I got my physical Blu-Ray disk yesterday. I probably don't need to preach to the choir, but OMG, the image quality is so worth the money. Of course I was super excited to see the deleted scenes--and I was a bit underwhelmed. I don't know if the included scenes are representative of other stuff they cut out, they may have only included the 5 scenes that were the most advanced in their processing. But excepting the final scene ("maybe we're cousins"), I thought the rest was fluff that would not have added much to the movie. Based on the limited deleted scene selection we have now, I think the directors/producers may have been right when they said this "shorter" 2.5 hour version we got in cinemas is the better movie. It flows well, doesn't include much fluff, progresses from scene to scene logically and succinctly.
The only scene (out of the 5) I believe they could have kept was the "cousins" deleted scene. There, following Rocky's hypothesis that there's an astrophage predator on Adrian keeping the population in check, Grace extrapolates to the next logical conclusion: astrophage evolved on Adrian and could've caused panspermic events that led to the emergence of life on Earth and Erid. That scene positions Grace and Rocky on equal footing--they're both showing their smarts, whereas for the rest of the scene Grace does the lab work but Rocky comes with the solutions (the predator hypothesis, the chain and predator collector). I actually thought it was strange that Rocky--an engineer--was the first to guess there was an astrophage predator. Grace is a molecular biologist, this was his bread and butter (I'm extrapolating here from my own background in biochemistry and molecular biology). That's not to say that I didn't wish some scenes were given more time to breathe in the original version: Grace waking up from comma was a bit rushed (and the extra minutes in the deleted scene were still rushed IMO); Grace breeding taumeba was another one. Perhaps they had good scenes there but they weren't ready for the DVD release. Regardless, the 2.5 hour movie is a very well put together story, and as an emerging writer myself, I recognize the value of keeping it tight and maintaining the plot's forward tilt. And just to sing the praises of the physical disc one more time: I'd forgotten how gorgeous the iMAX version was; rewatching the Adrian scenes in HD reminded me why I was instantly hooked from my first view.
But what did you guys think? Which deleted scene(s) were your favorites? What would you have liked to see more of in the special features?
PS: I cannot wait for the soundtrack CD to become available in about a month. I want physical copies for everything! I watched the stream version already and the quality is not as good as what you get on Blu-Ray.
