Note: I do mention the Dallas scene near the bottom of this email, if you consider that a spoiler....

I can only think of a few things to say given that this is basically just a repeat of a 25 year old movie. I saw this today in a medium sized theater with ok sound, with less than 20 other people in the audience. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the theater, or the print, but the early titles were a bit blurry. Also the model shots of the Nostromo early on were fuzzy/textured, like an old print had been used to make the master for the re-release. I hvae no way of knowing what the original looked like as I saw it so many years ago.

Unfortunately for me, I was to a significant degree unable to re experience this movie. I ended up involuntarily paying more attention to the set and the reactions of the actors in various scenes than I did being engrossed in the movie. One scene I was looking for, I couldn't find. During the filming of the suit-walk from the Nostromo to the alien spaceship they used 3 children in scaled down suits to make the set look bigger. There were maybe 1-2 short shots this could have been, but both were two dark to see much more than shadows. This is typical for me though, when I first see a scene in a movie it lasts much longer. When I see it later it's just gone. An example is the scene in Re-Animator where Dr. Hill (I think) is removing the brain of a corpse with a power saw. When I first saw that, the part where he puts the bloody saw down, light reflecting off the chromed surface, was a 'moment'. Now when I see it it passes near instantly. The same happened for me in the chest bursting scene. I swear it's missing some frames..but it's probably not.

The sets hold up very well 25 years later, for the most part. Even the computer displays and such are still passable. There are areas though where the low tech hand-fab of certain sets is apparent.

Sigourney Weaver was soooo much younger looking then. It's strange to see. But, even then, she had no ass :)

The scene where they first go into the Alien ship is interesting. For the first time I pondered the possibility that the egg area may have been an underground cavern, rather than part of the Space Jockey's space ship. No big deal either way, but it crossed my mind this time baset on the look of the set. The other interesting point there is, I don't remember John Hurts character having any kind of tool/gun in his hand, but this time he did have something just before he was attacked. I probably mis remembered the original. What was interesting this time out was, before they head out looking for the source of the beacon, I swear I heard Dallas say "lets get the weapons ready", or something like that. If they had weapons, then surely they would have used them later. Confusing.

Ok, so finally, what about the scene where they find Dallas? Well it's there. And yes, it absolutely, positively was the right thing to leave it out of the original release. It should have been left out of this release. The scene is badly lit, and its lit with different colors than the scene before or after it (scenes which were contiguous in the original release). The set was no great shakes either, clearly being a redress of an earlier set with a different camera angle (though if you saw this movie for the first time you might not notice). The scene is short and to me it felt unfinished. Ridley Scott doesn't even have a figleaf of respectibility for claiming this added scene makes this a directors cut.

The scene where Harry Dean Stanton gets killed does show one early, short, shot of the Alien. While it was interesting, and reminiscent of _Aliens_, it didn't add anything, and showed the monster a bit too much too early, IMHO.

So overall I'd view this as a re-release, not a Directors Cut. There's very little new material and what's there isn't worth much. But this is your chance to see Alien in a big, dark, theater with good sound, so my advice is to go see it, maybe at a matinee price.