"Let's nuke the bastards"
My love for Aliens is well documented- perhaps not in this el-jay, but in real life a lot of people know it's a movie I love. The story is tight, everyone makes realistic descisions, there is not one, but two badass ladies with gigantic guns, and even though it was made in the 80's the effects hold up like crazy.
I am going to go full film-nerd on this, audience be warned.
So I watched all the special features on the director's cut last night. I learned about the casting, the production, the music, and most interestingly, the effects.
I never noticed before that many major scenes are done with rear projection, which I thought people had stopped using with the advent of bluescreen. But apparently James Cameron's effects guys took a page out of Willis O'Brien's book and used not only a fantastic bunch of miniatures, but rear projection, stop motion, and models interacting with actors. They used like 3 composite shots in the entire movie, and all of the aliens are guys in suits. The queen alien is a life-sized puppet controlled by a bunch of puppeteers, a loading crane, and two stuntmen in a suit, and the power-loader is a real thing too, with a bodybuilder inside. The fact that almost nothing in the movie was computer generated actually makes it hold up a lot better when faced with modern effects. If they'd gone with bluescreen, it would have looked cheezy and outdated, like so many other 80's sci-fi flicks. But since they did everything with puppets and miniatures and all, there are only a few scenes where the effect is obvious.
I watched the movie again with an eye to the effects. Even when you're looking for them, they're still pretty seamless. There's one scene, where the jump ship crashes, that's a very obvious rear projection shot, but the rest of it looks unnervingly realistic for the time. The miniatures guys are particularly innovative. There's a scene in the end where the second jump ship is flying away from the planet, and behind them there's a nuclear explosion through the cloud cover. Apparently that's just cotton glued to a light bulb and pushed up through other cotton. It looks good.
I've always loved special effects- I get it from my dad, I suppose. I went to see Transformers 2, a movie I had very little interest in, because of the shot in the trailer where the aircraft carrier sinks. But to see fantastic visual effects in a fantastic movie is always such a pleasure. I want to cheer every time I watch the climactic fight between Ripley and the alien queen, not just because it's such a badass moment in the story, but because the effects are so seamless that I almost believe it's real.
I never knew that the movie was mostly puppetry and models. I always thought there had to be at least some computer generated effects. Now that I've found this out, I am more impressed with this film than before. Aliens: It's the best thing since hummus.