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| Sigourney
Weaver, Paul Reiser, Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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'What
the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?'
Ripley
returns to the planet where the original alien was found with a group
of marines to take on an army of aliens.
Cameron's
sequel to Alien is such a different movie, it's hard to compare
the two. Most Alien fans would be hard-put to decide on which
one of these is their favorite, and I am certainly not going to make
any judgment call on that now. Let's just say that where Alien
is a horror film, Aliens is an action film, and they both deliver.
There are
of course a few minor annoyances: some of the bonding scenes between
Ripley and Newt can be a bit much (the line 'They mostly come at night...
mostly....' was deservedly ridiculed to death in a South Park episode),
and one could argue that the extra scenes in the special edition merely
make it a longer and even louder movie rather than a better one. But
these are minor quibbles in an otherwise perfectly executed, always
exciting action epic that builds towards one of the best monsters ever
committed to celluloid. |
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Region 1 and Region 2 releases have different
packaging but are otherwise identical.
The
movie is framed at 1.85:1 and is anamorphic. The image quality on this
disc is rather varied: most of the film looks better than I have seen
it on home video before, but there are also several shots that reveal
a large amount of graininess, and some compression artifacts seem to
have crept in here and there as well. Apparently this film's image quality
has long been an issue, both on VHS and on Lasedisc releases, and this
is certainly better than any previous home video release, but it's still
a shame that they couldn't get it any better than this.
Though
not quite as extensive as the Alien release, there are still
a few nice extras included on the disc, especially if you count the
'special edition' footage that has been edited into the movie (though
I would have preferred to have seen these sequences appear in a 'Deleted
Scenes' section of the DVD). Of course an audio commentary from Cameron
would have been a treat, but as it is there is a production featurette
with interviews, and a nice special effects tests area that reveals
how they tackled various complex special effects shots in the film. The
animated menus are very nicely done, based on the sequence where the marines
enter the compound and use video monitors to report.
Dan Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on Aliens.
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