While the most of the work committed to this project has been in reworking the visual effects, both of the Alien and certain environmental shots that set the scene, I've also put effort into enhancing the entire viewing experience as a whole.
The first significant visual change of the Legacy Cut was to adjust the color grading. I have selected a palette that I feel is faithful to the tone of the film, but that accentuates the colors and brings the picture to life in a new way.
As is, the colors of Alien ³ can appear flat and lacking in character, often making the hopelessness feel smothering. I feel the visuals should be bolder and have more confidence, and be more in keeping with the look of the film's predecessors, making the trilogy feel like a more unified experience.
The next big change was upscaling the resolution from 1920x810 to 3840x1620. The first two films in the series have now been released in 4K, and I think the trilogy's stunning conclusion should get the same treatment. While I lack access to the original film prints to do a ground-up remaster, I have sourced the best publicly available software to create a 4K upscale that preserves all the detail of the original film including its characteristic grainy look.
Combining this with the new color grading and enhanced visual effects, my goal is to make The Legacy Cut the go-to way for many fans to enjoy the film.
Alien ³ is a great, and under appreciated movie, but it is not without its problems. While all movies recorded on film have blemishes and blips on the frames, Alien ³ is particularly wrought with them. Hundreds of frames have been cleaned up and had distracting imperfections removed. While it would be impossible to fix all of these blotches and dark patches as a feature film contains hundreds of thousands of frames, the most offending examples have been cleaned up.
There was also some manner of problem with the editing process of the film, where more often than not, the final frame in a shot, before cutting to the next shot, would have a warped effect at the top or the bottom of the image. While this might not be immediately noticeable, as each frame only makes up 1/24th of a second, once I noticed it, it was impossible to ignore.
This meant the removal of hundreds of frames of the film. This, if done in isolation, would have created an increasingly wider gap in the sync of picture and sound, so the audio had to be seamlessly corrected along the way to keep it in line with the visuals, creating hundreds of imperceptible stitches in the audio track.
Below is a video showing a few examples of this warping for reference.
Interesting note: This warping only occurred in scenes exclusively from the Theatrical Cut of the film. New scenes from The Assembly Cut did not have this issue, so whatever editing glitch was present in 1992, other methods were clearly used in 2003.
It’s no secret that David Fincher’s time on Alien ³ was plagued with frustrations and hindrances at every turn. It’s a testament to his creative talent and problem solving capabilities that he produced an end result like the film we got. One of these solved problems was the workaround of limiting the need for special effects during the final conflict in the lead works. The solution was an elegantly simple one, introducing the use of POV shots to simulate the Xenomorph chasing its prey.
While these shots are effective in creating tension and building suspense, there are a LOT of them, and at times they run the risk of feeling a little underwhelming and repetitive. Honestly after a while it begins to feel less like something fun and creative, and more like something done to cut corners with production time and costs. A big part of this, in my opinion, is that the Alien’s POV just doesn’t look very… Alien?
For these shots they definitely made an effort. They rigged the cameras to the ceiling and had crew actually chasing the cast around the tunnels, but as far as the visuals, they used a different lens, which creates a wider, and slightly warped effect, but the limitations of the technology at the time seemingly narrowed their creative options.
Thirty years later there are a lot more tools at our creative fingertips, and I thought I’d liven these sequences up a little. The Xenomorph’s cinematic cousin, The Yautja, of the Predator franchise, get their own dedicated vision signature, a few of them in fact. Why not the Xenomorph?
I’ve added a red filter, altered the contrast and exposure, played with volumetric lighting effects, and created a look that boldens the passing lamps of the corridors into streaming waves of light that reach across the screen.
I’ve also added running sound effects for the Alien to heighten the illusion of pursuit.
