That is the big problem you face when doing such things in-house. While the movie Kilrathi design itself wasn't totally horrible, the implementation and execution of their role in the movie left a lot to be desired. The shot setups and editing didn't do the movie Kilrathi any favors either. You could have replaced the scenes with the Kilrathi in it with cardboard cutouts and I don't think there would have been a different.
That's not a knock on the creature design, that's a knock on story boarding and actual scene shooting. They fell over soda cans, walked like rubber-suited ST:TOS aliens, and were always lit dismally for any cut that allow time to scrutinize. They had no glory shot in the movie to redeem themselves. The Kilrathi were ultimately given a second rate "WW2 Axis Power Badguy" role that gave them total superiority for the first quarter of the movie and then replaced them with inept "Hogan's Heroes" prison guard ability. You could have replaced the Kilrathi with Indiana Jones Nazi charactacures and gotten the same effect.
I can't attribute the failure of the Kilrathi's role in the movie to simply their design as puppets and full-suits. It was a compound failure on multiple levels to include Chris Roberts' direction of the scenes.
Also Mace, the point I was trying to get at was non-CGI special effects stand up better to scrutiny than CGI ones if the intent is to create actors in a real-world environment, as opposed to simply creating something fantasicial for the spectacle.
I kind of irks me when people complain about the direction for numerous reasons. I have a hard time pinpointing much of anything that you can specifically say was a problem in directing during principle photography, and most of the actors at the time praised him for his vision etc etc. Even then, some things, when the budget is limited you just don't have time or the money for the days of shooting or the film stock to go back and refilm. However, the cinematography is probably one of the strong points of the movie. Much of the flow was destroyed in the edit though. While some directors like to DP their own movies or pretty much dictate to the DP to the point where the DP might as well just be a camera operator, that isn't necessarily the film director's job. THe director tells the DP or cinematographer what he's looking for and it's usually up to them to place the camera's and decide on the lighting.
A lot of the problems with the WC movie were in the editing room though. Sure the kilrathi suits didn't work right and some of the acting was subpar. But where it concerns the kilrathi, some of the limitations were in the size of the sets (which were probably too cramped) and that we don't actually see much of what was shot *at all*. What we do see of the Kilrathi concom raid was cobled together from a much longer attack. Most of the shots we do see weren't even next to eachother originally. Blair wasn't even in the boarding party. He was the diligent's turret gunner and leaves his post part way into the raid to hunt down the phantom pilgrim signal... This stuff was shot. I've seen it.
We also lost a number of establishing shots in some of the other kilrathi conversations in the various other scenes. Instead, so that we don't really get to see them much at all, we pretty much only get to see a bunch of closeups.
A discussion for another thread is the havok the editing did to a number of other scenes in the movie... Maniac's acting is actually a lot stronger... if you can believe that... in the work print possibly from editing but also because of ADR.
The other issue was money. They basically ran out of money in post. The lip stuff LOAF mentioned was all they could afford, otherwise they probably would have done even more CG work to them then.
Someone mentioned Hellboy2 though which I believe is a combination of minatures, prosthetics, and CGI... This CGIing over the movie kilrathi is certainly doable and a way to make them more convincing should Chris Roberts ever get the money to go back and reedit the movie to make it the film he originally set out to make (which he wants to do by the way).