I hadn’t heard anything about this. Does anyone know what we can expect from the special edition? How many more minutes footage are there?
One thing I noticed from the trailer was…
the is a shot of what looks like captain dallas coccooned inside alien gunk, presumably for impregnation. I remember this happening in the book and I was always disappointed that it wasn’t in the film.
Does anyone else know what will be restored? Will this be a cheap cash-in, or worth going to see?
I just heard about this the other day. I’m pretty damn excited, but I can’t think it’s going to be anything too terribly impressive. There’s a nice website called Alien Legend (http://www.planetavp.com/al/index2.htm). It has a nice break down for each movie where it talks about variuos things, including the deleted scenes. Of the scenes shot, the majority of them are nothing more than extended dialogue, but there are a few little differences, as the afformentioned spoiled scene. A question about that:
I’ve never read the book, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on in that scene. From the review on the website, it states that those cacooned actually mutate into face hugger eggs. A coworker who’s seen the deleted scenes on a Laser Disc claims that they never make reference to that in the movie as to what exactly is happening to them, and why Ripley decides to kill Dallas instead of free him. Does the book explain the situation better, or is it just supposed to be something that they never explained in hopes that people would be able to pick it up?
I just read about this as well, in a recent issue of our local paper, which had a preview section on most of the movies coming out this fall. From what the blurb I read said, there’s something like an extra four minutes in the Director’s Cut, most of which deals with what’s in the spoiler boxes above.
I’m not all that excited about the new scenes. The original cut of Alien is a masterwork, but I guess we’ll see if the new footage can add much to it. I’m more excited to have an opportunity to see the film in a theatre, as I was about 6 when it was first released (just a little young for that sort of thing, I guess). It’ll be nice to see it as it was meant to be seen. I’m hoping Cinerama will play it locally.
The coccooning is just part of the impregnation. In the book, IIRC (and I read it well over a decade ago), half of the crew of the nostromo ended up as breeding stock. The xenomorphs will take the victims of to a lair, goo them up, and wait for an egg to hatch.
You see victims coccooned in Aliens just prior to hatching. The only thing that the book really adds is that normal ‘drone’ xenomorphs can lay eggs as well as queens, it just takes them a while longer. It makes sense that a single drone would be able to set up a new colony.
While on the subject, I also remember in the book for Aliens, it is revealed that the aliens have stingers in there tails, which paralyze or tranquilize its victim, so that they can be transported back to the lair and coccooned. I think they brought this into the Alien Vs Predator game on the PC (incredibly scary game by the way. If you like any of the aliens films you should find a copy)
Well, seeing as how it seems to be just us talking about the thing, I’m going to forgo the spoiler boxes from here on out. So, you’ve been warned, this is talking about the boxed stuff:
If the aliens can lay eggs themselves, which makes perfect sense to me, why is it then that Blake’s body is a puddle of goo, and Dallas is looking rather, ummm…eggy (look at the shape his legs are in). The site I linked above (assuming it worked) has some screen shots to help you along, and it also describes that they are indeed, melting into eggs. Someone in the “Ultimate Alien” post a month ago or so made the same observation. It seems highly wasteful in terms of breeding purposes to me (taking two hosts for one birth instead of one for one), but it does kind of explain how all those people who wrote original scripts for Alien 3 came to the conclusion that people could be morphed into aliens (even though those scripts all sucked).
On note about the stingers, it sounds rather nice, but…well, pretty much anytime someone gets poked by one of those things, the tail goes straight threw them. Kinda hard for the venom to enter into the bloodstream when the needle’s overshot it’s destination, you know?
The DVD has all these deleted scenes you can view as special features. The novels by Alan Dean Foster of both Alien and Aliens as others have mentioned are pretty good reads in their own right.
Does anyone else think the music from Alien is the most creepy and foreboding score of all time.
I have to agree that the idea of turning humans into eggs doesn’t make much sense to me. If they can transform humans, then why not tranform them directly into chestbusters? Also, I had a look at the link you mentioned. It said that both Dallas and Brett are coccooned. If they were turning into eggs, then surely the alien would only transform one of them, so the other could be a host. I think the eggy-ness of the coccoon is typical of alien interior design.
Like I say, I’m pretty sure in the book it says that they have been coccooned near eggs ready for impregnation, much like Newt was when she got captured in Aliens.
The only thing that doesn’t really make sense is that an egg looks too big to fit side the body of a normal drone alien.
The stingers just aren’t used in the films at all (at least not on camera), but they do make sense. How else could an alien take a host off to the hive and coccoon them? They managed to take Apone and a few others in aliens. Surely he would have been armed, and resisted until they had to kill him.
Another point I’d like to bring up, is how does the alien (in alien)get so big? It seems to grow from a chestbuster to a fully grown xenomorph without eating anything.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a directors cut of Alien3. Are there any rumours about this?
Don’t know about a director’s cut of Alien 3 yet, but with all the threads about the alien movies lately, I went and watched it again last night, and as I’ve said before, it just gets better and better with each viewing. I don’t see why so many people hated it, it’s a great movie and a wonderful addition to the series. Would have been nice if they’d left Ripley dead, because it was a great end to her myth, but that’s Hollywood for you. I believe there are some deleted scenes on the laser disk, and if you go to that link, they have a few of them on the site. One of the things I thought was great, but was cut:
The plan to trap the thing with the fire actually worked! The guy who tried to rape Ripley earlier ends up getting the thing to chase him into the vault, where the two of them get locked in. Later, though, the crazy guy who first saw it convinces his guard to let him loose, kills him, then kills the man on guard and sets the thing free, thinking it’s his friend. It then repays him by biting his head off.
I always figured the aliens just injured their victims enough that they couldn’t get away. I’ve always been sketchy on how long it takes for a chest burster to develope and mature. I figured from the first one, the host was in a coma for a couple days, but once concious, it only took a couple more. From the other scripts I’ve read, though, it seems it only takes about a few hours, unless the embryo is a queen, in which case, it takes several days. I guess it also depends on the host (dog vs. human vs cow vs penguin, etc.)
LOL. i want to see the penguin alien. Come to think of it, wouldn’t anything with a beak be pretty immune to facehuggers. They should reshoot aliens, but with penguin commandos. I think in the book for alien 3, the facehugger does impregnate a cow, rather than a dog. It creates a larger xenomorph than the norm, rather than the smaller dog-one.
The gestation times for xenomorphs seems to vary a great deal from film to film. In the first, it was less than 24 hours from when Kane is brought into the nostromo until when it bursts out. Then the alien in Alien3 seems to be in ripley for at least a week. I suppose it could be different because the alien in ripley was supposedly a queen. It would make sense for the embryo to stay inside the human for a while, so that the human can get home. It wouldn’t have worked if the alien in kane had hatched before he got back into nostromo.