Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: Alien Anthology (1 Viewer)

[Erin C]

For my money the extended cuts of ALIENS and ALIEN3 are far superior to the theatrical versions. ALIEN3 is still a mess, but the extended version DEFINITELY the best of the 2. ALIEN and ALIEN RESURRECTION are best as they were. NOTHING can save RESURRECTION! (maybe if you take out that horribly designed newborn.)

 

[Simon Massey]

I'd go with Special Edition versions of all the films with the exception of Alien - the original is better.


Aliens is great whichever cut you watch - tighter pace to the original, but the extra scenes are great anyway

Alien 3 definitely benefits from the extended version IMO, esp now the sound issue has been resolved.

Don't think it really matters with the 4th but I do prefer the SE

 

[Matt Hough]

I don't think with the first two films you can go wrong with either version. The extended versions ARE substantially longer, but the extra time only adds background and nuance to what are already superb films. Of the last two films, I actually preferred the originals to the extended cuts. In his commentary, the director of ALIEN RESURRECTION said that the original IS the director's cut; it's exactly the film he wanted to make.

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

The director's cut of Aliens adds peices to the overall film that enhance what we all saw and loved in the original cut. Having seen Aliens every week for nearly two years (and I recorded the audio of the movie onto cassette so that I could listen to it on my Walkman), I was always confused as to why Vasquez, Hudson, and Hicks were sweaty and on edge on one particular scene without direct apparent reason - the extended version showed me why!


I would watch Aliens and say the dialogue along with the film - drove people nuts. Actually, I'm a little embarrased about that now. Not sure what it is about Aliens that struck a particular chord with me and has stuck with me my entire life, but this collection on blu-ray is reason to celebrate. Thanks again for the great review, Matt.

 

[TravisR]

I prefer the theatrical cut of Alien but I don't think there's that much of a difference in terms of quality between the two. The cocoon scene in the extended cut is pretty cool though. The extended version of Aliens adds stuff that I find essential (like Ripley having had a daughter) but it also adds a scene showing LV-426 before the aliens invade that succeeds in undercutting the tension when the marines arrive at LV-426. Alien 3 is a better movie in its extended form but it's still boring and even longer. As has been said, Alien Resurrection's theatrical cut is the 'real' version.

 

[robbbb1138]

I find the Aliens director's cut to be vastly inferior to the theatrical version. It's not that any of the scenes are bad in and of themselves. I just find all of it unnecessary padding in a movie that is one of cinema's true benchmarks of editing and pacing. The Hadley's Hope scenes before Ripley and the Colonial Marines arrive are the worst offenders, not to mention that I think they seriously detract from the tension that the theatrical version has from the time that the Marines land to them finally finding the hive. I love seeing the scenes, just not in the movie.

 

[Cees Alons]

Originally Posted by ManW_TheUncool -- a couple of HTF members here seem to have already ordered it, but not sure if anyone can confirm yet. Thanks much.


_Man_

... and sorry for not replying, Man. I noticed your post after Doug had already given the (correct) answer - and I just realized a moment ago, I then forgot to confirm it.


Yes, the Alien Anthology Blu-ray set, The Mu-th-ur of all Blu-ray Collections, is "ABC", meaning not region-locked. (And so is the BttF set, which, being from Universal, doesn't carry any region indication, also meaning not region-locked.)


Of course some of the extras could be pure PAL (if SDVD)! I haven't been able to check those yet.



Cees

 

[SamT]

Originally Posted by robbbb1138

I find the Aliens director's cut to be vastly inferior to the theatrical version. It's not that any of the scenes are bad in and of themselves. I just find all of it unnecessary padding in a movie that is one of cinema's true benchmarks of editing and pacing. The Hadley's Hope scenes before Ripley and the Colonial Marines arrive are the worst offenders, not to mention that I think they seriously detract from the tension that the theatrical version has from the time that the Marines land to them finally finding the hive. I love seeing the scenes, just not in the movie.

I completely agree with you about The Hadley's Hope scenes. I think, not seeing them alive before, adds more mystery and suspense.


I'm one of the people who actually liked Alien3 as it is. I will try the workprint but I doubt to like it.

 

[oscar_merkx]

I walked out of watching Alien3 when it was first released simply because it did not make sense.


I did not know that David Fincher had directed Alien3 until years later.


Watching Wrecking and Rage, it is clear that no one had any idea what's going on so hats off to Charlie for such a thorough investigative documentary.


I am probably in the minority here that believes that David Fincher made the right choice not to contribute to Alien3 because this allows him to concentrate on making movies.


I have always found it interesting that he has made great movies afterwards,


Can any one shed light on this ?


Cheers

 

[Kevin EK]

I have always found the longer cut of ALIENS to be more of a curiosity piece than what I would have wanted to see in the theaters in 1986. It would have been nice if they had left in the bit about her daughter, as it informs everything else in the movie - but I agree that it really isn't necessary to see the colony before the Marines get there. I was interested in seeing Newt's family find the spacecraft, but once I saw the scene, it felt, well, ordinary. And I didn't feel we needed the extra material about the automated guns in the tunnel.

On the other hand, while it detracts from the pacing of the end of ALIEN, I always liked the cocoon scene with Ripley, Dallas and Brett at the end. Storywise, it explains the last piece of the puzzle about where the eggs come from. Tom Skerrit in one of the Enhancement Pods indicates that he thought this scene was really meant to tie into a never-filmed love scene between Dallas and Ripley, but he's forgetting a few details. The earlier Dallas/Ripley scene was intended to show that the characters were looking for relief, and that they weren't necessarily having a relationship - and it was intended to end with Kane's corpse floating by outside. (They were supposed to be in one of the glass blisters) When Alan Dean Foster did the novelization for ALIENS, he picked up on some of this and expanded it to say that there had been a relationship, but there's nothing in the original script to really bear this out.) The point of the cocoon scene as written by Dan O'Bannon was that it shows the last part of the life cycle of the creature - something that he had originally meant to be shown in heiroglyphics on the walls of the "silo" where the eggs are found in his original idea for the script.


BTW - another Enhancement Pod has Dan O'Bannon discussing at length his fight for writing credit on ALIEN, and how things got particularly nasty between him and Walter Hill. As far as O'Bannon was concerned, Hill was trying to completely take credit for O'Bannon and Shusett's work. I'm sure Hill's perspective would be that he had to completely rewrite O'Bannon's script to make it filmable - but the thing is that all the major core concepts are O'Bannon and Shussett's, with the exception of the Company/Ash subplot.


As for ALIEN 3, I was never happy with the theatrical cut of the film. Right off the bat, I've never understood where the egg in the cryogenics area came from. The Queen Alien had no time to lay eggs or do anything else before she got ejected from the ship, and no other aliens ever came up to the Sulaco - so what's with the new egg? And how is it able to lay more than one egg? Since it attacks Ripley, and is still able to attack down on Fury 151, it has super-abilities that contradict anything we've seen before. I wasn't a fan of Fincher's filming style for the third film, in that whole sequences felt like music videos - like the funeral/birth sequence, for example. And the whole thing was so relentlessly downbeat and grim - doomed Sulaco, doomed prisoners, doomed Ripley, doomed Bishop, etc - that I just have never found a lot of appeal in it. The longer cut of the film that got resurrected in 2003 at least explains a lot of what we are seeing in a better way than the theatrical cut did - and it opens things up a bit with the exterior shots. As for the whole "trapping the alien" bit, I have to agree with Jon Landau on that one - if you can trap it and contain it, it's not as frightening by any means. The bit about Golic letting it out just becomes a giant clapping your head to your forehead moment rather than one of dread - and the alien itself is diminished.

Having now looked at the longer version of the making-of for ALIEN 3, I'm surprised at how similar to the Quadrilogy version it is. Yes, there's a bit of saltier material with and about Fincher, and about how he was hounded through production, reshoots and post, but I can't believe that this was enough to to make anyone want it re-edited. What seems clear watching either version of "Wreckage and Rage/Rape" is that Fincher was making the biggest, grandest movie he could, and at times he was on a completely different page from Fox and from Hill and Giler. Since this was his first feature film, he didn't have the clout to do what he does today - and it's clear he resented that. The whole experience sounds like a really unhappy memory for him, and I'm not surprised he isn't interested in reliving it. It took me years before I watched another Fincher film - I didn't see Se7en for about 2 years after it was released - because ALIEN 3 had left such a bad taste in the mouth. And then after friends hounded me to see Se7en, I finally watched it, and was really surprised. Since then, I've really appreciated his films (maybe not so much for The Game or Panic Room, but absolutely for Benjamin Button, Zodiac and Fight Club).

 

[Lord Dalek]

This set really is a hell of an acomplishment. Any gripes I might have (unremastered trailers, no intended isolated score for the Special Edition of Aliens leaving two whole cuts exclusive to the Varese SE soundtrack) are basically nitpicking. No point to hold on to your copies of the Quadrilogy as Alien Anthology easily supplants it.

 

[Simon Massey]

Ok Just to throw this out there - how exactly does the Special Edition scenes in Aliens undercut the tension from when the marines land to the scene where they meet the aliens for the first time ? For those who have never seen Alien, it still doesn't tell them what happened after they found the facehugger and for those that have - does anyone watching this really have any doubts as to what has happened at the colony ?? What mystery is in the original that isn't there in the SE ??


I think it adds to the tension personally, given we are introduced to Newt and we are left wondering what happened to her. It puts a human face on the colony before they arrive making their loss seem worse and emphasises that these were "families" out there (the children playing in the corridors).

 

[Nelson Au]

I watched Alien, the new 2003 cut. I had not seen it in a long time. It's one of the movies I like to not watch too often. It still works for me!


I think I agree that the 2003 cut is okay, but the theatrical cut is the one to watch. The sequence when Ripley finds Dallas and Brent is interesting and I've seen that as a deleted scene in the past does cut into the tension of Ripley trying to get to the shuttle in time. I am noot that clear where the other trims and additions are the Scott adjusted for the 2003 cut. But it seems the scene where Ripley is trying to turn the coolant reactor back on to shut down the self destruct sequence was shorter?


At any rate, the bd looks great! I might have to watch Aliens tonight.

 

[Lord Dalek]

Originally Posted by Kevin EK As for ALIEN 3, I was never happy with the theatrical cut of the film. Right off the bat, I've never understood where the egg in the cryogenics area came from. The Queen Alien had no time to lay eggs or do anything else before she got ejected from the ship, and no other aliens ever came up to the Sulaco - so what's with the new egg? And how is it able to lay more than one egg? Since it attacks Ripley, and is still able to attack down on Fury 151, it has super-abilities that contradict anything we've seen before. I wasn't a fan of Fincher's filming style for

Yeah my main problem with Alien 3 is that the whole setup is so absurd and so ignorant of whats happened in the previous two movies. As I understand it., the Xenomorph Queen is now sterile because she's lost her sack, so she can't make eggs. Its a plot hole, it makes not a lick of sense, and its why I generally consider the other two movies to be not exactly canon (even though I do have a strange fondness for Resurrection)

 

[Mark_TB]

I haven't seen the "Director's Cut" of ALIEN since 2003 (when I was lucky enough to catch it in the theater), so if I have any of the following details incorrect, please forgive me. But if I remember correctly the scene where Ripley finds Dallas and Brett, she comes down the ladder, finds them, lights them up, then climbs back up and out.


So why was she down there in the first place? She didn't need anything from down there, and it clearly wasn't on the way to the shuttle. It felt wrong to me -- it seemed to have been arbitrarily dropped in, with no real reason for her to go down into that compartment. I haven't read the script in awhile, but maybe that scene was originally intended to be earlier in the movie, where it would make more sense.


Now feel free to explain to me why I'm wrong.


- Mark

 

[TonyPR2010]

The Alien 3 setup doesn't seem that hard for me to believe. Maybe the queen has the ability to lay 1 or 2 eggs if her egg sac is detached, as a survival measure. These ideas change from movie to movie. In the first movie, an egg is formed from Brett's corpse.

The queen was hiding in the dropship on the way up to the Sulaco for several moments when no one was watching her. She could have laid an egg in there. Or after she climbed out maybe she dropped an egg on the landing bay at a moment we didn't see. (Actually there must have been 2 eggs-- one for the dog and one for Ripley)

 

[Kevin EK]

I remember reading accounts of the making of ALIEN 3 that the facehugger that implants in Ripley is a "super facehugger" as it carries both a queen egg and a warrior egg. But we never see any example of this, nor do we know anything about it. The only thing we know is that somehow an egg is left on the ship, and that it opens on its own, in no proximity to any life form, and the resulting facehugger not only implants Ripley but then waits in the EEV to find a second target, which winds up being the dog. The Queen in ALIENS was hiding in the landing gear, and I got the impression she never made it inside the dropship itself. And even if she somehow dropped an egg at some point while menacing Ripley and Newt, it's a giant leap to think that Ripley wouldn't have checked for this, or that Bishop wouldn't have either seen it happen, or recommend that Ripley do a check just to be sure.


As for why and how Ripley winds up in the lower compartment to find Dallas in the cocoon, I believe that in the novelization the idea is that she finds Parker and Lambert's corpses and then runs the length of that compartment (C Deck) until she finds herself in the egg room. In the Director's Cut, this scene happens after that point, and we can hear the destruct countdown going on in the background. Why she would go there at that time makes no sense when you think about it

 

[TravisR]

Originally Posted by Kevin EK /forum/thread/305336/htf-blu-ray-review-alien-anthology/30#post_3745534

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Sometimes, you just have to remember to use a little suspension of disbelief.


Besides, why should we approach the story as if we can see from all the necessary POVs for everything to make sense? Afterall, it's not like we were supposed to know all that much about the aliens (and everything else about that universe) up to that point.


_Man_

 

[WillG]

I prefer the theatrical cut of Alien but I don't think there's that much of a difference in terms of quality between the two. The cocoon scene in the extended cut is pretty cool though. The extended version of Aliens adds stuff that I find essential (like Ripley having had a daughter) but it also adds a scene showing LV-426 before the aliens invade that succeeds in undercutting the tension when the marines arrive at LV-426.

Yeah, the Cocoon scene is neat to see, but I also agree that it makes little sense to where it was placed in the film. Yeah, why did Ripley go down there in the first place? Why would she burn Dallas alive when the ship was going to self destruct is a few minutes anyway? It might have worked better if they could have fit it in right after Ripley finds the bodies of Parker and Lambert. For example she's moving to the self destruct console and hears Dallas moaning and from there goes to investigate. Also the Director's cut loses the scene with Dallas having his final conversation with Mother which kills that version of the film for me.


As for Aliens, I prefer the Special Edition. I would have lost the Colony scene though (although I can see that scene working in another way. You lose the "mystery" of what happened to the Colony, but as someone else said, you see the "Human Face" to it which makes the fate of the colony seem more tragic, especially seeing several children present) I do find it a bit convenient that it's Newt's family that finds the Derelict. I would also lose the scene with Ripley, Bishop, Hudson and Vasquez discussing the concept of the Queen. It's too much foreshadowing and makes Hudson seem unnecessarily dumb by likening the Alien society to an Ant hive.


The opening of Alien 3. It was just a plain and simple cheat. Maybe the queen could have somehow left an egg, but the "Aliens" Ripley most certainly would have done a sweep of the Sulaco before going into stasis.


Also, is there a list available yet of the restored footage to "Wreckage and Rage" There were definitely a few bits that are easily recognizable as being restored. But, I didn't find that there was enough scandalous material to warrant 30+ minutes of deletions the first time around. Charlie's Delete Footage Marker from the Quadrilogy would have come in handy here.