 Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Brad Dourif, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon
Director: Jean Pierre Jeunet
Year Of Release: 1997
Plot: 200 years after her death, Ellen Ripley is cloned so that scientists can harvest the Alien Queen inside her and start to breed their own xenomorphs. However the experiment inevitably goes wrong and the creatures escape, leaving it to a part alien Ripley and a crew of ragtag astronauts to try and make it off the spaceship alive. |
I could wax lyrical about why I think Alien: Resurrection is an awful movie, from the fact it finally proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Winona Ryder can’t act, to the ridiculousness of the alien queen giving birth to a part human creature, however what I want to look at today is how the Alien series of movies charts the birth of modern special effects.
Just as the Lethal Weapon series shows how the action movie evolved from the 80s into the 90s, the Alien franchise displays just how far special effects have come in the last 30 years. For example, many people have praised Alien as a sort of ‘Jaws in Space’, where you rarely see the creature and even when you do, you rarely see all of it one go (until the very end). It is indeed a very effective tactic, but what’s pointed out less is that the reason both Jaws and Alien did this wasn’t because they didn’t want to show their creatures, but because the limitations of special effects meant the more you showed, the faker it looked.
In 1979’s Alien, much of the time the creature is either a fairly basic man in a suit who’s wearing an alien head with limited movable parts, or a complex animatronic head that they couldn’t really move very much because it was anchored to numerous controls. As a result, it worked better if you only saw the creature briefly and largely in close-up, while the use of shadows was as much to cover up the limitations of the effects as it was about creating a tense atmosphere.
Move forward seven years, and while computer generated imagery was still the wave of the future, there’d been a leap forward in animatronics by the time James Cameron made Aliens in 1986. This came about both because of the miniaturisation of technology, as well as the fact that microchips, robotics, radio controls, and computers meant you could have far great control over psychical special effects.
This allowed the now sadly departed effects technician Stan Winston to come up with something as enormous and complex as the alien queen, which is still one of the biggest animatronic creatures ever created for the screen, and took between 14 and 16 people to control it. It also meant Winston could create aliens that looked and moved less like men in suits and to be able to make them faster and more animal-like, which simply wasn’t possible when Ridley Scott was making his movie (however some of the agility of the creatures was as much due to wirework, which allowed the aliens to leap all over the place, as the animatronics).
However there were still limitations. Because a creature like the alien queen has to be held up using massive pneumatics and cables, it meant that Cameron had to be clever in the way he filmed it so that he could get the shots he needed but not show all mass of technology that was hidden off-camera. Nowadays the cables could be digitally erased, but that wasn’t possible at the time.
By the time Alien3 came along in 1992, Hollywood was right on the cusp of the digital revolution, and the movie was the first Alien movie to use CGI and computer controlled cameras during filming of the creature. While in some shots the alien was still a man in a suit, we also got our first CG xenomorphs, most notably at the end, when we see cracks appearing across its skull.
In some ways it’s a shame they couldn’t have waited a couple of years, as while Cameron had wowed the world with his liquid metal T-1000 in 1991, the technology wasn’t quite ready for extensive full-body shots of moving aliens by the time they made Alien3. Even so, what computers could do allowed us to see the creature in ways that hadn’t been possible before. Although many think the full body-shots on the aliens in Alien3 are stop motion, they’re actually rod puppets, with the rods digitally removed and then the creature composited into the live action shots.
It wouldn’t have been possible to do this in moving shots without the birth of advanced computer controlled cameras, which meant David Fincher could move his camera on set, and the shot could be mimicked exactly in the studio with the puppets, so that the two separate elements matched up completely when put together. Mapping the exact movements that a camera makes is one of the most basic things in special effects filmmaking nowadays, but in 1992 it was in its infancy.
However there is a problem with this. Compositing a rod-puppet creature into an otherwise fully live-action shot means it won’t cast any shadows, but in Alien3, advances in computer technology meant these could be added in using CGI. Although the puppets weren’t particularly convincing, they do show an interesting transition period where computers were becoming more and more important to special effects, but hadn’t quite yet taken over.
By the time we get to Alien: Resurrection in 1997, CGI was really coming into its own, and for the first time the film used full body shots of aliens created solely using computer generated imagery. There are 30-40 shots in the movie that use CG creatures, most notably in the underwater scenes, where we see the aliens swimming for the first time.
The film still had to use animatronics and men in suits, but for the first time technology had got to the point where the limitations were more down to the budget than what it was possible to do. Interestingly however, the makers still felt the need to use miniatures for all the spaceship shots, feeling CGI hadn’t yet reached the stage where it could render them convincingly (and many still believe a good miniature, whether of a spaceship or not, will beat a pure CG shot any day, which is why Peter Jackson used them so extensively when he created Middle Earth in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy).
The Alien movies really show what an enormous revolution there’s been in special effects over the last 30 years. And it really has been a revolution, as many of the effects used in Alien hadn’t changed drastically since the 50s, while a lot of what they did in Alien: Resurrection wouldn’t have even been possible five years before when they made Alien3. Of course things have moved on even more since then, to the point where the possibilities of what can be shown really are only limited by the maker’s imagination and how much of a budget they have (indeed AvP was a bit of a CG free-for-all on the xenomorph front).
Whether this is a good thing or not is another question, as it certainly seems true that the limitations on the likes of Ridley Scott and James Cameron really made them think about the best way to film the movie, while the fact CG lets you do whatever you want, often means that effects aren’t as well thought out as they used to be, resulting in sloppier movies. It’s also true that you can’t beat something real. While we know the alien queen is a giant animatronic creature full of pneumatics and motors, its physicality is something CG still often has difficulty mimicking. However I’m sure we’ll get back onto the pros and cons of CG later in the Movie-A-Day Project.
It is fascinating how each of the Alien films used new and different technologies that weren’t available before to expand and explore how they could show the killer creatures on screen, and in doing so charted the birth of the technologies that have now taken over special effects filmmaking.
TIM ISAAC
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