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My local cinema is doing some special shows. There is a new Blu-ray with remastered 4K and the Director's Cut included.

This makes me feel so old. I remember seeing it in the cinema on first release. It was an 18, so I must have sneaked in under-age.

I have been waiting for the alien movies to get released in a 4k box set. I guess this 40th anniversary is what they have been waiting for. Il pick it up when it comes out.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
My local cinema is doing some special shows. There is a new Blu-ray with remastered 4K and the Director's Cut included.

This makes me feel so old. I remember seeing it in the cinema on first release. It was an 18, so I must have sneaked in under-age.

That sounds absolutely excellent.

My favorite movie ever.

And then you realize how awful the films have become and you feel cheated and old XD

If you want a really stark and saddening evening...watch the ALIEN documentaries (I think I saw one online) and see how passionate, hard working and innovative everything from that film was...and then watch Alien Covenant and weep. It's disheartening to watch Ridley Scott talk about film making in his ALIEN days - disparaging poor film making, overly large budgets, cheesy action etc...only to succumb to all of that stuff in his later films.

ALIEN and ALIENS are superb. I adore that one was a thriller, the other a tense action movie/thriller. Since then it's been some hard times.

Alien is one of my favourite films. It’s not just the fact that it’s a superbly made haunted house style monster movie. What Alien does better than any other movie I know is convey the vast emptiness of space while, at the same time, feeling claustrophobic as these people are trapped, surrounded by nothingness, with no hope of rescue.

That feeling was utterly lacking in any of the sequels. I enjoyed Aliens at the time of release, but I don’t think it’s aged well. A war film in space with all of the cliches of war films and two dimensional characters. I’ve never understood the love for a James Cameron. Apart from the first Terminator movie, I’ve found all of his movies to be utterly forgettable.

I know this isn’t necessarily the most popular of opinions, but I actually like the prequels. They’re not the greatest movies by a long shot but I give them kudos for not being just rehashes of the same formular. They are also the only other movies in the franchise that give me the chills in the same way that the original did.

It is unearthly how Alien and Aliens has stood the test of time as sci-fi movies are usually the first things to age themselves.

Such awesome movies! About the only bad special effects in either movie is the ship destruction scene at the end of Alien.

I love the movies absolute favorites in Alien and Aliens.

But these are my little nit picks.

In Alien the scene where Ash's head is propped up and there is the hard cut from the manikin head to the actors... they really just need a reaction shot in between those two. Like... use that single moment to cut to Parker looking down on the head before cutting back to the live actor head. The hard cut is VERY noticeable.


In Aliens the Queen design is superb... except the body and legs. Anyone who has seen a toy or statue of a queen can see how ridiculously top heavy it is and how thin and spindly the legs and feet are. It worked great in the movie as the puppet. Amazing on screen. But there is no way that thing can stand and run without crumpling face first into a heap on the ground.

I would love to see a new slight redesign that made it's body actually functional.

I did always love the scene in Aliens where Bishop's torso grabs for Newt during the decompression, and you can see about 8 inches of Lance Henrickson's real torso going into a hole cut in the deck below his "guts".

Alien 3 is also good fun provided you watch the extended directors cut version where they put a lot of the cut story bits back into it. Though for some reason they cut the fantastic dog erupting scene (which makes sense) and replace it with a bull eruption scene which is no where near as visually brutal nor fearsome.

It's the one change I wish they'd not made when doing the extended version.

Meanwhile Alien 4 is visually a treat, though somewhat a predictable story and an utter crime to science in any form. But otherwise its a good fanservice style film.




It's a shame they've not made any alien films since then!
Also GOG why still no Alien 2!





Oh and whilst I'm on an Alien roll check out the comics they are well worth it; esp since many were written in the Alien1/2 era and really expand on the possible storylines that could have been done. War on Earth - War in the alien world - underwater aliens etc... As well as some good old fashioned "alien in the ship" adventures.

This is honestly one of the best alien comics. Mignolas deep shadows art style suits the feel of alien very well.

I like of liked Covenant, actually. It wasn't very good though.

I know this is about alien, but I have a True Cool Story Bro about Aliens:

The first time I saw Aliens, it was a WPIX movie of the week. Those were very big when I was a kid - they had the most incredible programming for a kid like me, it was always Jaw and horror and sci-fi and like, Godzilla vs King Kong and stuff like that.

Anyways when they played Aliens, they had to cut some of it for violence and that wrecked the runtime, so to pad it out they added in some other scenes that were dropped theatrically: the Sentry Guns, Burke briefing Ripley... what she missed, and the order from Weyland-Yutani that was relayed to some settlers to go investigate. Anyway, it came out on VHS after that and those scenes were again gone.

I would talk to people about it, and they had no idea wtf I was talking about. They existed on laserdisc, but who the hell owned a laserdisc player? No one I knew, the discs were $90. I mean, $90 in like, 1990!

Anyway, I never felt such vindication as I did when Aliens SE was finally released on DVD with that stuff re-inserted, and no, I was not crazy, those scenes really did happen.

It's amazing how cut- up films can become!
It was something that plagued Sergio Leoni with his films, often because he'd make quite long films and the companies that bought them would slice out chunks to make them fit into their cinema time slots. I think it was a major reason why he didn't make all that many films, esp when they cut his most major work Once Upon a Time in America.

The crazy thing is that different parties end up owning different cuts of the film and even today there's a society that has been trying to unit the different rights owners to restore the film to its original form.

If you check the wikis you can see that for almost all his major films there are multiple versions with bits cut and changed over time!

Listen to the actor commentaries for ALIENS.

Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein and Lance Henrickson spend more time talking about "Near Dark" (which they made AFTER Aliens) than the movie they were ostensibly there for.

Some more stuff:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
No, not drink shorts.

Or short shorts.

But film shorts. All set within the canon universe of Alien.

More here.

Sorry for the double thread.

No problem.

I look forward to a 4k 6 alien film +6 short film box set. Il buy it.

 LordofHats wrote:
And then you realize how awful the films have become and you feel cheated and old XD

quoted for truth, saw it at my local cinema last week and the post watch pubchat was lynching the chuff out of everything but the first two films

Alien 3 was a bit too bleak and kind of lost its way.

Alien 4 was just far too silly comic book.

Got to admit, I've got a distinct soft spot for Alien Ressurection.

It's by no means good, but it's still thoroughly enjoyable.

Mostly it suffers from the incredibly high bar Alien and Aliens set. Both are stone cold classics of the genre - and both took the same central nasty and produced two very different films.

AR at least tried to do something we'd not seen before. Specifically, what would've actually happened if Weyland Yutani got hold of the Xenomorph. It didn't quite succeed in that, but I for one seriously appreciate the effort, and can sort of 'fill in the blanks' with my own head canon (no, not Head Cannon. That's different). I'll always take a flawed stab at something a bit different, than a 'straight by the numbers, might as well be a remake' retread of what has gone before.

Alien 3 is a movie designed by committee and it shows.

Multiple changes of writer AND director, not to mention other crew, meant that the movie ended up being bits of ALL of the script options and it suffered for it.

The dog/cow alien (it's either depending on which version you have seen they shot both versions. In either case, it's quadrupedal.)

It makes far more sense as a cow. Instead of coming out as a small chest burster it comes out as a more developed xenomorph because its in a bigger body that can support its growth better.

The dog should have been a smaller and less developed chest burster then we have seen in the past.

Where the feth was the room in the dogs body for all its limbs?