Originally published at: Aliens, the modern trailer | Boing Boing
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Love this. A great tribute. Been a few years since I watched Aliens. Guess it’s about time.
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This is probably my favorite SciFi movie of all time. It was such a shame Carrie Henn decided not to do another film and they had to write her out of the story. Yes some of the effects are dated but it’s a brilliant story and still stands up against modern SciFi movies today. There are so many good SciFi books which haven’t been made into films (and short stories too - which are probably more suitable). How about making Arthur C Clarke’s masterpiece “A Fall of Moondust” into a disaster movie set on the moon? How about making John Wyndham’s “The Crysalids” as a TV series for children? Leave classic movies alone! The 1956 film Forbidden Planet is still brilliant to watch now and undoubtedly inspired the “Great Machine” in Babylon 5.
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The sonar sound in background music around :38 mark is genius.
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I graduated from high school in ‘85. In college, my friends and I quoted this movie CONSTANTLY.
"We’re on an express elevator to hell, goin’ DOWN!!"
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Recently rewatched to introduce teen son to a formative spectacle of my youth.
Unsolicited opinions:
- Might want to avoid the director’s cut. Bloated and unnecessary. It gives backstory to Newt and her colony going sideways. It didn’t make me care for Newt any more than I already did, and there was no mystery about what Ripley and her comrades were walking into.
- Some time was given to automated machine-gun sentries expending all their ammo on a lost cause. Kinda cool, but didn’t really add anyting unless you count making Cameron feel better about leaving that footage out in the theatrical release.
- Don’t spring for a high-res version when you stream it. Painted set pieces are painfully obvious, especially on the surface of LV-426. Looked like a school play, in which case you ought to watch the school play of Alien where if comes off as charming rather than distracting.
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There’s an UHD version of Aliens? I thought they only did that for the first film?
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Applies to almost every Director’s Cut™
The “director’s cut” that started the trend (the Blade Runner “workprint”) wasn’t even released with the director’s permission and is really the opposite of what the rest of them represent
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In BBS land, you can watch too:
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But… and hear me out… that leaves out the appearance of Mac McDonald, aka Captain Hollister in Red Dwarf. The man had two commands and one entire crew is wiped out by an alien infestation while the other crew disintegrates because of that gimboid Rimmer.
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Director’s Cuts are not always worse, or always better. Blade Runner and Brazil DC’s are better, Donnie Darko’s is worse. I think the Aliens DC is mixed, I think the scenes on the colony are unnecessary, but the scenes about Riply’s daughter and the auto guns add to the story.
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Better for her, given that Aliens3 was such a bomb.
Less is absolutely more. It was brilliance, originally, to have excised all clips of the colonists before Ripley and company hit the planet. Reinserting the clips removes all the mystery and massively reduced the quality of the work. Probably done by the same people who “helpfully” rethreaded Godfather II to be in chronological order.
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The scenes with the colonists. It was like a Lifetime movie. With Aliens. 
It was, and it’s such a shame. If you look into the possible directions that movie could have taken, you’ll find a treatment by William Gibson that, while it rather unceremoniously sidelined Ripley in favor of Hicks, read like a fun sci-fi action ride. Another iteration took place on a planetoid inhabited by monks, who had eschewed modern technology of any kind (the planetoid was made largely of wood, however that was supposed to work). Still, I don’t hate the final product, as poorly as it did at the box office. It has its moments.
Aliens, now, that’s an action masterpiece. It’s about time for me to watch it again. I own the whole collection, but I think DVD is no longer the best way to watch. It’s strange; I thought when I bought it that it would never get any better.
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I avoided it for the almost 3 decades until lockdown, and was pleasantly surprised. Not a masterpiece but much better than it’s reputation IMO.
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I have to agree with your assessment, even though I got there by a different route.
I saw it when it was released, and I was…not impressed.
But during lockdown, I plowed through the box set, and y’know…it still clearly isn’t the class of the franchise; but it was much better than I remembered. It’s also possible that I was just happy to be back in the Alienverse, and was willing to overlook more of the warts…
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Totally agree.
I remember seeing this in the theater when it was first released.
It’s for sure one of my all time favorites.
Side note - At the time I was a dedicated watcher of Letterman and Carson and Paul Reiser had been a regular doing stand up on those shows, so it was funny seeing him play a bad guy here.
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