Alien 3 – 1992
Woah! I expected more from a Best Visual Effects nominee. Some of the effects were terrible! Just terrible! And I had fairly high expectations for a couple of reasons. First, the movie was part of the spectacular Aliens franchise. Alien 1 was created and directed by Ridley Scott. Alien 2 was directed by James Cameron. But Alien 3 had a director I had never heard of before named David Fincher.
Now, just because I had never heard of him, it doesn’t mean he isn’t a good director with an impressive body of work. He has since directed movies like Seven, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, all of which were very good movies with great visual effects. But Alien 3 was his directorial debut, and honestly, I found it lacking in several ways. I won’t even go into the story content or character development issues I had. The poor visual effects alone were enough to throw the movie off.
Nowhere is this more evident than right from the very beginning, in the opening sequence. As the craft containing Lt. Ripley in a stasis pod crashes into the water of a desolate planet, we see the ship falling like a burning comet. The camera cuts to a closer shot, and the pod looked as fake as a piece of cardboard crashing into the ocean. The lighting on the pod was terrible, not matching the environment into which it was descending. And that was just within the first two minutes.
But it was the alien we all came to see, right? Now, I’ll concede that it was cool how the creature which used a dog as its host had come out with more canine-like qualities, so I understand the different look of the monster. And I understand that CGI was a technique that was still fairly new, only a few years old in its common and widespread use. But come on! The scene in which it attacks the infirmary was so poorly executed! Let me explain.
As the creature approached, we could see its shape through a plastic curtain. It grabbed the doctor and killed him, but they were tangled in the plastic curtain, so we still couldn’t see it clearly. Ripley backs up against the wall and it creeps around the bed. It was clearly a CGI alien that looked like a two-dimensional, hand-drawn cartoon. It didn’t look like it belonged in the image. Then they switched to a sophisticated puppet when it came close to Ripley, and that looked good.
And then there were the two scenes in which bodies were dropped into an incinerator. We got to see the bodies from above as they fell in slow-motion. But they didn’t burn, or suddenly vanish as they were obliterated by the fire, or anything realistic like that. They strangely faded like ghosts. It looked a bit ridiculous. But yes, there were a few good fire effects in the film, and a couple of stunts, but they were all overshadowed by the bad CGI and questionable blue-screening. For the third film in the franchise, I just expected the high quality of the effects in the first two movies to be upheld. Unfortunately, I was disappointed, and I don’t think I’m the only one.