Is that an..alien?

[RobertScorpio]

Every once in a while a scifi movie will come along, and have aliens that leave you scratching your heads. The ‘aliens’ just look..well..strange. For example; I was watching the Fifth Element on Bluray last night (print is great). And those strange looking aliens at the start of the movie? You know; the ones that look like walking Goodyear tires. Now THOSE were some strange looking aliens. Then again; the movie was made by a Frenchman I think, so what do you expect?

What are some of your favorite not so 'by-the-book' movie aliens?

Rob

 

[QuasarVM]

Yeah, those crazy French...

That's what eating too much escargot does to you....

 

[Harvey]

Most of the aliens in Farscape would qualify. When it comes to the cinema, I'd nominate the creature from John Carpenter's version of The Thing.

 

[RobertScorpio]

Most of the aliens in Farscape would qualify. When it comes to the cinema, I'd nominate the creature from John Carpenter's version of The Thing.

ooooo..yeah. Thats a good one. And good point about FARSCAPE.

And on the flipside? What kept me from watching BAB-5 for so many years (though I did and loved it eventually) was Londo. He looked like Nepolian/Liberace combination. If they ever redo BAB-5? Centurians need a make over like the TOS klingons..

Rob

 

[Admiral_Young]

The thread title would be a great title for a game show! Welcome to Intergalactic Network's number one highest rated game show for five cycles running....IS THAT AN...Alien?!!!!! I'm your host Tybec Shell!!! I can't say that I've ever had the experience of asking this question. I'll have to think about this for a while.

 

[Mistral]

Fifth Element had some wacked aliens. So, too, Farscape. Most tend to be humano-centric for purposes of viewer relatability. Or they look weird just for the sake of looking weird.

 

[Trekker4747]

ST:TOS where all of the aliens look exactly like humans?

 

[Christopher]

Every once in a while a scifi movie will come along, and have aliens that leave you scratching your heads. The ‘aliens’ just look..well..strange.

Aliens should look strange. The strangest thing of all would be if an alien species looked even remotely like a human being. It's rare for aliens in film and TV to look anywhere near strange enough.

 

[Greg Cox]

ST:TOS where all of the aliens look exactly like humans?

Except, to be fair, for the Gorns, the Horta, the Medusans, the Tholians, etc.

 

[Mistral]

Every once in a while a scifi movie will come along, and have aliens that leave you scratching your heads. The ‘aliens’ just look..well..strange.

Aliens should look strange. The strangest thing of all would be if an alien species looked even remotely like a human being. It's rare for aliens in film and TV to look anywhere near strange enough.

A very valid point. Even assuming Earth-like conditions, anything evolving on another world is subject to millions of years of evolutionary impetus unique to that planet. If the planet was .99G of Earth it could be enough to create creatures we would find disorientingly different. And that's one small environmental difference. What happens when you increase the copper levels in the soil, or the amount of methane in the atmosphere? If we were ever to encounter ONE creature that had more than a passing resemblance to humans I would be quite shocked.

 

[Daneel]

Every once in a while a scifi movie will come along, and have aliens that leave you scratching your heads. The ‘aliens’ just look..well..strange.

Aliens should look strange. The strangest thing of all would be if an alien species looked even remotely like a human being. It's rare for aliens in film and TV to look anywhere near strange enough.

I tend to agree... which I suppose makes my love of Trek kind of odd, but there you go.

Actually, I understand that Trek and other shows/films use human-looking aliens for budgetary and dramatic reasons, and since it's fiction that makes no pretense of being completely scientifically accurate, I can let it slide. But I do love seeing truly alien-looking extraterrestrials on-screen -- such creatures can allow filmmakers (like the aforementioned Luc Besson) to get extremely creative visually, and if it's done well, it can really stimulate the audience's imagination and sense of wonder.

 

[Trekker4747]

ST:TOS where all of the aliens look exactly like humans?

Except, to be fair, for the Gorns, the Horta, the Medusans, the Tholians, etc.

Well, yeah, but most of the "regular" "Aliens of the Week" were just humans.

 

[Brent]

Trek is irrelevant, cause it was explained in TNG that the worlds were seeded with human like life per "The Chase", therefore, artificial tampering.. same for Stargate in the Milky Way galaxy, tampering via seeding life in the galaxy

You wanna see some weird aliens, Doctor Who

 

[Myasishchev]

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that aliens would be significantly different than humans, if they came from roughly the same type of environment.

 

[Anwar]

Trek is irrelevant, cause it was explained in TNG that the worlds were seeded with human like life per "The Chase", therefore, artificial tampering.. same for Stargate in the Milky Way galaxy, tampering via seeding life in the galaxy

You wanna see some weird aliens, Doctor Who

Doctor Who is somewhat guilty of having the Timelords and other aliens look just like humans as well. But I think there is some fanon about how Rassilon altered the Galaxy to be like that with most aliens.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that aliens would be significantly different than humans, if they came from roughly the same type of environment.

But we didn't evolve in a single environment. Our form is the result of thousands of different evolutionary steps taken in many different environments over the ages. For instance, our basic body type evolved as an adaptation of the quadrupedal mammalian form to an arboreal existence; our ancestors developed grasping digits and a vertical body plan to swing from tree branches. And the fact that Earthly life is quadrupedal in the first place was decided nearly half a billion years ago with the first lungfish that developed its fins into limbs -- a lungfish that happened to have two pairs of fins instead of one or three or four. A lot of evolution is as much due to random chance as environmental selection. Mutation produces various random traits, and those which happen to be useful in a given environment get kept and refined. Two independently evolved life forms in the same environment would likely have different random traits that got adapted to serve the same purpose. For example, flying squirrels glide between trees by using membranes of skin stretched between their arms, legs, and tail; but gliding lizards' membranes are attached to extensions of their rib cages. Two totally different anatomical origins for the same environmental adaptation, giving two very distinct results.

So even if an alien species did exist in the same basic environment that humans evolved for, it would still have a history of countless random mutations being selected for in countless different progenitor species living in countless different environments. The odds that all those thousands and thousands of different evolutionary outcomes would've happened the same way in two unrelated species even on the same planet, let alone two different planets, are infinitesimal. If you went to a parallel Earth that had started out at the same origin of life and been through all the same astronomical and climatological events, evolution would still have produced a radically alien biosphere because the random traits that gave evolution its working material would've been different.

 

[Davros]

ST:TOS where all of the aliens look exactly like humans?

Except, to be fair, for the Gorns, the Horta, the Medusans, the Tholians, etc.

Well, yeah, but most of the "regular" "Aliens of the Week" were just humans.

with bumpy noses or foreheads

 

[Goji]

The alien mollusk "hero" in the dreadful film "Kraa! The Sea Monster" is pretty weird. Even weirder is that it has an incredibly stereotypical Italian accent. But I wouldn't recommend sitting through the movie to see it. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I've seen it, even though I saw it when I was 11 and would watch anything with a giant monster in it.

 

[Checkmate]

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that aliens would be significantly different than humans, if they came from roughly the same type of environment.

Then I guess most of the life on Earth should look just like us.

Oh, wait.

 

[Skywalker]

Another common sci-fi cliche is an alien that doesn't look like a human, but it looks like it could be related to another animal that evolved on Earth, like the feline Kilrathi in Wing Commander.