20 Things You Didn't Know About Aliens
13. There Were No Special Effects Used For The Queen
Aliens was a ground-breaking film for its practical visual effects.
This is perhaps best represented by the iconic Queen vs Ripley fight at the films climax. This fight was shot with little to no computer aided trickery. Essentiaslly, the Queen Alien was a glorified puppet.
The Queen was created with binbags, operated by a crew and hoisted on a crane. The action regularly flitted between full scale and 3 foot tall models, which would have been horrendously difficult to shoot, in order to maintain the scale of the fight.
It's worth noting that in future installments, the Queen was heavily CGI'id, and didn't look half as good as it did twenty years prior.