They did an excellent job restoring it.
The thought occurred, if you got the exact same camera, lenses, and film, could you make a picture that looked like the stuff from the late 70's/early 80's?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080761/technical
Do they even make that film any more?
Or would it just be easier to simulate it with Photoshop filters?
Yes and no. Film is currently better than digital, but not for long. The new 6K RED Dragon sensor is catching up pretty quickly:
http://www.redgrabs.com/up/1360380054.jpg
The new digital sensors give an amazingly clean & sharp picture, but we associate movies with the film-look...24fps, film grain, etc. So there are a ton of digital film-grain tools available now, some of which actually look great:
http://www.filmconvert.com/examples/
And there's a huge number of films shot digitally now that people didn't realize were digital. A quick list from RED :
http://www.red.com/shot-on-red
So to some extent, you can make it look pretty good, and the benefit is that you get a cleaner original picture, which not only looks better from the start, but is also better for doing CGI since it's already clean and you can add grain over the original shot & the CGI later. But as far as glass goes, I still prefer using vintage glass on my digital cameras...most of what I shoot on my T2i is on my 50's/60's Zeiss glass, just because it makes the picture look awesome...then slap on some film grain, color grading, and light-leak type of stuff and you can get a pretty cool look. Although there is new, higher-resolution glass out like the Leica Summilux-C made for 4K+ lenses which gives absolutely awesome image quality:
http://vimeo.com/33110953
So it's hard to quantify how close we can make digital look like film...maybe 90, 95%? Film has the physical film, the old glass, the mattebox filters, etc. And running film is horrifically expensive and requires more time & expertise...you have to get the film sent to film processing places, where it will be scanned in digitally anyway, and you need special technicians to run the equipment...I dunno. I prefer film over digital, but I'll never shoot film again because of the convenience of digital, as well as the sharpness/clarity and the ability to add grain later in post.