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Blu-ray Reviews: Alien Anthology

Originally published in Sound and Image, Feb/March 2011, v.24#04
Last updated 18 February 2012

Alien Anthology cover


Alien
1979 - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto

Movie: 5 Picture: 4.5 Sound: 4.0 Extras: 4.5


Aliens
1986 - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, William Hope, Paul Reiser, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein and Carrie Henn

Movie: 4.5 Picture: 4 Sound: 3.5 Extras: 4.5


Alien3
1992 - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glove, Ralph Brown, Danny Webb, Christopher John Fields, Holt McCallany and Lance Henriksen

Movie: 2.5 Picture: 4.5 Sound: 4.5 Extras: 4.5


Alien: Resurrection
1997 - Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific Pty Ltd
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, Michael Wincott, Kim Flowers, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman and Brad Dourif

Movie: 3.5 Picture: 4.5 Sound: 4.5 Extras: 4.5


I hereby admit defeat. When doing these reviews, I like to tell you -- at least in the features summary -- precisely what you are getting. With the six disc Blu-ray release of Alien, I had to call it quits a little after a quarter of the way through the sixth disc. So many, and so intricate are the extras, that you could spend weeks just examining them all.

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.


Alien Facts
Running time: 117 minutes (116 minutes for Director's Cut)
Picture: 2.35:1, 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 26.00Mbps (25.93Mbps for Director's Cut)
Sound: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 3/2.1 @ 3385kbps (3412kbps for Director's Cut - core: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps); English (original audio mix): Dolby Digital 3/1.1 @ 640kbps; Portuguese, Spanish: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 640kbps; French, German: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 768kbps; 1998 Commentary, 2003 Commentary: Dolby Digital 2/0.0 @ 224kbps; Final Theatrical Isolated Score, Composer's Original Theatrical Score: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 448kbps
Subtitles: English, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
Extras: Intro by Ridley Scott to the DC version (480i60 - 1 mins); 7 Deleted Scenes (1080p24 - 7 mins); MU-TH-UR Mode (select other audio streams, trivia track, and select featurettes in context for later play back); Unbound mode; BD-Live; Bookmarks
Restrictions: Rated MA (Australian rating); Region Free

The following video bitrate graphs were generated by BDInfo 0.5.4. Theatrical cut:

Alien Theatrical Cut video bitrate graph

Director's cut:

Alien Director's Cut video bitrate graph


Aliens Facts
Running time: 137 minutes (154 minutes for Director's Cut)
Picture: 1.85:1, 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 26.78Mbps (26.74Mbps for Director's Cut)
Sound: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 3/2.1 @ 4055kbps (3981kbps for Director's Cut - core: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps); English (original audio mix): Dolby Digital 3/1.1 @ 448kbps; Portuguese, Spanish: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 640kbps; French, German: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 768kbps; Commentary: Dolby Digital 2/0.0 @ 224kbps; Final Theatrical Isolated Score, Composer's Original Theatrical Score: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 448kbps
Subtitles: English, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
Extras: Intro by James Cameron to the DC version (480i60 - 1 mins); 16 Deleted Scenes (1080p24 - 20 mins); MU-TH-UR Mode (select other audio streams, trivia track, and select featurettes in context for later play back); Unbound mode; BD-Live; Bookmarks
Restrictions: Rated MA (Australian rating); Region Free

Theatrical cut:

Aliens Theatrical Cut video bitrate graph

Director's cut:

Aliens Director's Cut video bitrate graph


Alien3 Facts
Running time: 115 minutes (145 minutes for Special Edition)
Picture: 2.35:1, 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 19.49Mbps (19.49Mbps for Special Edition)
Sound: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 3/2.1 @ 4198kbps (4145kbps for Special Edition - core: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps); Portuguese, Spanish: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 640kbps; French, German: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 768kbps; Commentary: Dolby Digital 2/0.0 @ 224kbps; Final Theatrical Isolated Score: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 448kbps
Subtitles: English, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
Extras: 31 Deleted Scenes (1080p24 - 49 mins); MU-TH-UR Mode (select other audio streams, trivia track, and select featurettes in context for later play back); Unbound mode; BD-Live; Bookmarks
Restrictions: Rated MA (Australian rating); Region Free

Theatrical cut:

Alien 3 Theatrical Cut video bitrate graph

Special Edition:

Alien 3 Special Edition video bitrate graph


Alien: Resurrection Facts
Running time: 109 minutes (116 minutes for Special Edition)
Picture: 2.35:1, 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 29.99Mbps (29.99Mbps for Special Edition)
Sound: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 24/48 3/2.1 @ 4388kbps (4238kbps for Special Edition - core: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps); Portuguese, Spanish: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 640kbps; French, German: DTS 24/48 3/2.1 @ 768kbps; Commentary: Dolby Digital 2/0.0 @ 224kbps; Final Theatrical Isolated Score: Dolby Digital 3/2.1 @ 448kbps
Subtitles: English, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish
Extras: Intro by Jean-Pierre Jeunet to the DC version (480i60 - 1 mins); 11 Deleted Scenes (1080p24 - 12 mins); MU-TH-UR Mode (select other audio streams, trivia track, and select featurettes in context for later play back); Unbound mode; BD-Live; Bookmarks
Restrictions: Rated MA (Australian rating); Region Free

Theatrical cut:

Alien Resurrection Theatrical Cut video bitrate graph

Special Edition:

Alien Resurrection Special Edition video bitrate graph


Alien Anthology Disc 5 Facts
Extras: 137 Featurettes (480i60 - 1035 mins); MU-TH-UR Mode (play back featurettes earlier selected in context during movie watching); Unbound mode


Alien Anthology Disc 6 Facts
Extras: 4 Documentaries (480i60 - 289 mins); hundreds of minutes of featurettes (480i60); Thousands of still photos, script pages, text pages, artwork (1080p24); MU-TH-UR Mode (play back featurettes earlier selected in context during movie watching); Unbound mode


© 2002-2012, Stephen Dawson