Alien Quadrilogy DVD Fox Home Entertainment 2003   Planet of the Apes: 35th Anniversary Special Edition DVD Fox Home Entertainment 2004     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	The first time I saw Alien, it scared the crap out of me. And every time I see it, it scares the crap out of me again. I'm not a masochist, but I love the movie. Over the years, it's achieved the status of "classic," which isn't all that surprising. Like Jaws, which was released a few years earlier, Alien was all about a monster that largely isn't seen on-screen. The fear comes from not seeing it, from not knowing what's coming next. Alien, even more than Jaws, uses silence to create suspense. In the opening section of the movie, there's hardly any sound at all, just Jerry Goldsmith's whispery music and a few well-chosen sounds generated by action on the ship. The crew is still asleep, so we hear the clicks of computers, the little ticks and pops as fluorescent lights illuminate, that kind of thing. All the while, the camera seems to float through the ship -- the Nostromo -- looking for something. This, rather than the alien itself, is the scary part. It's not the screams or the surprise attacks or the gore. It's the filmmaking, it's Ridley Scott's way with things, that gets me. Of course, one of the reasons Alien is remembered so fondly is that it brought us Sigourney Weaver. In a role originally written for a man, she kicked ass (and she kicked it even harder in the sequel, James Cameron's Aliens). Weaver brings a wide-eyed innocence to Ripley. I always felt she was perfectly named, because when she gets home, the story she'll have is one to be believed ... or not. Ripley is a serious woman with a job to do, and that job morphs into basic survival soon enough. She brings a fascinating tension to the role. In the end, armed with little more than her panties and skimpy T-shirt, she beats the alien. The cast of Alien is rounded out by actors who have since become masters: Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt, Ian Holm. Each brings an almost frustrating naiveté to their roles; clearly, though the film is set far in the future, none of these characters has ever seen a horror movie. Alien was so successful that it spawned, much like the alien itself, a whole family of sequels. It is widely believed that only the second film, Aliens, is any good. But Alien 3, directed by David Fincher, is interesting if only because you get to see how disastrous his early work was. By the time anyone got around to thinking about Alien 4, it was over. Late last year, Fox released a massive set of nine DVDs. Each film got the two-disc treatment (though 3 and 4 hardly deserved it), and a ninth disc was added, filled with bonus features. There are director commentaries, featurettes beyond belief, photo archives, deleted scenes, original versions and director's cuts, and more. Alien also benefits from a look at composer Jerry Goldsmith scoring the film, whose icy music should receive just as much credit for the success of the film as director Scott and alien designer H.R. Geiger. About a decade before Alien, there was a little film called Planet of the Apes, based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle. Where Alien was all about what's not seen, Apes was very much all about what is. You want to see the apes speaking and doing human-type things. It was a tour de force that still has fans talking. Despite a flurry of Apes and Apes sequels on DVD a few years ago (along with a Tim Burton-directed remake that tanked), now there's a new two-disc DVD set commemorating the 35th anniversary of the original film. The discs are filled with commentaries (one by composer Goldsmith, whose score for this film broke new ground in that arena), behind the scenes featurettes and an extensive two-hour documentary about all the films and the phenomenon that surrounded them, narrated by Roddy McDowall. It's a spectacular package that contains every possible morsel of information. Even if you own a previous DVD (of the film and of the two-hour documentary), it's worth the upgrade. Planet of the Apes starred Charlton Heston as Taylor, one of three astronauts who crash land on a mysterious planet 2000 years into the future. There, they encounter a race of apes -- chimps, gorillas and orangutans -- who have remade civilization. Years before, disease killed all the dogs and cats. Man, in his arrogance, fell a couple of rungs down on the evolutionary ladder just as apes made a jump. Now the apes have rebuilt society, and with screenwriter Rod Serling (post-Twilight Zone) behind it, you know it's creepy and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. The film unfolds through the eyes of Taylor, who befriends two sympathetic chimps, Cornelius and Zira, played by McDowall and Kim Hunter. The three form a controversial and dangerous alliance against Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), who doesn't want anyone to know what really turned the world upside down. But that truth is revealed after Taylor orchestrates his escape and sets out on horseback with Nova. When they come upon a ruined Statue of Liberty, Heston jumps down to the beach and pounds the sand -- and we know that this world in reverse is Earth in the future. It's a bleak ending but it's a powerhouse climax to a film created to engender thought and discussion and debate. In the years after the first film, producer Arthur P. Jacobs produced four more: Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from..., Conquest of..., and Battle for... . The opus followed Cornelius and Zira as they befriended yet another astronaut (James Franciscus), then used the ship from the first film to escape from Earth, only to see it blown up. (Mutants living in the New York subway tunnels had a live nuclear bomb, and Heston, in a last act of humanity, triggered it.) The two chimps eventually return to present-day Earth, much to the surprise of every scientist on the planet, allowing the third film to be, essentially, a new take on the first -- only with apes out of water instead of men out of water. In the fourth film, the child of the chimps (now dead) leads a revolt against the humans, and in the fifth, many generations down the line, his progeny try to live in peace with humans in the forests. But of course that doesn't quite work out, especially after Heston appears. (If you were to watch the films chronologically, the first and second films would come here, ending with Taylor's destruction of Earth.) In the final analysis, Alien and Planet of the Apes launched massively successful series. The value of the sequels aside, the original films are brilliant works of science fiction. Like the best of that genre, on the page or on the screen, these films present a new reality for man, a reality that forces us to reconsider our own place in the universe. | March 2004   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	Where Alien was all about what's not seen, Apes was very much all about what is.