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It amazes me how that scene today still looks realistic.

It reminds me of Alien 1's ship interior built with spare parts of vacuum cleaners I think, it just brought so much more details that you couldn't get from CGI for at least 20 years.

I miss these old scifi movies where the special effects were crafted by hand. They had a real feel, that I still don't get from 'so clean yet dirtied' CGI.

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As someone pointed out over at MetaFilter, a big part of the realism of that scene is thanks to a solid understanding of how cameras, lighting, and film work and interact, rather than super-detailed modelling. Trumbull is a photographic effects wizard, but he also had 80 years of earlier work to build on. I'm not sure we're quite there yet when it comes to CGI.

I was toying with an idea recently to build a CNC cutter for styrofoam, and paint them by hand. For miniature based FX shots. I built a 3-axis CNC recently with a friend to carve wood and plastics (for a hobby), I don't think a wire cutter would be much more difficult, but wire lathes would provide a challenge.

Also, camera rigs for miniature work and lighting rigs for those are kind of an art that is on a verge of extinction. Which is king of a shame, because I still think miniature work looks better than CG in most cases. Because CG, in almost every shot I've seen, looks like a miniature world.

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