She starts to cry as she clutches the photograph to her. He hands Ripley a photograph of her 66 year-old daughter and she mournfully tells him she had promised Amanda she would be home in time for her 11th birthday. He then reveals that Ripley's daughter, Amanda Ripley-McClaren, died two years previous. He tries to get her to focus on the impending hearing, but when she persists he asks her to sit down. Burke enters, apologizing for being late, and Ripley asks if he has any news about her daughter. However, the trees at which she is looking are revealed to be an image on a giant television screen, which she switches off - in reality, she is in a small anteroom on Gateway. After Ripley's nightmare in the medical center aboard Gateway Station, a new scene is added where Ripley is seen relaxing on a bench in some woodland.Before the film begins, there is a brief introduction to the alternate cut by James Cameron.īurke informs Ripley of her daughter's death.The scenes that were included in the 1989 CBS broadcast are additionally noted. Here follows a complete rundown of the differences between the theatrical release of Aliens and the extended Special Edition. The Aliens Special Edition was one of the first "Director's Cuts" to gain widespread attention and a home video release (along with the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner) and can therefore be seen as the beginning of the now common trend of releasing extended/alternate cuts of movies on home video and, in some cases, theatrically. It is not clear if this was a reversal on Fox's part resulting from the unexpected success of the alternate cut - the Special Edition VHS sold over 170,000 units in the first five weeks of release in the United Kingdom alone, on top of some 270,000 units of the original theatrical cut that had already been sold - or whether the situation was simply a sly marketing ploy from the studio to push initial sales.
Initially, the Special Edition of Aliens was said to be a strictly time-limited release that would only be on sale for a period of 100 days, after which it would never been seen again, but this later proved not to be the case and it has been included in virtually all home video releases of Aliens since. Since its release, Cameron has described the Special Edition as his preferred cut of the movie and the version he always intended people to see. Due to the lateness of the changes, virtually all of the additional sequences were retained in the novelization of the film by Alan Dean Foster. Conscious that a film over two and a half hours in length would allow for fewer screenings per day (and therefore reduced profits), Fox had Cameron cut the run time by over 15 minutes during the editing process. However, 20th Century Fox representatives thought the film was showing "too much nothing" and spent an unnecessary amount of time building suspense. Ĭameron had originally intended for the footage added to the Special Edition to be included in the film's theatrical release. For the LaserDisc release, Cameron returned to visual effects artists Robert and Dennis Skotak and had them finish the sequences so that they could be included in the extended cut of the movie. Notably, two of the largest additions in the extended cut - scenes set on LV-426 before the Xenomorph outbreak begins - had not had their special effects finished during the film's production and thus remained incomplete. The remaining additions were not made until the release of the Aliens: Special Collector's Edition LaserDisc in 1991, for which James Cameron oversaw the creation of a definitive extended cut of the movie, now known as the Special Edition. However, while the CBS broadcast contained this then-exclusive footage, the film was also heavily censored for violence and profanity to meet network guidelines. The added scenes represented around half of the additional footage now found in the Special Edition, and included Ripley learning that her daughter has passed away while she was drifting in space as well as all scenes involving the Marines' use of automated sentry guns. The extended cut originated with the film's broadcast television debut on CBS in 1989, which included several deleted scenes that were reinstated to extend the movie's run time. Unlike the other alternate versions of the films in the Alien franchise, the Special Edition of Aliens was not created for the Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set in 2003 but actually evolved over a period of several years in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
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