Alien vs. Aliens

The Alien DC is shorter, but it's *not* actually Scott's preferred version.

The Aliens DC is longer and is, imho, ruined by the awful intro.

There is an Aliens: No Hope fan edit that is the Aliens DC but with the intro stuff cut, and that's my preferred version.

Cameron also ruined the pacing on the Terminator 2 DC by adding in a long boring Myles Dyson family scene right in the middle. Other than that, the T2 DC is great. I've been meaning to see if there's a fan edit that cuts out only that scene.

Yeah, if I was forced to ignore the fan edits, I'd go for the theatrical versions.
Never actually watched the alternate version of 3 though.

I did however just get done listening to Audible's dramatisation of William Gibson's unused Alien 3 script.
AKA the adventures of Hicks and Bishop in the space cold war while Ripley was sleeping.
It was ok, but much more pedestrian than I expected from Gibson. I think it'd have ended up as a better but more humorless version of Resurrection...

The Dallas scene in the DC doesn't make any sense.

^^ That's what Ripley suggests in the novelisation of Alien 3. I've been binging on the Alan Dean Foster audiobooks. Alien and Alien 3 are read by Peter Guiness; Aliens is narrated by William Hope (AKA Lt. Gorman).

I geeked out and bought the "graphic novels" of Alien and Gibson's Alien 3 (or his first draft at least). The new novel and audiobook are based on his second. Funny seeing how the later films go back and pluck out unused ideas. The Alien comic suffers a bit from the pitch being "let's pretend we never saw the film and adapt the Dan O'Bannon screenplay" – their version of the alien is really meh.

Cocooning a human body into an alien egg doesn't make any sense. It's always stood out at me as being dumb. But yeah it also ruins the pacing of the film, and people just disappearing is way more effective than showing you what happens to them.

I always had a much greater problem with the Alien growing to full size without eating anything, drooling massively without drinking anything, producing acres of oozy tunnel resin out of nothing, than the idea that they might be able to genetically convert victims into new eggs as part of an asexual life cycle.

The cinema cut rightly decided to leave the Alien as alien as possible, because as soon as you start answering questions the familiarity reduces interest and the answers might be stupid. It’s why sequels and prequels are often so bad, they feel the need to answer questions no one asked, and the answers are almost always stupid.

It's interesting how much of that deleted Alien scene made it into Aliens. They might have simplified the egg thing, but isn't the shot of her climbing down the ladder with the flamethrower basically in Aliens? Plus the wall stuff.

I agree on the best bit of Resurection being Weaver having fun being a badass hybrid.

I never really got why people disliked Resurrection that much, but it has been quite a few years now.

I recently watched the Reassembly-cut of Alien 3 and the first quarter or so of that one is quite atmospheric (and without help of the Alien!), but overall still nothing special.

Aliens is great in the first half, but in my opinion doesn't have much respect for the intelligence of the Alien or the viewer. I'm specifically referring to dozens of Aliens letting themselves be killed by automatic turrets and then Ripley running around just shooting up Aliens towards the end of the film. The last thing an Alien-movie needs is an action hero. It also doesn't fit with the Marines getting completely messed up by the Aliens earlier.

So that leaves me with Alien, because I simply have no complaints about anything in it.