That was my opinion. I never said the special effects sucked ass. For the most part, they were extremely well done for it's time period, which is why the cheesy alien threw me for a loop. It was so obviously a guy in a suit that I half expected it to look down and check it's wrist watch. Not once did it ever scare me, and it ruined the atmosphere of the entire film.
In case you didn't know, the aliens in the sequel were men in suits as well, but at least they acted the part.
You meaned FX sucked ass by your sentence:….
" the alien was so obviously a guy in a suit (and a pretty poor excuse for a suit at that) that it was rediculous. It's hard to be scared by an alien when the mere sight of it makes you burst into laughter."
IIRC Aliens was made with animatronics and was granted last FX technologies that didn’t existed by the time, in 1979!
Don't give me that **** about how special effects don't matter. If the alien's costume was made out of tin foil and magic marker, would you still hail the movie as a classic? Hell no!
HELL YES!
One of the best SF/fantasy serie I ever saw in televison had no FX at all. All was based on imagination of the spectator. It was based on Hindu’s legends (the Mahabharata sp?) and all actors (from all around the world, blacks, Caucasians,…) played this epic in just simple clothes, nothing else. These were actors from shaeksperian theatre and their acting alone was sufficient to entertain without flashy effects. It is a classic amongst fantasy movies/series fans.
For something more known, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the first) didn’t have so much FX and in the Night of the Living Deads, it was pure crap BUT they are CLASSICS!
Special effects are just as important as anything else in a movie or game. Pretending otherwise just makes you sound like an elitist *******.
Then I’m proud to be an elitist *******. I’m a big SF/Fantasy fan since my mother showed me her classics when I was 5 or 6 years old. Old movies with Vincent Price or Boris Karlov. I frequent for more than 10 years the Brussels International Festival of SF& fantasy Film (www.bifff.org) and it happen I’m member of the jury of the public for 2 years now, seeing 60 movies in 2 weeks, most of them will never been screened in theatres for the sole reason of their small budget or because there isn’t some nice FX in there. And I’m upset because some of these movies worth 10.000 times any Schwarzie “let me show my gun and my explosions” movie!
By the way, if all anyone cares about nowadays is flashy special effects, then explain why movies like Wing Commander, Pitch Black, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within bombed in the theaters.
WC, only saw pictures of it and wasn’t impressed at all by the FX in there. FF, not my kind.
PB had only the intro impressive in terms of FX (the crash scene).
Anyway those first 2 movies only concerned a limited public (console gamers) and PB made some success here.
And don't try to categorize me. You know next to nothing about me
You are a 20 year old PS2 pimp, so-called moderator but who insult people by calling them elitist assholes!
Yes, I own the entire set on DVD. From what you've written, it sounds like you're the one who hasn't seen it.
Fine you own the DVD, so what ? You weren’t able to spell a word when I saw this movie the first time.
The only time that they ever seperated the cargo from the hauler vessel was when they went down to LV-426 to inspect the distress signal, and that was simply because they couldn't land the ship while carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of ore behind them. Just so you know, I'll give you a rundown of the entire film...
Yeah, I know, I was tired yesterday and confused the rescue ship where Ripley escaped with the other one.
"OH NO! A crew member was attacked by some kind of alien organism while investigating that derelict alien spacecraft and now it's attached itself to his face... oh, but now it fell off. It's all good.
They had a protocol over “diseases”. They decided not to respect it by friendship and it was a big turmoil in the team to achieve that! It fell off, ok, so what ? They weren’t marines or big scientifics, they were WORKERS! (Space trucks pilots if you prefer).
OH NO! Now some sort of alien creature burst out of his chest and is loose aboard the ship! Let's go search the poorly lit corridors for it! YES! We've got it cornered! WHOOPS! It was just a cat. Let's send someone out to get the cat so we don't pick it up again on our mysterious motion trackers. OH NO! The alien killed him!
...
Oh yes, I forget it is absolute NORMAL for a creature to grow like that in such a few time… In case you didn’t get it, they didn’t find the MANUAL and therefore, they didn’t RTFM about this alien weapon! They saw a tiny creature, they expected to chase a TINY creature!
After that, what did you expected ? They were JUST PILOTS, not marines! How will you react if you didn’t know anything about such creature ? Yes they panicked, you won’t be panicking if you saw your chest’s friend blowing and a creature that growed too fast according to normal/earth standards ? I don’t remember them needing coolant for the escape pod (I should see this movie again to refresh my memory). I remember however that the self-destruction of the ship wasn’t an easy task (quite normal for me) and that they were betrayed by the android because they were just sheep to test this alien weapon and to see how it worked. They should have blown it in space since the beginning ? Tell me how Einstein. In case you didn’t notice, the alien run fast and can hide in many places before you can guess where it is. Not telling you should have a combat squad to do so…
Like I said, most deaths resulted not from any alien creature, but from the crew's own idiocy. The movie was pure cheese, plain and simple.
The idiocy is yours. You are telling the story like the team should know in advance what was going on and how easy it is to kill an alien when you are unarmed and untrained. (That is one of the reason I didn’t like too much the second one, it was too easy to kill aliens…)