ALIEN Blues

Last week, 20th Century Fox released the four films in their core Alien franchise as individual Blu-ray discs. Previously, they were only available as a "Quadrilogy" boxed set. I thought about buying that set, but it was damned expensive, and frankly, it's only the first two films in the series that I really like. I don't care for Alien 3 at all and I've only seen Alien Resurrection once. It didn't impress me much at the time, but one of these days, I'll probably give it another chance.

My wife and I watched both Alien and Aliens (which, since it was released in 1986, is a bit beyond the purview of this blog) on Saturday night, and I was very impressed with 20th Century Fox's efforts on the restoration and remastering of the films. The HD transfers are nearly flawless, and the audio was great (still not quite as full and rich as my old laserdiscs, though). These Blu-ray editions are, by far, the best these movies have ever looked on home video; in Alien, especially, we were noticing numerous visual elements we'd never seen before throughout the film.

I was also impressed that, like their Planet of the Apes Blu-rays, Fox included the alternate cuts of the films on the discs, instead of releasing them - and charging for them - separately. I hadn't seen Ridley Scott's "Director's Cut" of Alien before, and it was cool to finally see a major scene that I remembered from Alan Dean Foster's novelization re-integrated into the film. I know that the "Quadrilogy" box included a lot of exclusive bonus features that I would probably enjoy, but I'm very happy with the discs I bought - especially since our local Best Buy had them marked at only $15 each!