The best and worst of Aliens.

Pretty complex question.
Humans with rubber masks are detestable. A necessary evil when CGI was really expensive, but now there's no excuse for it.
It's acceptable in video games if there are many alien characters and they all have to be able to go through doors or up/down stairs designed for humans.
I like my aliens alien and plausible. Yaphit's species doesn't seem plausible. Should have more differentiated cells and recognizable organs.
Not a fan of evil reptilian or insectoid aliens. Seems a bit cheap to base them on Earth creatures that humans find creepy.
Psychological differences are more interesting if the balance is right. If all members of a species share to the same ethos it's cheesy. If there is too much diversty they're hjust ugly humans.
There should be more Vulcan/Romulan situations in SF. One species with two (or more) very different cultures.

 

There are always alien clown ventriloquists.

 

Maybe aliens simply are part of what is picked up as 'natural laws'. In that case they are unlikely to notice us, as long as we don't try to alter those. So for the time being, in such a case, it is safe to say they will not bother.
Another problem is that what is scary to humans is highly unlikely to be cosmic (ie scare due to inherently being scary). So again the aliens may just be dull.

 

Contact is one of my favorite movies about aliens, even though the aliens themselves are barely a part of it. Still, I think an advanced species that very gingerly and carefully makes contact with Earth is probably realistic.

I haven't seen it in a while, but I think Gareth Edwards' Monsters might be a good double-feature with Arrival.

 

I'll have to give Monsters a watch!

 

I don't remember the movie, but from the trailer it is obvious the aliens use math. Imo this is entirely unrealistic, cause (imo) math is simply not cosmic.
Math may be gaian (gaian dna-tied), though, to some extent. I just doubt it is a system tied to beings not of this planet. For us (and apparently all other creatures here -?), the basis of sensory input are integers. This is unlikely to be so for actual aliens.

 

You won't get to space if you can't count.

 

Well, the transmission the aliens sent was intended to allow humans to construct a device. They'd have to send us the instructions in a form we could understand and use, even if it's not the way they'd do it themselves. And, in fact, the aliens didn't send their message in a perfectly understandable form.

Are spoiler tags for a 22-year-old movie going overboard? Probably.

Spoiler :

The movie relies first on William Fitchner's blind character hearing the separate signals, and then on John Hurt's iconoclastic weirdo-genius to think to look at the diagram as a cube instead of as a flat sheet of paper.

Hurt has my favorite line in that movie: After the ship is sabotaged and Tom Skerrit's character is killed, Hurt's character shows Jodie Foster the second device he'd had built in secret. Hurt leans into the camera and says, "Wanna take a ride..?" like some dirty old man propositioning the young object of his desire. He practically licks the camera lens. Naturally, in the context, the young woman's eyes light up as if to say, "Yer goddamn right I do!"

 

My post was more like "it isn't a space if you can't count"

 

Not my favourite movie adaptation, although I am a great fan of Lem's works.

I also love Lem's idea (and a theme in some of his works) that it is very unlikely that humanity could recognise intelligent alien "species" as such because they could have such completely different physical forms, and incomprehensible modes of behaviour/existence.
For example, if the Red Spot on Jupiter was some form of alien life, why would we even suspect that to be the case, unless there were some obvious physical manifestations, or if it decided to communicate with us at our level?

 

Nobody's mentioned Farscape. For an early 2000s show without huge production value it had some decent concepts especially the living ship with a symbiote pilot.

 

I kept meaning to post about Farscape but kept forgetting to!
But yeah, the quality of Farscape's aliens -courtesy of the Jim Henson Creature Workshop- was outstanding. Prosthetics, animatronics, and puppetry was quality across the board with some very imaginative designs. The puppetry work for Rygel and Pilot were quite good. Unfortunately, the visual quality of the designs took a dive in the last season with the show relying pretty heavily on rubber bump head aliens.

 

I'm not sure if it counts but I think the mid-level 6 cutscene in Halo: Combat Evolved introducing the Flood is a classic and awesome alien-related media.

I'm also fond of both Independence Day and Signs even though I think they're pretty terrible films.

Also who could forget this banger

 

"Wanna see a magic trick? I'll make all the white people disappear."

The movie is Brother from Another Planet (1984) and the subway train is about to cross into Harlem. I've always thought the weird hunters that were chasing River in Firefly - "Two by two; hands of blue" - were an homage to Brother from Another Planet.

 

genocide is funny

 

Yeah, because obviously he was talking about killing all white people and not the fact that in 1984 there weren't a lot of white people to be found in Harlem
Seriously, every time I think you've made the stupidest possible comment...

 

that is funny

 

Hmmmn, well the Star Trek 'Borg remind me of the Tyranids from 40k. All-consuming, but motivated to learn while it was consuming. It's a cute bit of a selection process that ends up (potentially) being maladaptive.

The aliens in Arrival were 'okay', even if the movie itself is jaw-droppingly amazing. Their premise required a suspension of disbelief, so that's why I can't give them 10 stars to fit the movie's eleven stars.

One of my hidden favorite movies is Skyline, except for the last ten minutes. I liked those aliens. Completely impersonal, here only to harvest a resource.

 

I think the worst depiction are the alien cow-thieves and other torture-porn scientifically inclined gray aliens.

Actually wait, the "Pleiadians" are even more braindead. Basically He-Man.