'Alien' and the Often Under Appreciated Importance of Editing...and thus, Pacing

Ok...here's where the Uber-nerd in me comes out....but I needed to start something new........I've always loved movies....always.......it doesn't matter how much you love something until you truly take a look at the finer points and appreciate your obsessions for what they are..... I went to film school to make movies.....somehow I ended up in Special Education, but that's another thread for another day.....and I never appreciated the true importance of editing until I was confronted by just how easily any film we see could come out a hundred other ways than what we know...... There's a saying in film....a movie's made three times, with the script, in production and in post-production... I worked on a 16mm short film that we were required to edit in pairs and when we finished and submitted our edits, we all sat down to watch each one and vote on our preference....Going into it, we all had the same shots, same material to work with and I ended up watching 11 movies made by 22 editors that looked nothing like each other.........the center piece of the film was a flirtatious conversation between two co-workers and in each edit, the mood was different, the flow, the attitude and performance of each actor; whether you felt chemistry between them or awkwardness, it was always as though you were watching an entirely different conversation...she seems as though she likes him in one edit and is weirded out by him in the next....fascinating. The point is....any film we see is one post-productiona argument away from working or just plain sucking....there's more to it than that, of course, but it has more to do with the final cut of any film and whether it works, how it feels, the pacing, than most of us realize..... 'Alien' is one of those movies where this is brilliantly on display and I'll demonstrate with the following exercise......Ridley's film, the theatrical cut, is paced so perfectly that you can measure the effort put into it's pacing by timing out the streches between major events and there is an obvious, steady decrease in time between each event, with one exception, that gets a little shorter each time.....It's ptich perfect pacing... - Opening title to Kane's Facehugger episode.. 32:36 min. - To the Chestburster sequence.. 20:05 min. - To Brett's Death.. 11:38 min. - To Dallas' Disappearance.. 07:03 min. - To Ash's Outing as an Android and His Death .. 04:16 min. - To Parker and Lambert's Deaths.. 08:05 min. - includes Ash's monologue - To the Nostromo's Death.. 07:49 min. - To the Final Confrontation Aboard the Narcissuss.. 02:50 min. The so-called Director's cut chops this up and destroys that pacing in way that feels entirely off.....It's amasing what a little addition and subtraction can do..........