It also helps that Neill Blomkamp is a great visual director. Even his other films that weren’t well received as well as his short films with Oat Studios have fantastic visuals. Meanwhile, big studio blockbusters spend many times more and the CGI is terrible.
So many “what could have been” moments with Blomkamp. He was going to make the Halo movie, Alien 5 that would've been a direct sequel to Aliens, and he was also going to reboot Robocop.