The best and worst of Aliens.

[Lexicus]

I read somewhere that the creatures in Signs aren't aliens, but rather they're demons. I feel that makes a lot of sense to me, especially since that movie mainly focused around religious themes.

Signs may just be a series of hallucinations experienced by Mel Gibson's character. Who knows?

 

[MaryKB]

I enjoyed that movie

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Signs scared the crap out of me when I was like 12 and it was amazing. I'm still super fond of the movie and even though the resolution/climax is a bit silly, it's a great, suspenseful movie. I also thought it was very original. M. Knight Shyamalan often falls on his face but at least he brings new things to the table.

 

[Lexicus]

I enjoyed that movie

Well, I wasn't saying it was bad, I'm just saying it's open to interpretation. The aliens as demons is certainly a valid one. Particularly since, if viewed as a straight alien invasion, it makes very little sense. Aliens invading a planet where 71% of the surface is covered with a substance that melts them and all that.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Our atmosphere is very nearly saturated with it at all times as well.

 

[MaryKB]

What I read about the demon theory, is that any old water won't harm them ... it specifically has to be holy water. And Bo's "ritual" with her water glasses was her blessing them, which is what turned them into a weapon against the creatures.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

That's a deep reading

 

[EgonSpengler]

Our atmosphere is very nearly saturated with it at all times as well.

Right, the Newcomers in Alien Nation were burned by seawater, but not fresh water, so rain and morning dew wasn't dangerous to them.

 

[Lexicus]

What I read about the demon theory, is that any old water won't harm them ... it specifically has to be holy water. And Bo's "ritual" with her water glasses was her blessing them, which is what turned them into a weapon against the creatures.

Yeah, I could easily see that, makes total sense.

 

[Socrates99]

Signs scared the crap out of me when I was like 12 and it was amazing. I'm still super fond of the movie and even though the resolution/climax is a bit silly, it's a great, suspenseful movie. I also thought it was very original. M. Knight Shyamalan often falls on his face but at least he brings new things to the table.

He either knocks it out of the park or falls on his face. For all the complaints about him I'll still check out just about anything he does simply because he at least tries to be creative. Not something you can say about most of Hollywood these days.

 

[Lexicus]

The worst movie I've ever seen is M Knight's Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation.

 

[El_Machinae]

Oh! The Fourth Kind! Not 'realistic', but I enjoyed their aliens. Very reminiscent of today's UFOlogy

 

[EgonSpengler]

Another of my favorite aliens. Also one of my favorite car chases and one of my favorite cold opens. Some people say "Dance like nobody's watching." This guy says "Drive like you can't die." Earth is a playground: Fast cars, loud music, free money, disposable inhabitants, food's alright.

Can't seem to find a good version of the whole scene. This one cut it into two vids for some reason. Well, whatever. You get the idea.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I think Dr. Who did many absolutely terrible aliens, but also had some very innovative ones. Twilight Zone sometimes had good concepts for aliens, though the execution tended to lack. Today, it seems to me, most SF writers and most SF movies merely reproduce already known forms, tropes and signs. Taking aside Arrival, which was great in some regards and bad in others, there have been incredibly few actually revolutionary aliens since Soralis, both book and movie. I can honestly hardly pinpoint even one example where the alien isn't some form of anthropomorphized being, or some play on an animals.

Far and few there have been tries to conceptualize other lifeforms as being gaseous, electric, wave-patterns, light, non-corporeal. Instead we get an infinite amount of aliens looking like various insects or reproductions of the grey men from mars, or following some horror aesthetic. Most of their language, customs, and culture, seems to be just a very slightly warped version of ours. Their societies barely work differenty, and in many, many ways, reproduce the basics of capitalism. Testimony to human fantasy

 

[Leifmk]

Greg Egan's got some nicely alien ones. Like in Wang's Carpets where there's an ocean full of macro-scale but exceedingly simple (basically unicellular) lifeforms that are utterly non-intelligent in and of themselves but happen to be functioning as a giant molecular Turing machine performing an immense computation, basically simulating a computational space within which there exists a whole virtual ecology including sentience.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I think Dr. Who did many absolutely terrible aliens, but also had some very innovative ones. Twilight Zone sometimes had good concepts for aliens, though the execution tended to lack. Today, it seems to me, most SF writers and most SF movies merely reproduce already known forms, tropes and signs. Taking aside Arrival, which was great in some regards and bad in others, there have been incredibly few actually revolutionary aliens since Soralis, both book and movie. I can honestly hardly pinpoint even one example where the alien isn't some form of anthropomorphized being, or some play on an animals.

Far and few there have been tries to conceptualize other lifeforms as being gaseous, electric, wave-patterns, light, non-corporeal. Instead we get an infinite amount of aliens looking like various insects or reproductions of the grey men from mars, or following some horror aesthetic. Most of their language, customs, and culture, seems to be just a very slightly warped version of ours. Their societies barely work differenty, and in many, many ways, reproduce the basics of capitalism. Testimony to human fantasy

For a unique alien, Greg Benford has a book called Eater that is hard to top.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not a movie, but at least the Bob Lazar-type aliens (ie Area 51) seem to be 3d or 3dish. Maybe some third world aliens which still are a billion years ahead of humans or something so have their own anti-gravity reactor

Not sure what to make of this Lazar guy and his account. He seems to describe some kind of alien spacecraft which combines some symmetrical (external shape) with mostly amorphous (internal) characteristics. Also the supposed "anti-gravity reactor" has again some 3d external shape (hemispheric) but has no use of electricity or (obvious) magnetic field properties and Lazar claims it worked due to interdependence of material sort of reacting with no known medium or trigger.
What I dislike about all this is that (if true; I am no ufologist at all) it would basically be something in theory future humans could create (assuming some unknown properties/elements/interaction were discovered). So in that sense it isn't very alien.

 

[Commodore]

I also like the aliens in that TV mini-series "V". Not so much their design, but rather the concept that they were conquering us by pretending to be our friends and slowly making us dependent on them rather than trying to subdue us through brute force. It's probably a more realistic way aliens would go about conquering us if they really did want to take the planet from us and weren't just after our resources.

 

[Berzerker]

The Abyss, aliens were cool and their ability to manipulate water

and their ship

 

[Leifmk]

The Abyss, aliens were cool and their ability to manipulate water

and their ship

Well, you're not wrong.