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As you might expect, all that talk of de-noising and de-graining has some fans freaked out that the release is going to suffer the same excessively DNR-ed fate as Fox's recent Predator: Ultimate Hunter Blu-ray. Here's the deal: Everyone we trust who was involved, and/or has actually SEEN the new Aliens HD master for Blu-ray, reports to us that the film looks terrific. To the degree that DNR was used, it was applied carefully and with a light hand, with an eye toward striking the proper balance between maintaining the detail and integrity of the image and the desire to reduce grain and address the deficiencies of the stock used at the time. There is apparently STILL grain left in the image, it's just no longer excessive or distracting. Plus, Cameron is no slouch when it comes to the presentation quality of his films on disc, and he approved this transfer and master. Look, there's a VERY big difference in digital mastering when the filmmakers are directly involved in the process, as opposed to when they're not. So we're told the disc looks great, we trust that it looks great and I'll personally work to directly confirm that. My own feeling is that Predator was probably an aberration. Fox has generally been doing very good mastering work for Blu-ray in the last year or so, and I suspect this is going to be a non-issue when we all get our hands on the Aliens disc.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Plus, Cameron is no slouch when it comes to the presentation quality of his films on disc, and he approved this transfer and master.

Brian C wrote:* - and I don't believe he ever got around to anarmorphic releases for either The Abyss or True Lies.

aox wrote:I don't understand now what Cameron (a huge tech geek) meant when he hinted that he removed all the grain from the second film. Did everyone read that incorrectly, or was his statement taken out of context?

I would slightly agree on the way you start to root for the aliens eating everyone - except Ripley of course. I would argue that the perspective of the film towards the soldiers is tied to Ripley's perspective of being 'outside of the group', something that gets even more prominent in the following films (The difference being that here she in making an attempt to try and assimilate back into society again, while for the later films that is simply not a possibility any more)

In Alien, Ripley could be seen as being a true, full member of a crew until she became individualised in a way by the crew being decimated. In the first film she also came across as one of the more officious and not particularly fun loving members of the crew - in the scene where she makes the, proven to be correct, decision to keep Kane in the airlock which gets overridden by her captain for example.

She then comes to the foreground and gets individualised through having the 'family' of the crew ripped from her. I think Cameron's Aliens, in its re-purposing of many of the set pieces of the first film on a bigger, louder scale also takes this theme up too. We meet all of the stereotypical (although this was really the film that defined many of the stereotypes!) soldier types who don't really seem particularly interesting or individualised, or at least are just painted in a rather broad manner - even the eventual 'hero', Hicks. After the first encounter with the aliens, when most of the soldiers are whittled down to the core cast, we then start seeing the remaining characters becoming individualised in their deaths/martydoms or their heroics - I particularly liked the moment of the odd couple of Gorman and Vasquez coming to terms with each other before they die together after being cornered.

These characters taking up that strand of the film (with Hicks eventually reaching the point of character development that Ripley did in the first film) frees Ripley up in this film to fully explore the motherly aspect of her relationship with Newt, who is basically placed, in terms of the plot mechanics, as a more sophisticated version of the cat in the first film.

I suppose that this is why the 'new version' of Ripley in Hicks, and the 'cat figure' in Newt have to be removed from Alien3 to give Ripley some new territory to explore, even if it is done in the most brutal manner possible.

Even though I agree with you about the film basically being a remake of many set pieces of Alien, I think this is one of the few examples of a remake done intelligently, knowing which aspects of the material can be most profitably expanded upon to express a more 'James Cameron' kind of vision!