an R2 PAL DVD and took some shots.
R2:
R1:
R2:
R1:
For a DVD its still not amazing but much much better than the R1 2-disc and to me more pleasing than the waxy Blu-ray. They do come from different transfers because the R1 has burnt in subs for foreign dialogue and R2 has player generated ones. Also the R2 was advertised having a 5.0 track but its actually 5.1. This is a remixed track where the dialogue is firmly in the centre whereas the 4.0 has proper directional dialogue which I assume was how it was presented theatrically.
So I'll be muxing the video from the R2 and slowed down from PAL->NTSC and synced to the 4.0 track from the R1.