I just realized this. I recorded the movie this morning and was just watching it. By heck, I have no memory of seeing the very beginning, with salvage robots lasering into Ripley’s ship, or of Jonesy the cat sleeping with Ripley in her capsule. I also don’t remember the corporate boardroom meeting where they were disbelieving her story of the alien infection in the Nostromo. Wow. It was fun seeing some bits of this movie I had never seen.
By the way, what happened to Jones the cat? Last we saw him, he was in Ripley’s tiny studio apartment. I guess she left him behind.
I was about to say that I’m the same way, except I realize you were talking about Aliens, the second movie. I’ve seen it all the way through quite a bit, but I’ve never seen the original all of the way through. I’ve tuned it in a few times when it was halfway through, but I never managed to watch the entire thing. I seem to recall that it wasn’t bad, but not one of the best movies ever compared to Aliens, and that the people around me were even less interested in it than I was, so they decided to flip the channel and I didn’t have the heart to object.
What I particularly liked about Aliens was how it came down to a one-on-one battle between the alien queen and Ripley, as the surrogate mother to the girl
James Cameron was a great director before his obsession with blue aliens.
Back to the Future was that for me, seen almost a 100 times but almost always on cable and it was always the scene with the Delorean in the mall parking lot, so I wound up missing pretty much all the setting up and pay off in that first 20 minutes.
I was that way with The World According to Garp in college. We had free Movie Channel, and they showed it a lot. Whenever I’d come back from class, and it was on, I’d watch it from wherever I was. Every viewing I got closer to the beginning. Finally I saw the whole thing, and “wow, there’s foreshadowing and repetition throughout the film! Makes a lot more sense now!”
You may have, perhaps, only seen the theatrical release previously? There is a director’s cut with extra stuff in it, including showing how the aliens get into the terraforming base, which I don’t think is in the released version. I think the boardroom bit is only in the director’s cut too, but I might be wrong??
Also, the cast were all killed off in reverse order of how famous/prominent they were, so (at the time) the audience kept on going “Oh, so I guess that so-and-so is the main character, then. Wait, no, never mind, he’s dead, too.”.
Of course, now, Sigourney Weaver is the biggest star of any of them, but that started with this movie.
The boardroom scene is in the theatrical release, but it is longer in the directors cut. The extra time shows Vanluwen delivering the verdict whereas in the theatrical version they cut straight to the readout stating File Closed.
I loved Aliens when it first came out, and, unlike some others, I like the Director’s cut (which shows life on the planet before the xenomorphs strike).
I’ve long thought that Cameron’s ending the film with Ripley in the Loader Suit vs. the Queen Alien was inspired by a middlin’ good film from 1960 called Dinosaurus!, in which a T. Rex, a Brontosaurus, and a caveman are dredged out of frozen water in the Caribbean and brought to life by a lightning bolt strike. (I know – “frozen in the Caribbean?” And the three creatures are from widely separated time periods – Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Recent. Scientific ignorance is forever!) The film ends with the Hero fighting the T. Rex one-on-one using a steam shovel, which a cool concept far beyond the quality of the rest of the movie.
By the way, it wasn’t until I saw a tableau of Ripley in the Cargo Suit vs. the Queen Alien at an exhibit on Special Effects in the movies at the Boston Museum of Science that I first noticed that the alien Queen has High Heels!
Here’s a longer version, starting at 4 minutes in. As a bonus, it has all the stop-motion shots (a lot of the dinosaur effects shots were done with puppets, to save time.)
Years ago I saw Aliens Extended Cut or directors release and in the beginning they showed a working colony and even included a happy Newt in a side scene.
I hated it. It ruined the tension for later and was completely unnecessary.