I'm with him, though I maybe don't agree with the assumed tone about it. Precisely what surprising thing went from being assumed non-possible to known possible

I'm with him, though I maybe don't agree with the assumed tone about it. Precisely what surprising thing went from being assumed non-possible to known possible through these folks' efforts? This paper is pointing out that if you have sufficient fidelity, you can do this -- which isn't the science fiction part of the film plot, it was fundamental and now widely known (and frequently repeated in popular CSI type television and film, to the degree it has now spawned many parodies). What was science fiction in the film was that somewhere "beyond the year 2000" you'd have a source image of sufficient fidelity to try this with -- and the paper hasn't changed that either, it is quite unlikely you are going to find matching fidelity images (39 megapixel) out of e.g. security camera or child abuse stills anytime soon. The only novelty here is that the researchers have access to still camera that can take a photo of fidelity required to make this a real thing in their controlled conditions -- which is a little cool I suppose, but is that surprising? Things reflect light, and that kind of capability from imaging sensors is fairly established (yet still not widely available enough to produce real world applications). They lean on this abstract with these crime solving use cases -- and if those things were real (even if you cheated and used the very top of the line consumer video recorders or security cameras or phone still cameras) then sure yeah that'd be remarkable and maybe people would be surprised by that (precisely because it is not physically possible).