Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.
My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.
The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.
Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.
The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.
Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.
I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.
Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.