A L I E N
the PERFECT ORGANISM cut
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+++THE PITCH+++
Can else can be down to fiddle with a perfect movie about "the perfect organism" *my best worst Ian Holms impersonation* Fan-edits of Alien 1979 aren't anything new. There are deleted scenes, the director's cut, debates about which version works best, and rinse, wash, and repeat. But when long ago when I decided to dabble in fan-edits (read: become OCD and obsessed with all things fan-editing) my Holy Grail was fixing what is my vote is for one of the worst edits in movie history in an otherwise perfect and sublime film. THAT DAMN ASH jump cut. For anyone out there living under a rock, move along, nothing to see here. But for perfectionists like myself, that one is hard to swallow. For those coming in late, *spoiler alert to all five of you that haven't seen this movie* it is the transition from a very fake but fun looking mannequin looking head prop of Ian Holms to his real head. The filmmakers oddly don't even bother to hide this choice, odd because so much of Alien is so painfully sculpted and overworked in post that it really makes you wonder why they shrugged their shoulders at that choice.
Let me be clear: the jump cut is SO jarring and laughable that is reminds me of this, and that's a parody where we are in on the joke! I think what happened here is that we are seeing the future of CGI in a way. The transformation scene in American Werewolf in London (1981) is so overdone (I mean that as a compliment) that you can tell in its ambitions and the balls to swing for the fence that it WANTS to be what CGI would eventually give us in the years to come. That promise of a bigger canvas with NO limits, or that is how it was supposed to go until every Tom, Dick and Harry with millions of bucks to blow on what they thought was the next Jurassic Park and T2 ran the wheels off their new car. I digress.
BUT I think Ridley Scott and company were giving the likes of Lucas and Spielberg a run for their money. They knew they had a hit on their hands. It was all about conquering new frontiers back then both on the screen AND in the studios. So basically on pure moxie and ambition alone they were like, "Fuck it, the audience will just have to accept it on our pure will alone." In that funny way, I applaud that. It's a foul ball and not a home run, but still. It reminds me of the terrible Terminator mirror scene that for my money exists for that same reason too. As a signifier of a filmmaker's ambitions to be KING OF THE WORLD (Jim Cameron pun intended). But George Lucas had to ruin it for the rest of us with he started to use CGI to tinker with his movies to point of making it a running joke on South Park. So you can't blame Ridley Scott and those like him about being hesitant to revisit their more well received works. And he already did with Blade Runner 1982 that did more harm than good I would contend for his legacy.
But, they, that's what fan editing is for, right?! RIGHT!?! I don't have big studios or fans breathing down my neck. And if you troll me for drawing a mustache on your Mona Lisa then it's one anonymous doofus punking on another for their hobby.
+++THE HIGHLIGHTS+++
So, as my skill set expanded and both my work ethic AND experience editing improved I decided to tackle this most tricky of dilemmas. You can see why Ridley Scott would be hesitant to try that himself. How exactly to go about it? Do you just fix that effect and not deal with the other corners cut through out the movie? The less is more approach really does work with this masterpiece of sci-fi horror suspense. That's part of its power. And after the Alien: Romulus debacle of using a posthumous Ian Holms as yet another android Nazi with an inferiority complex waxing poetic about how humans suck for this esoteric reason or that, you can understand why it would backfire.
But, again, as a test of my work ethic AND experience of pouring so much time and efforts into my fan edit experiences (sorry, dishes and laundry, I promise to do a better job) I think I cracked this puzzle in only the way fan edits can. Which, for me, is a good argument for WHY we need fan editing and how it can truly be, at times, an art form in addition to a hobby.
*drum roll please*
*The first exclusive on this planet or anywhere of Ash's jump cut fixed!! I truly have faith that THIS is the way to do it. You have to find a way to honor what came before it. I get why people find charm, for instance, at that old puppet Arnold head in Terminator, it signifies the time that movie was made. But I think their is an exception here because at least Terminator (1984) would know when to cut away back to the actor. Even Cameron with his big balls wouldn't want to risk laughter at a puppet head turning into Arnuld in too obvious a way. So, enjoy my edit if for no other reason than it was a personal triumph for this jaded moviegoer to finally find closure to this itch I needed scratch. There was another cut almost worse than the jump cut where Ash smiles, only for Ripley to knock his head over in what was even a sillier mannequin head than the first one, with the same grin no less! Doing that REALLY makes me think the filmmaker are playing chicken with our expectations knowing that the rest of the movie works so well that we will give them their bullshit ambitions and let them eat shit too (even if we are doing the eating).
*Stylistic changes, like an enigmatic quote that opens the film and ties later Alien entries into this one. I'm an Alien:Covenant hater, I will proudly admit, so I hope that this quote fixes the course of that ship a little.
*The other big change. The original design of the xenomorph is now prominent. I like the original Big Chap with the human skull barely visible under the alien's translucent skin. I understand why James Cameron ditched that look for Aliens (1986). I would've made fighting them too much of a zombie movie, so he went for an insect vibe, right down to the Queen as galactic ant. For Alien, I think it was an accident we couldn't see more of that design, mostly because of the use of lighting to hide the f/x. But what a lost opportunity IMHO. It adds to the fundamental misunderstanding of the xenomorph that ruined future sequels.
Remember, this creature is something ripped straight from the darkest and deepest of our subconscious fears. The fear of rape and impregnation, the ultimate violation that is murder, sex as both creation and destruction, and our own lizard brain we inherited from the reptiles we struggle to live with day in and day out whenever interpersonal or global conflict arises. People forget that when we first saw the movie, it was the facehugger hatching from the strange egg that was what we thought of when we saw that movie. For better or worse, James Cameron got us addicted to the vision of the monster as foe rather than ultimate apex predator. But the whole idea was that poor Kane played by the great John Hurt (R.I.P.) got a little too curious like us humans sometimes do when flying too close to the sun. And the rape, impregnation and violation that follows was meant to be his rebirth. Regardless of what lore you buy into about Engineers this or Predators that, what made alien TRULY alien is that it was about distilling you as a lifeform to your essence. The mystery of what it means to be born and then die.
The facehugger to xenomorph lifecycle is really YOUR lifecycle filtered through the essence of the universe itself, which as depicted by Ridley Scott was some fun playground to bop around in like George Lucas did a few years earlier. No, outer space here was depicted as dark and dangerous and vast, a place humans really do NOT belong, and the home of death itself if not worse. It's as if the universe was punishing us for stealing fire from the Gods to fuel our ships to penetrate that safe boundary between our atmosphere and what lies just beyond it. Hence, the whole angle with the unnecessarily maligned Prometheus (2012). It's no alien, but I like it a lot. It gets this formula right. And it presents this journey of birth and death on a human spectrum of flesh, faith, belief and adventure as one where our punishment from nature if not the Gods themselves for overstepping our bounds is to confront ourselves in the only place we can, in hell. Is not the xenomorph an allegory of the demonic if nothing else?
the tl;dr version is that, if nothing else, if you get impregnated by THIS alien then what made this truly alien is that you will be reborn as the worst incarnation of yourself as possible. Poor Kain is reborn as the Ted Bundy from hell serial killer version of himself. So, yeah... that makes sense, facehuggers + humans = pure psychopaths addicted to homicide and rape. It's as if the facehugger lifecycle is about separating the wheat from the chaff of what it means to be human, leaving out the civilized parts of us and allowing only our darkest most impulses and sins to survive. When it attaches itself to a dog in Alien 3(1992) then a facehugger + dog = the most vicious angry GET OFF MY LAWN rabid dog you've ever encountered.
All that interesting lore and mystery got lost along the way when Alien become just another franchise to milk money from and the creatures of it became simply another B-movie monster. There's nothing wrong with a good movie monster. Those are my favorite films if you can't tell by my website here.haha BUT the franchise overtime turned this original and beautiful concept of sorts, an atheist devil, and simply turned into just another animal.
Nothing against the storytellers of Alien:Earth (2025) who I think also struggled with this and tried, in their own misguided way, to restore this mythology to its roots. But where they went wrong IMO is seeing this enigma as just another space animal rather than a part of our souls that becomes almost herniated in a sense.
What I'm getting at with all this is that, the reason I chose in my edit to showcase a xenomorph WITH a human skull is that the image is truly alien BECAUSE it feels like a human soul is trapped in their somehow. That the facehugger uses poor Kane to create this awful rapey homicidal asshole of a monster is a violation because he uses everything he was, both his best attributes (his life essence and being) and fashions a new anti-lifeform (death form? out of his worst impulses. So the sight of that human skull that clearly came from Kane trapped under the alien's hideous and disgusting biomechanical translucent body truly gives a movie like Exorcist (1973) a run for its money in the creep factor when you stop to let that all sink in, and one could see Kane's consciousness maybe even trapped in there too looking out helplessly as he kills all those he loved.
Make no mistake, there is a reason why Star Trek's The Borg borrows so much of its look and vibe from Alien. That's basically the hell Captain Picard experienced, and those like him who did NOT escape assimilation. Watching everything you are become an instrument of unconscious ego and evil. If that's not alien to everything it means to be human, then I don't know what is?
*Some fun changes (okay, after being a buzzkill with all that!) like a little more action for Ripley (in the form of a better re-imagined deleted scene where she encounters Dallas's remains) that hints at the fun we will see in Aliens. Some better explosions here and there, when appropriate and other little touches that give this movie its best foot forward IMHO without pulling a George Lucas (sorry, man, but I can accept Ewok eye lids but not the Anakin force ghost).
+++IN CONCLUSION+++
That's a lot to say about Alien, but if you are coming all this way to my website the darkest reaches of the internet then know it was my favorite movie as a kid, and like my other fan edits I am here to share that love and bottle it up if such an effort is possible. I have hope for this lore after Alien: Romulus (2024) just when I thought the franchise was dead after the travesty that was Covenant. So enjoy my little love letter here to the movie that started it all.
ENTER THE THEATER!
