Aliens: Original Vs Special Edition

[BUDFORCE]

Something I was thinking about.

I need to set the premise, Aliens is one my favourite movies of all time. However, I was quite late to the Special Edition, and I had seen the original version, many many times, and therefore was "used" to the original version.

There are quite a few subtle differences, but I guess the main two differences, are the pre-incident colony scenes, and the automated sentry turret scenes.

I guess a few of the subtle differences to note, towards the start of the movie, there is a scene where Ripley is in a room sitting on a park bench with a woodland scene actually on a TV screen, and adds plot about her daughter.

I can take or leave this part.

Jumping way ahead, there is a short scene as Bishop is dropping Ripley off on the platform to go off and fight the Queen alien, there is IMO a very cringey scene where Ripley and Hicks exchange forenames, that 100% should have been deleted forever.

There are also quite a few other subtle differences, but really none of these are that significant and I guess add a bit of content.

The automated sentry turret scene I guess is one of the two main differences, and I must admit, I love the special edition content for this part. Watching the original version, it always felt like the movie jumped ahead, Hudson comments something like "how can they cut the power" and it does feel like the movie had jumped.

The pre-incident colony scenes however have got me torn.

In one respect, the added content is great, you get to see more of the colony and I guess the set designs they did. But I dunno.... In the original version when the marines first land, there is more of a feeling of mystery and suspense, I mean, yes you know there are aliens there otherwise it wouldn't be an aliens movie, but there is more of a mystery of where the colonists are, what happened etc, which builds a bit more suspense. You get hints, the acid hole burned into the floor, then the face huggers in the glass jars.

It's not until they find the first colonist and the chestburst scene quickly followed by the outbreak that you truly know what had happened.

Whilst giving extra content I feel the pre-incident scene spoils this a bit, plus there are characters that end up having very short parts never to be seen again.

I guess if you only have watched the special edition or were used to that version, you might think half of the movie was missing in the original, fair enough.

Interested to hear what people think.

 

[hudson86]

I always watch the special edition and I've always thought of it as a great example of a directors cut , rather than a quick cash in to sell Dvds.

I like the extra Ripley bits at the start , they add the additional context as to why she bonds so closely with Newt.

The pre incident bits i think were taken out as you say , they killed the suspense about whats to come. Definitely would be better as Dvd extras even from the special edition.

Sentry guns are just awesome but I think they took them out for time and not wanting to show the Aliens as easily killed.

Didnt realise the first name swap wasnt in the cinematic cut, its been a while since I watched it .... Maybe as far back as Vhs !

Btw my usernames from Aliens + year of release and even the dogs called Hudson )

 

[Hades]

I always watch the special edition and I've always thought of it as a great example of a directors cut , rather than a quick cash in to sell Dvds.

I like the extra Ripley bits at the start , they add the additional context as to why she bonds so closely with Newt.

The pre incident bits i think were taken out as you say , they killed the suspense about whats to come. Definitely would be better as Dvd extras even from the special edition.

Sentry guns are just awesome but I think they took them out for time and not wanting to show the Aliens as easily killed.

Didnt realise the first name swap wasnt in the cinematic cut, its been a while since I watched it .... Maybe as far back as Vhs !

Btw my usernames from Aliens + year of release and even the dogs called Hudson )

That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over! What the **** are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?

 

[danoliver1]

You know it's an awesome film when you can real off tons of quotes.

 

[ttaskmaster]

I guess a few of the subtle differences to note, towards the start of the movie, there is a scene where Ripley is in a room sitting on a park bench with a woodland scene actually on a TV screen, and adds plot about her daughter.
I can take or leave this part.

Motherhood being a big theme of the Alien films, this scene is pretty crucial IMO, as it established Ripley as an actual mother. In Alien, she was the ship's Warrant Officer, the 2i/c and basically the mother of the crew (references to MUTHR aside). The third and fourth films developed this concept further, as she basically birthed aliens.
Side note - The woman in the 'last known photo of Amanda Ripley' was actually Sigourney's own mother.

 

[BUDFORCE]

Side note - The woman in the 'last known photo of Amanda Ripley' was actually Sigourney's own mother.

Hah nice fact, was she deceased at the time of filming? Be a bit morbid lol.

 

[Rroff]

The colony scenes I think are awesome but very difficult in terms of erasing some of the suspense and tension - watching the movie for the first time without then re-watching with I think works well. Potentially the bulk of the colony scenes other than some teasers which didn't give too much away could have been worked into a later act but I'm not quite sure how that could be done.

Sentry gun scenes are highly dividing but personally I like them as despite their power the aliens just keep on coming and I think that actually tends to make them scary rather than the other way around.

There have been a few deleted scenes cropping up over the years including some pretty interesting ones with interaction between Hicks and Newt which is a shame never made it to the movie - sadly the YT video I watched including them seems to have been deleted.

Definitely one of if not my favourite movies as it has a feeling of authenticity you rarely see these days, the grittiness and quality of the characters makes it feel more real rather than so many movies where you feel like the settings and characters only exist for the brief time they appear in the movie for want of a better way to describe it.

there is IMO a very cringey scene where Ripley and Hicks exchange forenames, that 100% should have been deleted forever.

Although cringey - a lot of characters in the movie have this small kind of final development of their relationship with other characters like with Gorman's death scene and the bit leading up to it where in the end he is kind of accepted by some of the other characters, especially Vasquez, who originally didn't think much of him.

 

[ttaskmaster]

Hah nice fact, was she deceased at the time of filming? Be a bit morbid lol.

Elizabeth Inglis
Actress
Born: 10 July 1913, Colchester
Died: 25 August 2007, Santa Barbara, California, United States

Aliens was 1986, so no she was very much alive and somewhere around the age of 73. I suspect the photo would have been of her around the 66 years of age that Amanda was supposed to have been.

Sentry gun scenes are highly dividing but personally I like them as despite their power the aliens just keep on coming and I think that actually tends to make them scary rather than the other way around.

Actually, the fact that they stop coming, with rounds still left on one of the guns, is precisely what demonstrates that they're not just mindlessly throwing themselves forward. They do stop and rethink their tactics... which makes them even more dangerous and scary!!

Regarding the characters' development, there's a lot more detail in the Alan Dean Foster novelisation, as it was taken from an earlier draft of the script and gives much more background.
For example, Ripley is especially upset when Wierzbowski dies, as she'd quite liked him.
There's also a group shower scene, which was never filmed here, but did surface in Starship Troopers which in many ways took a lot of inspiration from Aliens.

 

[Rroff]

Actually, the fact that they stop coming, with rounds still left on one of the guns, is precisely what demonstrates that they're not just mindlessly throwing themselves forward. They do stop and rethink their tactics... which makes them even more dangerous and scary!!

I was meaning in a wider sense in that ultimately the guns don't stop the aliens.

 

[ttaskmaster]

I was meaning in a wider sense in that ultimately the guns don't stop the aliens.

Debatable.
They were certainly effective, to the point where it's a question of what runs out first - Aliens or ammo....

In the wider sense, no, but that's the same with anything you can bypass or think your way around. Most home security is like that.

 

[Rroff]

Debatable.
They were certainly effective, to the point where it's a question of what runs out first - Aliens or ammo....

In the wider sense, no, but that's the same with anything you can bypass or think your way around. Most home security is like that.

I think you are missing the point of my post, or as Hudson said rhetorically "Maybe we got 'em demoralized".

 

[ttaskmaster]

I think you are missing the point of my post, or as Hudson said rhetorically "Maybe we got 'em demoralized".

Not sure exactly what point you were making, then, as absolutely nothing will ever stop them so long as there's a scriptwriter to create plot devices that let them move between contexts...
To my knowledge, not one alien made it past those guns as long as they were still able to fire... but that's also why they didn't just keep going mindlessly forward down to the last xenomorph standing, and why a thinking xeno is scarier than one that thinks it's going to overpower an automated turret. They're not dumb AI NPCs like in the game!

The guns stopped the Xenos from getting in that way... but just because they found another way in does not detract from what the guns did achieve.
Had the APC not been damaged, the Dropship not been crashed, or any number of other things, the story would have been very different. Not even taking off and nuking the entire site from orbit was any way to be sure... but none of these things are really testament to the aliens' characteristics, so much as other contributing factors that either they take advantage of or that put the stupid humans further down the holes they dug for themselves.

In fact, I think the humans are generally the scariest villains in sci-fi anyway.... because as Ripley says, you don't see them ******* each other over for a goddamn percentage.

 

[ianh]

My understanding of the Sentry guns (maybe from the novelisation?) was that the Queen had some form of mental "link" to all the drones and as such it was the Queen who made the decisions for the colony. Therefore once the Queen started to sense the amount of drones dying and, not knowing enough about "guns" to know about ammo, she decided to change tactics rather than the individual drones making that choice.

So for me it was never about showing the drones to be mindless one second and calculating the next, but instead to show there was an greater intellect behind the collectives decisions - the Queen.

 

[GlitterBalls]

Oh god not another Aliens thread, I know I'm a new poster but I've been a lurker for some time and seen a few posts on this haha.

 

[Rroff]

Not sure exactly what point you were making

You are taking parts of what I said in a very literal or specific way when they were intended much more broadly - and/or appearing to disagree with what I said while basically saying the same thing in another manner.

 

[ttaskmaster]

You are taking parts of what I said in a very literal or specific way when they were intended much more broadly - and/or appearing to disagree with what I said while basically saying the same thing in another manner.

Not quite. I'm agreeing with your premise, but not your argument or your conclusion.

 

[MookJong]

I much prefer the thetrical version, have stated it here many times. There isn't anything from the Special Edition that adds to the experience IMO it only detracts from it. Although seeing the Sentry guns is cool, it feels much scarier when that doesn't happen first and they are simply sealed in and you don't know the aliens are coming.

The worst pasrt is seeing Newts family and the colony at the start, turning up and exploring the location as the Marines first see it is far more unnerving.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Special edition for me

This is a good site for info on cuts etc

Aliens deleted scenes

This article covers all the known deleted scenes from the 1986 film Aliens. Some of these sequences never progressed past the early script or storyboard stages, while others were filmed before being cut during the editing process. Despite their removal, several of these scenes were included in...

avp.fandom.com

 

[FlamBango]

There was another scene when they were dropping down to the planet and Hudson gave a longer speech about how badass they were. That was good.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

There was another scene when they were dropping down to the planet and Hudson gave a longer speech about how badass they were. That was good.

You mean