Seeing this in the theater on opening night, the alien often seemed pasted onto the images, like bad sixties blue screen. It was jolting because the suit aliens in the previous two movies looked present in the same space as the characters. Fincher never got a script he liked, so we'll never see his vision. Yet I like the assembly cut more than I do many technically-slick SF movies, because there's something dark and unique inside it.

The thing about _Alien 3_ is I think the practical and make-up effects hold up pretty well. Whereas the special/visual effects have aged poorly and that's sad considering they went old school with them. And it irks me when people still foolishly believe the wide shots of the Alien running on all fours are CG. But if they watched the fucking special features, they'd know it was a rod puppet they shot in front of a blue screen that ended up looking bad due to rushed schedules, mismatched frame rates, mismatched lighting, and poor compositing.

They named their animation style 'Mo-Motion,' but the first use of this technique was 'Go-Motion' in the film, Dragon Slayer' 1981. A real achievement.

I’m wondering if digital compositing (in its early form) was available yet. That probably could finessed the rod puppet xenomorph into the background photography. I mean what we got (to me) was already pretty cool and ambitious.

Is this its own featurette or part of the Making of Aliens 3?

Alien 3 was a miss. VFX wise I give it a pass because they didn't have the budget to put more time into the visuals. The compositing was rather obvious even for untrained eyes. Story wise it was very weak. It could easily be taken out of the franchise and not be missed.