The running time of the new version is virtually identical to that of the old one. It had to be to fit into the same two-hour (with commercials) time slot. The original was written with nine act breaks, so that PTEN could fit in more commercials, rather than the standard six acts for a "two-hour" TV movie. However, by 1998, when the revised edition appeared, cable channels like TNT were running about the same number of commercial minutes as PTEN had wanted in 1993, so JMS didn't get any "extra" running time with the re-edit. What he did get was the chance to re-edit the film into six acts, since TNT fit their commercials into the standard number of breaks and just had each of them last longer. This reportedly did wonders for pacing, as now you have a dramatic climax and a break every 12 minutes or so, instead of every eight.
JMS ended up with about 14 minutes of "character stuff" that ended up on the cutting room floor. He was able to put that back in by cutting out 14 minutes from the original version. While this sounds like a huge amount, it really isn't. Many of the cuts were 30 seconds of a long panning shot from the top of one scene, 10 seconds of an overly long reaction shot from the end of another. Shots of characters walking silently through the corridors between on place on the station and another also fell victim to the editor's scissors.
Essentially they pulled out a lot of stuff that the director liked and JMS didn't. (The aforementioned "alien zoo" and "cone of silence" - both derrogatory names applied to these elements by fans, not so-called in the movie - long, lingering camera pans, inferior CGI "establishing" shots that went on too long, that sort of thing.)
Then they put back a lot of stuff that JMS did like, but which hadn't made the original cut. The whole dust dealer/hostage incident at the beginning of the film wasn't in the original version, for instance. Switching to a six act structure let JMS drop certain scenes that were only there to hold the audience through a commercial break, and rearrange the order of others, which helped clarify the narrative. He was able to put more "character" moments back in, like Takishima's cofffee plant (an element later grafted onto Ivanova since it was never seen in the original version) and Kyle's use of stims.
A number of new CGI FX shots were also put in, often replacing the original FX. Since the entire movie was re-edited to one degree or another, a new score was mandatory. The original score had been written for the original final edit. Rather than try to get Stewart Copeland back, JMS just had Christopher Franke write a new score.
The other major change was all of Takishima's dialogue. A Warner Bros. executive had disliked the character, and thought she was too "harsh". So they made Tamlyn Tomita come back and "loop" all of her dialogue to "soften" it. Not only did this change the performance, but it added that odd, flat quality that automated dialogue replacement always had, like a bad English dubbing job on a foreign film. In the course of prepping the revised edition, somebody happened upon Tomita's original voice tracks, and these were restored to all of her scenes. I've heard people who saw the original version and didn't like the character at all say that they liked her a lot better in the revised edition.
Regards,
Joe
