I’ve watched James Cameron’s Aliens countless times over the years. I own numerous copies of it across multiple home video formats. As far as I’m concerned, Aliens is a nearly perfect movie, as as a sequel or taken on its own. The film takes everything that was great about the original Alien, expands it in scale and scope, and spins it off in a new direction that is decidedly a reflection of its own artist’s voice.
Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien was just about perfect in its own right, and any filmmaker tasked with making a sequel to it faced a seriously daunting challenge. The smartest decision Cameron made off the bat was to swap genres from what was essentially a haunted house tale set in space to a full-tilt action movie rollercoaster thrill ride. Had he merely tried to repeat the first film’s formula and crank out a carbon copy retread of it, the resulting Alien 2 would not be anywhere near as well regarded or remembered as the movie we actually got.
| Title: | Aliens |
| Year of Release: | 1986 |
| Director: | James Cameron |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Available On: | Blu-ray Max Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
As an action movie, Aliens delivers perfectly calibrated suspense and excitement, while still managing to draw very colorful characterizations from a large cast. Cameron’s screenplay also adds rich thematic layers not present in the original film, in the form of Ripley’s maternal attachment to surrogate child Newt. As much as this child-in-danger angle might have felt terribly clichéd in another filmmaker’s hands, Cameron makes it work so that it never does. It also allows him to cleverly climax the story in a battle between two mothers, Ripley versus the newly-introduced Alien Queen trying to protect her own children.
By the time of their final confrontation, Ripley’s experiences fighting alongside the marines allow her to overcome the trauma she suffered in the first movie, leading to one of the most iconic lines in all of cinema: “Get away from her, you bitch!” I wasn’t old enough to see an R-rated movie in the theater in 1986, so I can only imagine how audiences must have exploded at the catharsis of that scene, as all the tension that had built for two hours was released in one rousing moment, flawlessly delivered by Sigourney Weaver.
Aliens was a huge blockbuster hit that outgrossed the original Alien and went on to be nominated for several Oscars, including Best Actress. (It won for Visual Effects and Sound Effects Editing.) Nevertheless, James Cameron felt it could be improved. In 1990, he put together a longer Special Edition cut that added 17 minutes of new footage for release on the Laserdisc video format. In the years since, both versions of the movie have co-existed on all subsequent formats, from DVD to Blu-ray and now 4K Ultra HD.
Remarkably, most of the additions for the Special Edition may actually make Aliens an even better movie, especially the backstory about Ripley’s daughter and a very suspenseful scene with automated motion-controlled sentry guns. I can understand why Cameron cut them to keep the film’s length reasonable for theaters, but when I watch the movie at home, I’m inclined to choose the SE.
However, the one scene from the Special Edition I really don’t like is the longest – the prologue with the colonists on planet LV-426. The scene’s a little cheesy and it really undercuts the suspense of the Colonial Marines’ later arrival on the planet, not knowing what happened there or what they’re in for. Ideally, I wish I could program a version of the movie that seamlessly included all of the Special Edition content except that one scene. As it is, the best I can do is chapter-skip past it as soon as it starts.
James Cameron vs. Grain
Aliens was previously released on Blu-ray back in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology box set. That was followed by standalone reissues of each of the movies from the set over the years, but most of them amounted to straight copies of the original discs, until now.
For many years, James Cameron expressed his dissatisfaction that the photography for Aliens had turned out grainier than he liked, due to a variety of budget and logistical circumstances – including the fact that the director fired and replaced his first cinematographer partway into production. Cameron has always been something of a grain hater; Widescreen Review magazine even once published an article that detailed how the Laserdisc master for Aliens wound up an overprocessed mess due to his insistence on trying to DNR the grain out of it using the primitive tools available at that time.
For the 2010 Blu-ray, 20th Century Fox contracted a company called Lowry Digital to use a proprietary process designed to digitize the film and strip out grain without negatively affecting real picture detail or leaving the image with too much of a traditional smeary DNR look. A much lighter layer of artificial grain was then added back on top to simulate film texture. Cameron was reportedly thrilled with the results, and the Blu-ray was largely met with acclaim. The high-definition picture was often remarkably sharp and detailed, far more than any previous video release. On the downside, Cameron also inflicted the movie with a heavy-handed teal-and-orange color grade, which was so obnoxious it felt like the entire last half of the movie had practically no other colors on screen except teal or orange.
Here we are more than a decade later, and James Cameron has a whole new set of tools to play with. For the recent 4K Ultra HD reissues of Aliens, True Lies (reviewed here previously), The Abyss, and Titanic, Cameron had New Zealand visual effects studio Park Road Post employ A.I. processing to further reduce grain, enhance detail, and make all the movies look more like they’d been photographed digitally rather than on film, to very controversial results.
Note: Because I’m not equipped to take 4K HDR screenshots yet, all image comparisons on this page were made from the 2010 Blu-ray against the 2024 Blu-ray from the same master as the new 4K disc. To see the full extent of the grain removal and other processing, click the links in the captions to expand the images to full size.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Alongside True Lies and The Abyss, the new 4K, A.I.-enhanced transfer for Aliens was released first to digital VOD streaming platforms in late 2023, followed by physical media in March 2024. The latter comes in a three-disc set with a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, a standard Blu-ray from the same master, and a final disc of just special features. Annoyingly, two of the discs are stacked on top of each other in the case, which may lead to one getting scratched. (I immediately put the bonus disc in a paper sleeve.) At the time of this writing, no standalone copy of the regular Blu-ray is available, just the combo pack. I’m not aware of any SteelBook or other special packaging options.
A rival publication spoke to a representative from James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment, who reportedly confirmed that the new Aliens 4K transfer was derived from the same master used for the 2010 Blu-ray release, which had been originally scanned at 2K resolution. That source has been upscaled to 4K and run through the new Park Road Post A.I. processing. What isn’t clear to me is whether the remaster started from the final Lowry Digital product, and the A.I. algorithm had to remove all the artificial grain already embedded in it, or whether Park Road had access to some intermediate version after the original grain was removed but before Lowry’s fake grain was added.
Whatever the case, the new 4K version of Aliens has virtually no grain at all, in almost any scene. The entire movie looks uncannily like it had been photographed digitally. I’m sure this is exactly what James Cameron wants for it, but make no mistake that this is a revisionist version of the movie, even more so than the last Blu-ray. For someone who knows and cares what a movie shot on film (especially the high-speed film stocks that Aliens was shot on) should look like, the appearance of this new transfer can be quite disconcerting.
That being said, I have to be honest, I didn’t hate it. I was very critical of the 4K edition of True Lies and fully expected to have similar feelings about this one, but the Aliens remaster looks significantly better than that movie. I suspect that mainly comes down to the fact that the prior video master for Aliens was a lot better quality than the one that True Lies was upscaled from. While it looks very different than the movie ever had in the past, it doesn’t necessarily look bad. In fact, in many ways it looks very pleasing to the eye and has numerous qualities that home theater fans would normally praise.
The 1.85:1 image is very sharp and detailed. The A.I. upconversion and detail enhancement work wonders on this source, enough so that I could easily be fooled into believing this was true 4K. If an occasional shot here or there may look unnaturally smoothed-over or leave the actors with weird skin textures, those are quite rare on the whole. Even though I initially started watching the disc with an intention of just sampling a few scenes for a back-and-forth comparison on the first night, I got so wrapped up in the movie again I wound up watching the entire Special Edition.
I’m not sure, right now, whether I really want this to be my default viewing method for Aliens going forward, but I do think I at least consider it a legitimate option. I didn’t necessarily expect that.
As for color, as far as I can tell, the new 4K master still has the same color grade it had in 2010, which is disappointing. However, I say that with a caveat that I’ll get to momentarily. In the Blu-ray-to-Blu-ray comparisons I’ve made on this page, the colors look absolutely identical between the 2010 and 2024 discs.
As much as I would generally not use a DVD as a reference, I’ll offer the following comparisons with the old THX transfer from the 2003 Collector’s Edition DVD just to show the stark difference in coloring that Cameron has imposed on the movie. I’ll concede that the DVD perhaps had a bit too much red in some scenes, but the Blu-ray and 4K have a persistent and very strong green push that shifts just about any instance of blue (and Cameron used to be famous for his “steely blue” tones) to teal.
Speaking as someone sick of the teal-and-orange fad that infests so many modern movies, I find this extremely frustrating. Despite that, while watching the 4K disc, I wasn’t quite as annoyed at the colors as I’d remembered being when I first watched the prior Blu-ray back in 2010. Something about the experience of watching the movie in 4K in this new grainless state with the detail enhancement has a perceptual effect of making everything seem more vivid, including colors. Although there’s still a ton of teal everywhere, other colors that might have gotten swallowed by it (or by the grain) previously now stand out more. This gives the impression that the movie has a wider range of colors beyond just teal and orange.
For example, I don’t believe the underlying color grading for this scene in the colony bio-lab has been changed at all. Nevertheless, the pinkish hue of the alien Facehugger in the tube next to Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is clearer without a blanket of green-tinged grain over the image. The difference may seem subtle in these screenshots, but it’s more apparent at full resolution, especially in the 4K version.
The 4K disc has strong colors and contrast. It’s also encoded in HDR format. To my eye, the disc for True Lies was clearly an SDR Rec. 709 encode mapped inside an HDR container, but this one is harder for me to judge. My inclination is to say that it looks more like genuine HDR and Wide Color Gamut, but at least one YouTube reviewer has run some tests that he claims prove otherwise, and I’m not in a position to debunk that. As a projector user, my display doesn’t hit the same peak brightness levels that, for example, an OLED TV can. In any event, the Aliens 4K master looks a lot better than True Lies.
Audio options differ between the 4K disc and the accompanying Blu-ray. In 4K, the Dolby Atmos remix for Aliens (on either cut of the movie) also sounds a hell of a lot better than the one for True Lies, which was sadly lacking in dynamic range. Aliens is much more powerful and has a fair amount of hefty bass. Even if not much activity is steered directly overhead, the track is quite immersive and can fill the room nicely.
In all, the 4K disc offers the following:
- English Dolby Atmos
- English Dolby Digital 4.1 (theatrical cut only)
- English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
- English Dolby Digital 2.0 descriptive audio
- French DTS-HD High Resolution 5.1
- Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
Meanwhile, the Blu-ray in the case has these options:
- English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
- English Dolby Digital 4.1 (theatrical cut only)
- English Dolby Digital 2.0
- English Dolby Digital 2.0 descriptive audio
- French DTS-HD High Resolution 5.1
- Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
In addition to seamlessly branching both versions of the movie itself, bonus features on the 4K disc (and the corresponding feature film Blu-ray) include an audio commentary from the 2003 DVD, two isolated score tracks over the theatrical cut (one for the final theatrical version and one for James Horner’s original version), a 30-second video introduction to the Special Edition by James Cameron, and a direct-access option to watch the SE extra scenes on their own.
As far as I’m aware, the only new item on the supplement disc is the 30-minute Inspiration & Design documentary, which has a copyright date of 2016 in its credits. If this was released somewhere previously, I may have missed it. The piece may have been created for the 2016 30th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray, but doesn’t seem to have actually been included on that disc for some reason.
A host of other items are recycled from previous Blu-ray or DVD releases, including the comprehensive three-hour Superior Firepower documentary and an hour of so-called “enhancement pods” to go along with it. After that are a wealth of still galleries, pre-viz footage, some deleted scenes (including one that explains what happened to Paul Reiser’s character), alternate opening titles, trailers, and even a whole section carried over from the 1991 Collector’s Edition Laserdisc.
In all, the set has quite a considerable bounty of content. I won’t pretend to have catalogued every feature to confirm that every single item from the Alien Anthology Blu-ray made it to this set, but I believe the only thing missing is the MU-TH-UR interactive mode.
Related
- The Abyss (1989) 4K Ultra HD
- The Terminator (1984) 4K Ultra HD
- True Lies (1994) HD streaming comparisons
- True Lies (1994) 4K Ultra HD
- True Lies (2023) CBS series premiere
To reiterate: All screenshots on this page were taken from standard Blu-ray editions of the film.
