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For example, one section of Disc 6 replicates the entire set of extras from the LaserDisc release of Alien. To find all the mini-featurettes within this required keying through more than seven hundred still panels organised into more than twenty chapters. In the quarter or so of the whole disc that I managed, there were 3,725 still panels of scripts, essays, artwork and photos. Plus at least three hours of standard definition documentaries and featurettes.
And that's in addition to Disc 5, which has over 17 hours of SD featurettes. This has extensive indexing of them all, alphabetically by subject title (including names). For example you will find 23 links to Darius Khondji, with titles like 'Darius Khondji on mixing B&W with color film'. This might work a little better if it Khondji was listed under 'K' rather than 'D', and if it took you back out of the featurette at the end of the relevant bit, instead of just rolling on. Nonetheless, this is brilliant as a research tool.
So if there is anything you want to know about any of the Alien movies, then hurry and purchase one of the six disc 'Facehugger' versions (the really fancy one comes with a glowing Alien egg). The hurry is because the six disc versions are nearly all gone, and will be replaced with a four disc version. Along with those two discs nearly all the special extras will be lost: only the deleted scenes and introductions on the four movie discs will remain.
Also lost will be the special MU-TH-UR mode. Some of this is fairly common place. It pops a control bar up at the edge of the movie. One item allows you to select from the available 'extra' audio content (commentary and orchestral tracks). The next item is labelled 'Visual' and with this one you can select by title pictures and videos relevant to the particular part of the movie that's showing. An editable list of these is created and you can play the listed featurettes later when you insert disc 5 or 6. The third item is called the 'Weyland-Yutani Datastream'. This is in effect a trivia track. Clever, but soon to be lost.
Cleverer still was the 'Unbound' mode. When you eject a disc a 'Weyland-Yutani' logo fills your screen and remains there, unless you press 'Stop'. Load another disc and it skips the lengthy process of your player loading in BD-Java code, making things run faster. This, also, is disappearing I'm told with the four disc version.
I don't really need to talk about the first two movies since everyone knows them. But, in brief, Alien is a horror movie, set in space, and claimed to be the first with an effective female hero. This was ground-breaking but, unlike many ground-breaking movies, it remains completely effective. It hasn't dated at all (except for the green-text computer monitors). Thank you Ridley Scott!
James Cameron was given the second one, and he made very intense action movie set in space.
Things went wrong with the third movie. The first movie had one alien and an unarmed crew. The second had lots of aliens and armed humans. In both cases, the aliens had the edge.
The third reverts to the one alien format, so this required the humans to be unarmed. But the device to achieve this is so contrived as to make it almost impossible to enjoy, and the method of fighting the alien is even more contrived. Director David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) walked out after photography and refused to have anything more to do with it.
The fourth -- Alien Resurrection -- goes back to lots of aliens, armed people, and an ambiguous Ripley who has been brought back from the dead. This part is pretty unconvincing (cloning doesn't reintroduce memories!), but nonetheless there's plenty of interest, not least because of the other clones.
The first two movies come in their Theatrical and Director's Cut trims, while the other two come in their Theatrical and Special Edition trims. Movies 1, 2 and 4 have a little Director's intro (in SD) to the alternate version. Seamless branching is used to avoid having to excessively compress two complete movies onto the disc.
The first few seconds of the first movie were worrisome in terms of quality. The famous 20th Century Fox spotlight logo was washed out and wavered uncertainly on the screen, as though telecined from a film with worn perforations. The sound of the fanfare was blaring and midrangey, with no air or openness.
But, happily, that was for the logo alone. Once the movie titles appeared over the shots of space, slowly bringing the Nostromo into view, with the eerie underlying score, both picture and sound assumed their rightful quality.
The picture quality is fairly consistent across all four of the movies. The first, second and fourth are dominated by blacks, and these are brought through very nicely in the transfer: deep, but with plenty of detail to allow the yuckier stuff to be made out. Aliens was in parts a touch softer than the other three, and also had a moment or two where the special effects were a touch more apparent. For example, the spaceship entering the clouds of the alien planet near the beginning of Aliens had a clear cut-and-paste outline.
Alien was made and released a couple of years after Star Wars, and so it made full use of the four channel Dolby Stereo cinema surround format (three in the front, one at the back). The DTS-HD Master Audio encode does a good job of encompassing surround, losslessly conveying the near subliminal creepiness of the space vessel. The producers don't seem to have tried to enhance the surround for Aliens, even in places where it would have been warranted (eg. the storm on the planet and empty reverberance of the base). Most of its sound is simply straight from the front.
It may be a poorer movie, but the sound design of Alien3 is considerably more involving than the first two entries, with far more aggressive use of the surround channels and some pretty dynamic surprises. Alien: Resurrection is about the same as Alien3.
The discs are BD-Live enabled (you will see an additional 'Live Extras' item on the main menu if your player has BD-Live enabled). As I write, this merely provided promotional material about forthcoming movies, discs and television shows.
Even if you're too late to get the six disc version, your Blu-ray collection will be simply incomplete without the first two movie in the series. And you know what to do about that.
(Australian rating); Region Free
The following video bitrate graphs were generated by BDInfo 0.5.4. Theatrical cut:
Director's cut:
(Australian rating); Region Free
Theatrical cut:
Director's cut:
(Australian rating); Region Free
Theatrical cut:
Special Edition:
(Australian rating); Region Free
Theatrical cut:
Special Edition:
