You've got to appreciate the venerable institution of the
deleted scene. Home to countless boring little vignettes where characters share
some unnecessary exposition which the director rightly decided was too static
to bother watching, the deleted scenes section of some DVDs (remember those,
fellow elderlies?) was also known on occasion to house the occasionally stellar sequence which
completely reshaped the reality of the film from which it was cut.
Yes, sometimes a deleted scene,
chopped out of the final cut for whatever reason, could shed some much needed
light on the film’s backstory, deepening a character arc or filling in details
of the world surrounding them. Other times a scene might merely offer us a glimpse
of character motivations otherwise left relatively unclear in the theatrical cut,
or change the tone of things entirely.
As a genre, the expensive
institution of sci-fi seems particularly full of these small scenes that,
though they never made it to the screen, can reshape the narrative and characters
of their source movies—for better or, in some cases, far worse.