ILLIONS OF WORDS HAVE BEEN EXPENDED SCRUTINIZING, ANALYZING AND CRITICIZING EVERY METICULOUSLY CRAFTED FRAME OF RIDLEY SCOTT’S ALIEN, BUT IT’S STILL BEST SUMMED UP IN THE EIGHT USED TO SELL IT TO AUDIENCES BACK IN 1979: “IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM.”
M The folks at Fox were going to have to try mighty hard to top 2003’s Alien
Quadrilogy DVD collection, a high-water mark in both form and content. And I’m pleased to say that, in moving the series to Blu-ray – now re-dubbed The Alien Anthology – they’ve surpassed even that. What began as an unambitious B-horror script titled Starbeast by Dark Star
scribe Dan O’Bannon (in collaboration with Ronald Shusett) grew and evolved as rapidly as its titular toothsome terror, becoming a global cultural phenom- enon that remains as popular and influential today as it was when it first chest- burst to life more than 30 years ago. An intricately designed, nigh-perfect scare machine, it’s spawned four films to date, each helmed by a nascent visionary director (James Cameron’s Aliens; David Fincher’s Alien 3 and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection). Each wildly variant in tone and text, they’re linked by the dynamic presence of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and her night- marish nemesis, on an epic journey that brings them closer with each suc- cessive film until they literally become one, dying together and being reborn, linked at the genetic level. For this set, both Alien and Aliens have been fully remastered. Alien certainly
benefits from the new format, given Scott’s extraordinary eye for detail, but Aliens has also been significantly improved (under Cameron’s own character- istically meticulous supervision). Cinematographer Adrian Biddle photographed the film on a notoriously sensitive film stock, which captured incredible detail but also led to a serious problem with grain in the shadows. It’s an issue that has dogged every single edition of the film, until now. The new Blu-ray displays a noticeable increase in contrast and, more importantly, significantly less noise. Purists may take issue with Cameron’s additional picture tweaking, which fea- tures far more prominent blues – now his trademark look – than previous re- leases, and eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the most infamous gaffe, the appearance of bisected Bishop’s jeans poking through an obvious hole in the studio floor as he reaches out to grab Newt in the film’s climax, has been fixed digitally. There’s no denying that this is the best the film has ever looked on home video.
That said, it’s un-
fortunate that both the beautifully shot Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection reuse the Quadrilogy mas- ters for the Blu-ray. The aliens themselves have never looked better, but the superla- tive effects work – which is beautifully captured on film in the fourth installment by cinematographer Darius Khondji, who utilized the same silver-retention process he employed on Se7en to create high-contrast images with supersaturated colours and impenetrably deep blacks – deserves a better presentation. The discs are handsomely packaged in an illustrated hardcover book format,
which contains a booklet to guide the wary viewer through the extensive depths of its archive. With more than 50 hours of interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, extensive documentaries (including two different cuts of Mark Ker- mode’s Alien Evolution), production illustrations, trivia tracks, alternate sound- tracks and filmmaker commentaries, the films themselves start to feel like a supplement to the making-of material. This isn’t so much a special edition as it is the Alien equivalent of the Warren Commission Report, a massive Ph.D.- level dissertation on every conceivable aspect of the production of these films and their impact. The Alien Anthology also ports over special features from not only the
Quadrilogy, but every previous release of the films, up to and including a com- plete archive of the LaserDisc releases of the first two films, as well as offering some features unique to this set – most notably the inclusion of Burke’s cocoon death from Aliens (turns out it was wisely left on the cutting room floor). All are accessible either linearly or via a helpful alphabetical index feature, or for the truly OCD Alien enthusiast, through the Blu-ray’s MU-TH-UR Mode, using cus- tomizable “data tags” that can be selected while viewing any or all of the films, which can then be collated and played back on the supplement disc. But the scariest thing may be that despite the volume of information avail- able, it’s still not the whole story. Fincher’s continued lack of par- ticipation in telling his side of the turbulent production of Alien 3 prevents the set from being considered truly definitive. And now we’ll have to wait for Scott to bring things full circle with not one, but two threatened Alien prequels – in 3-D no less – set to star The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Noomi Rapace, before The Alien Anthology might be considered truly complete. And even then, who knows? Space is infinite, and infinitely terrifying.
RM46 R E I S S U E S
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