After re-watching Alien and Aliens in the past week as well as a 5 hour documentary about Aliens, we could successfully say that I have had a rather full week of Alien oriented stuff. The logical step is for me to move on to Alien 3, which is a movie that has received very harsh criticism over the years and a lot of it isn't really deserved. In fact, a great deal of the criticism that is mostly negative isn't even true. People just didn't like it as much as the much-beloved Aliens and just went wild with speculation.
The first thing we need to take not of here is that no matter what they did, they were not going to be able to one-up Aliens. The success of that film was just unreal and like Eminem said in one of his songs "I'm not gonna be able to top where my name is." Alien 3 was in the same situation.
Most people didn't like the fact that the story took place like it did. We went and killed off "Newt" off-screen and then thrust Ridley down to a planet and many people thought this was just absurd. If you know anything about space you know that the chances of you being near anything in space is extremely small, let along a planet that has people and atmosphere. The chances of your spaceship having a fire and emergency space capsule release right at that precise moment that the craft just happens to be there is ridiculously low, even for a fictional sci-fi movie.
But whatever right? They needed to get Ripley on the ground and around a colony that just happens to have a mostly unarmed group of people in order to have a story. They didn't want another "space marine" film and it is easy to understand why. They had already done that as well as it could possibly be done.
The story isn't terrible here but a lot of people pick on it anyway. I think the story, once we get past the very convenient off-screen elimination of Newt and the fact that we ended up on this planet in a one-in-a-hundred-trillion chance encounter with a habitated planet, that the story is actually pretty good.
But then we start to get into the Alien, which they HAD to do in a somewhat innovative way, and the criticism of the execution in the end, just runs off the rails with people accusing them of using bad CGI.
The thing is, almost none of this was actually CGI as it turns out. It was actually a team of puppeteers working with a miniature model and that is probably a good thing. I will agree that it kind of looks hokey in a lot of places but this could very well be lighting decisions rather than the puppetry. For me, I think they made a mistake by keeping the shot on the Xenomorph for so long rather than just having "jump shots" of it every now and then. They were pushing the envelope because that is what films do, you have to do something new and a lot of this technology was invented specifically for this one film.
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this was not good.... everyone will admit that... it was pretty special at the time though
A bit later Jurassic Park would be released and people will universally contest that JP was done much much better than Alien 3 was.
There are actually very few scenes in this entire film that utilized full CGI. One of which was the infant Xenomorph emerging from an Ox and this was only done because the practical effects of this sequence were never completed and just like you would expect, films run on time-frames and a lot of pressure from studio execs. There is also a full CGI scene that is widely criticized but that scene is only about 1-second long.
Shadows were CGI and some debris was CGI, but almost every scene that you see of the Xenomorph running around is a very elaborate puppet that is being manned by a team of puppeteers who honestly when you look at it this way, did an outstanding job.
In later films we would see the CGI improved but fans were not happy then either. By the time the modern films were released I would say that they truly mastered it, but at that point the world was mostly kind of tired of the Alien franchise. Their most recent movie and the TV series, were kind of pushed to the side because certain modern social issues were injected into the story and well, most people really don't like that.
I feel as though Alien 3 got thrashed by critics back then because, the previous film had established something that couldn't possibly be one-upped. They tried anyway though and made a bunch of money which is honestly, what film-making is all about anyway. All of the following films also made money, I think.
Other than the honestly, truly awful TV series, I think that the Alien franchise is one of the best in history and "3" was always going to get ripped apart, no matter what they did. You can't create a crew of characters as beloved as they managed in Aliens and have anything other than that happen.
But if you ever see someone say that "the CGI in Alien 3 was awful", just know that there was almost zero of it despite the fact that they had the capabilities at the time.