Alien: Just watched it again.A lesson on film making!

[Wilbur Eddings]

When an old movie with ancient green computer monitors and a guy in a cheesy Alien suit can still put 90% of modern movies to shame with all their CGI sorcery, you know you have a masterpiece.

For such an old movie, it packs a powerful punch!

Genius use of sound and atmosphere, scary as PMS and extremely entertaining.

It really made me re-look my approach to film making!

We focus on story and technical efficiency, but a lot of time, we forget one of the most powerful tools at our disposal - Atmosphere.

Music and lighting are just two of the contributors to atmosphere. In Alien, the use of silence and fluctuating dialog volume is uber powerful!

The biggest atmosphere contributor in my opinion is the pace of the movie.
Each scene almost feels like it is setting you up for the next - like the break in an epic trance tune moving you expectantly towards the big synth and then to the pounding four on the floor climax.

I feel rebuked and schooled and i think I need to go and change my pants!

 

[arroway]

Indeed. It's a timeless piece of work.

 

[Zblock]

2nd that.

 

[jumpthewire]

i felt the same way when i rewatched john carpenter's "the thing"

 

[Kholi]

i felt the same way when i rewatched john carpenter's "the thing"

Can I get a hell yeah!

The Thing is STILL sick. Practical effects are the way to go.

I like that the modern director Chris Nolan at least attempts to employ as many practical elements as possible with his budgets.

 

[Nektonic]

When an old movie with ancient green computer monitors and a guy in a cheesy Alien suit can still put 90% of modern movies to shame with all their CGI sorcery, you know you have a masterpiece.

The thing is, it isn't a "cheesy" Alien suit. The design and work that Giger did on that film still hasn't been topped in my opinion. Now if it had been a cheesy alien suit, the film would have possibly been a dud.

 

[chriscurl]

Yeah, both Alien and The Thing are just perfection, impossible to improve on.

 

[combatentropy]

Ridley Scott has always been one of the most visually accomplished directors. That may be because by the time he started directing movies, he had already done about 2,000 commercials (http://www.ifc.com/blogs/indie-eye/2010/05/ridley-scott.php)

There may be something to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book))

 

[Sad Max]

One of the major contributing factors to the visual impact of the movie - particularly in the last fifteen minutes or so - is the really brilliant use of forms in the design of the Nostromo and Narcissus interiors: the basic forms of the alien's head and limbs and details like surface finishes and ridging are echoed in the forms and finishes of the corridors that Ripley flees through under strobes and steam, etcetera. The environment itself feels so threatening because you subliminally register the alien everywhere in this disjointed seen-in-flashes panic-stricken flight. And of course it's exploited wonderfully inside the Narcissus where the form of the alien blends unnoticeably into the guts of the shuttle until that hand whips out at Ripley from where the critter has wedged itself between the conduits...

 

[Nektonic]

One of the major contributing factors to the visual impact of the movie - particularly in the last fifteen minutes or so - is the really brilliant use of forms in the design of the Nostromo and Narcissus interiors: the basic forms of the alien's head and limbs and details like surface finishes and ridging are echoed in the forms and finishes of the corridors that Ripley flees through under strobes and steam, etcetera. The environment itself feels so threatening because you subliminally register the alien everywhere in this disjointed seen-in-flashes panic-stricken flight. And of course it's exploited wonderfully inside the Narcissus where the form of the alien blends unnoticeably into the guts of the shuttle until that hand whips out at Ripley from where the critter has wedged itself between the conduits...

That is true. Especially in the Narcissus. I remember watching ALIEN for the first time when I was about 10 or 11. It was on TV so there were commercial breaks, otherwise I don't think I would have made it through without them.

As for the alien blending into the industrial surroundings of the ship, and in the second film, the colony, I feel like Alien 3 and Resurrection lost some of the biomechanoid look of the creature. Surely the practical effects were well done in the second two films, but the actual designs started to get away from Giger's original biomechanical feel. Even the way the alien suits/animatronics were painted in parts 3 and 4 were not as effective as in the first two films.

http://www.dvdvision.fr/jco/AlienWarrior.htm

Basically, besides a few slight modifications, the aliens in ALIENS were the same design as the one in the original film.

 

[Sad Max]

"They're comin' outta the WALLS!"

 

[Chamber005]

That is true. Especially in the Narcissus. I remember watching ALIEN for the first time when I was about 10 or 11. It was on TV so there were commercial breaks, otherwise I don't think I would have made it through without them.

As for the alien blending into the industrial surroundings of the ship, and in the second film, the colony, I feel like Alien 3 and Resurrection lost some of the biomechanoid look of the creature. Surely the practical effects were well done in the second two films, but the actual designs started to get away from Giger's original biomechanical feel. Even the way the alien suits/animatronics were painted in parts 3 and 4 were not as effective as in the first two films.

http://www.dvdvision.fr/jco/AlienWarrior.htm

Basically, besides a few slight modifications, the aliens in ALIENS were the same design as the one in the original film.

Well Alien 3 really screwed the pooch IMO because of the CGI alien. We just were not "there" yet when Alien 3 was brought to the screen. AVP and AVPR hold up much better than does Alien 3, despite A3 being arguably a better film.

In all honesty the only CGI creatures that hold up from the 90s are the T1000 (?) from Judgment Day, the dinos in Jurassic and the water alien from Abyss. I think moving forward things like Lord of the Rings and the in-costume Spiderman will hold up, along with some of the more obtuse monsters seen from afar like the one in Cloverfield, but lots of the visual effects we see now barely hold up (Van Helsing, Clash of the Titans) to today's standards.

To me the only CGI so far (including Avatar) that is near flawless to the naked eye is non-living subjects (robots ala AI and alien ships like Independence Day included), though some crustaceans and lizards come close (Starship Troopers, Pitch Black, Reign of Fire) so long as the creature doesn't have a real life counterpart. Things like Iron Man in his suit can't really be improved upon because we've already arrived. I doubt in our lifetime that we'll see a computer generated living creature on screen that is indistinguishable from the real thing. The reasons dinosaurs and dragons still hold up so well is because we have no real understanding of what dinosaurs look like -- we only have drawings in textbooks.

But as far as we are from making a real life looking CGI cat, we're not even near the galaxy of what it would take to make a real life looking human.

However, if they kept an all CGI Alien with its crustacean-like shell in the shadows I think they could pull off something that would stand up for a few decades.

In the end we won't know for sure until someone covertly puts a CGI dog in a film and the audience isn't informed that the dog is CGI. If the dog has no real bearing on the plot and simply acts as a dog and no one notices, then maybe we will have "arrived".

 

[Sad Max]

In the end we won't know for sure until someone covertly puts a CGI dog in a film and the audience isn't informed that the dog is CGI. If the dog has no real bearing on the plot and simply acts as a dog and no one notices, then maybe we will have "arrived".

You're positive this has not yet already happened?

 

[Finnegan]

Some famous cinematographer (whose name escapes me) once said that the hardest thing to photograph is the human face, and by extension if you could photograph the human face then you could photograph anything. Somewhere in that ideology lies a simple truth about CGI humans that both the film and video game industries are painfully aware of: it is impossible to substitute a CGI human for a real one and get away with it. Since the human face and human expressions are incredibly subtle and nuanced, similarity between the actual and the representation is not enough. It has to be identical. And as long as that little gap exists, CGI people will continue to look weird even to regular cinema-goers. Look at CGI Jeff Bridges in Tron. From a technical standpoint that's probably one of the better examples of good CGI representation, yet no matter how similar to Jeff Bridges it actually looks there's still that one tiny bit of weirdness about it that people can't seem to put their finger on.