by dinky on Tue Jan 04, 2005 10:27 pm
I thought the slicked-up cgi effect was more troubling in A4. AvP cgi wasn't so troubling, maybe cuz it's black foreground on (mostly) black background. anyway, the queen walking like a t-rex was pretty impossible not to see that way (having seen JP).
anyway, your point about wasted money and doing less with more is well taken, and the fact that cgi couldn't cover up</i> other shortcomings is the more important issue about cgi to emphasize. after all, there's a shitload of cgi in LotR, and most of that seemed pretty damn good to me (matting with treebeard and the two hobits being a notable exception)
however, I think the main</i> reason the queen looked so much better in Aliens</i> is because you never had to see it fully articulated. yeah, you see it chugging up the elevator shaft, which amounts to a stationary body and two arms/legs left on "spin cycle." but cameron never asked the queen to move in full view of the camera the way anderson did in AvP. there's the scene in the hangar, but even there, it's a confined space, close-up, showing certain sections of the queen (or she's stuck under the exo-suit-thingy) - in any case, you're not requiring her to do much more than stand there and articulate one or two limbs at a time from a very limited pov.
this obviously doesn't take everything into account. you're still going to be annoyed by the slick look of the queen's face in A4 and the all-too-even appearance, even when thawing in AvP (that last one didn't bother me seeing as to how I have NO idea what such a thing would actually look like - in fact, neither one was an issue for me). like any good scary movie, the proper use of the monster is to show as little as possible, and that's what the more recent Alien flicks fail to understand - something that falls squarely on the writer/director's head(s). seeing aliens for any extended time in A1 or A2, it becomes painfully obvious that you're looking at a guy in a topheavy suit - it's not like the make-up/puppet combo is a priori</i> more convincing. cameron, scott, and even fincher were't dumb enough to put their creatures under a spotlight though.
Life ducks, and you sigh.