Alien Anthology Art and Accolades

The Alien Anthology Blu-ray will go on sale here on November 10 as part of a global release of the extraordinary extra-terrestrial collection.

It coincides with the director of Aliens, James Cameron, signalling he plans to make the two Avatar sequels here, which probably will follow production of the two Hobbit movies.

While the rest of the world might have a better-looking box set to drool over — compare NZ and Australia’s (above) with the US and UK’s (below) — at least we’re one of the cheaper places to buy the six-disc set, which has a recommended retail price of $120 here compared with $US140 in the US (even discounted, Amazon.com’s $US90 doesn’t compete when you include postage).

Advance reviews suggest it’s worth buying at any price. Blu-ray.com’s “high expectations for the picture quality of these four films were met and quite frequently surpassed” while The Digital Bits dubbed it a “format heavyweight.

“The stunning new HD transfers of Alien and Aliens alone are almost worth the price of admission all by themselves, not to mention ALL of the previous Quadrilogy extras plus literally HOURS of all-new content created just for this BD release. I’ll tell you: Blu-rays just don’t get much better than this.”

And Home Theater Forum reckons the Alien Anthology “is likely to be the last word on these four fascinating works as the six-disc set collects two versions of each film and more commentaries and bonus features than a person could comfortably watch in a month”.

Surprisingly, given they were made up to 31 years ago, the original Alien and its first sequel appear to fare better than the latter movies in terms of HD video quality.