Quote from: Highland on Nov 24, 2023, 10:58:43 AM...
The Theatrical cut is better, but I always watch the Special, because.....spoiler alert, I know what happens and I simply just want to see more of a kick ass movie, more characters , more Hicks, more Hudson, more Hadley's hope.
If you were to say to me, there's a version of predator that's about to be released with 15 more minutes of Dutch just talking smack ....take my money
Yeah, i only watch the
Aliens special edition too. Simply because there's more to see.
With
Aliens issues like pacing, plotting, character development etc, are irrelevant because of the many times I've seen it by now (I lost count long ago). I know what's happening, what's about to happen, and what isn't about to happen. There's no real suspense or mystery anymore. (So why bother with repeat viewings? The music and sound, photography, lighting, the acting, i.e. all the sensory stuff; as well as the FX with the miniatures and creatures. These are the things I can enjoy over and over.)
Something I often say is how precious a first-time viewing is. You can only ever have that experience once. Forever thereafter, you're watching the movie with all your acquired knowledge altering the experience.
Now, about the special edition's opening Acheron sequence that many people seem so keen to cut: One thing it does is show us graphically what a facehugger does to you (i'm talking about the scene in which Russ Jorden is facehugged). Nowhere else in the movie do we get to see actual facehugging. I know we get Ripley's verbal description during the hangar briefing, and we see Burke dip his face to the speciman jar with the facehugger thrashing around inside, but it's much better for us to see it explicitly doing its thing; it's more vivid and visceral. And I think this pays off in the later scene when Ripley gets attacked -- we know exactly what it's trying to do. Prior knowledge makes the horror hit you in the gut much more.
Of course, this means nothing to anyone on this fan site. Everyone here knows exactly what's going on. And if you're a first-time
Aliens viewer, it's probable that you saw the first
Alien movie and got to witness Kane's facehugging. But in 1986, and quite possibly today as well, studios were loathe to make sequels in which audiences felt it necessary to see the previous film before watching the new one (for obvious reasons). And if you're the filmmaker, it's more gratifying to think that your sequel is still fully effective as a standalone. (That would be my guess, anyway.)
One other thing about the Acheron sequence: By introducing Newt to us this way her character is elevated into far more of a co-protagonist role alongside Ripley, rather than being a mere support character that Ripley picks up along the way. In the theatrical cut we only get Ripley's inciting incident, which is what compels her to join the mission back to LV-426 and exorcise her PTSD demons. But Newt has demons of her own, and the special edition allows us to witness the inciting incident that creates them: the attack on her father. This incident sweeps her into the story's narrative separately from Ripley. So now they are both searching for salvation and the stage is set for their stories to converge and begin the love story. (Usually when I talk about the love story in
Aliens people think I'm referring to Ripley and Hicks. Far from it. The love story in
Aliens is the love of mother and child -- Ripley and Newt. Hicks could even be written out of the movie and the plot would hardly change. The movie would be much weaker for it, but it would be a comparatively easy rewrite).
TC