Now There’s Going To Be A Cleaner Aliens Special Edition?

James Cameron really is doing all he can to become the new George Lucas, isn’t he? Not content with adopting the heavily greenscreened, CGI-created atmosphere of the Star Wars prequels with Avatar, now he’s going back and “fixing” earlier movies even though no-one asked him to. Bleeding Cool caught Cameron’s reference to a new Aliens special edition in a recent interview:

I just did a complete remaster of Aliens personally with the same colorist I worked with on Avatar. It’s spectacular. We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed, color-corrected it, end-to-end, every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally. Because it was shot on a high-speed negative, that was a new negative that didn’t pan out too well and got replaced the following year. So it’s pretty grainy. We got rid of all the grain. It’s sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it’s ever looked.

Okay, so it’s only cleaning up the movie stock – No “Ripley shot first” moment here, at least that we know about – but, come on: Wasn’t the graininess part of the appeal of Aliens? I’m not sure the world really needed a brighter, shinier, glossier Space Marines, but then again: I’m not a multi-million-dollar generating movie director.

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http://djtrudeau.wordpress.com djtrudeau

Cleaning up the print and changing scenes are in two different ball parks. I also disagree that “graininess” is an essential element to the film. The grit should come from the design of the film itself and it exists here plenty, even with a clear image.
http://freemantim.wordpress.com freemantim

It is pretty amazing what a digital remastering can do for an older film. The Roger Corman flicks you gave away last month are a case in point. The remastered films looked like a low budget horror/sci-fi flick shot with digital cameras. No smudge or grain and the colors were consistent throughout all shots.

Watching Aliens recently on AMC (or one of the better grade “not-for-pay” cable channels) I noticed just how grainy the film was. It was actually pretty distracting. If Cameron is simply removing the distractions and making everything look sharp then I have no problems with his tinkering.

Even the Final Cut of Blade Runner made the film look that much better. I’ll be curious how much Lucas’ tinkering with the Star Wars series for blu-ray will help or hurt the visual “cleanliness”.

Nothing worse than watching a film on an HD TV and seeing more flaws in the film than being able to simply enjoy the piece.