Non-humanoid original aliens

[Aardvark]

The most original aliens I've seen in a while were the Elcor. Those guys were awesome. They should have had more of them. If they could have made those stupid elevators a little bigger, you could probably have one as an NPC. Imagine it, Shepard hiding behind a barrier with his/her little blue alien strumpet, pinned down by Krogan, saved suddenly by Manfred, the Elcor short-order chef, who bounds in from the side, his incredibly dense muscle mass allowing his limbs to smash through the Krogan armour, while he uses a back-mounted, brain-operated mass driver cannon to take out those pesky Geth snipers.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum, after all, you have to get the components from *somewhere*.

I defy anyone to come up with an idea for an alien that can't be described based on anything on Earth. (And I mean anything--it has to be completely foreign to any and all human experience.)

Can't do it, can you? There you go.

Moties.

They're the aliens in the novel The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Pournelle. The aliens are asymmetrical and caste-based cyclical hermaphrodites, and their psychology is weird. They have two dextrous arms on one side, and one extremely strong arm on the other; they're bipedal but their leg structure is completely different from terrestrial species; they don't have spines, but rather a big rigid central bone (like a thicker femur) that fits into a socket joint where a humanoid would have hips.

You can't venture too far from "guys in suits" in movies and TV, but in novels the mind's the limit.

-- Steve

PS: and then there's the Cheela, from Forward's Dragon's Egg, nearly-microscopic creatures made of collapsed matter living on the surface of a neutron star...

 

[JMeganSnow]

They're the aliens in the novel The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Pournelle. The aliens are asymmetrical and caste-based cyclical hermaphrodites, and their psychology is weird. They have two dextrous arms on one side, and one extremely strong arm on the other; they're bipedal but their leg structure is completely different from terrestrial species; they don't have spines, but rather a big rigid central bone (like a thicker femur) that fits into a socket joint where a humanoid would have hips.

I'm hearing "arms, legs, this instead of a spine". Still using elements found on Earth. Yeah, the whole package isn't found on Earth, but you could say the same thing about a dragon or an aurumvorax.

Art is fundamentally about people, anyway, so the only reason to have aliens or elves is for comparison/contrast and some of the Issues that come up. It doesn't really matter just *how* they're different.

 

[Good morning blues]

If you want outlandish things, read some Lovecraft. In the first story I read, At the Mountains of Madness, the first alien creatures the cast comes across are so alien and bizarre that the characters don't know whether to classify it as a plant or an animal.

There's also the Star Child from 2001... not really an alien in the movie, but more so in the book.

Anyhow, the reason that aliens are always basically humanoid in movies is partly because it's really difficult to come up with believable alien designs, partly because CGI has only been avaliable for a few years, and partly because no matter how good your CGI is it's still several orders of magnitude more expensive than costumes and makeup.

 

[ThaBenMan]

The most original alien thing I've seen in a while was the Elcor. Those guys were awesome. They should have had more of them. If they could have made those stupid elevators a little bigger, you could probably have one as an NPC. Imagine it, Shepard hiding behind a barrier with his/her little blue alien strumpet, pinned down by Krogan, saved suddenly by Manfred, the Elcor short-order chef, who bounds in from the side, his incredibly dense muscle mass allowing his limbs to smash through the Krogan armour, while he uses a back-mounted, brain-operated mass driver cannon to take out those pesky Geth snipers.

O_O Must. Be. In. Mass. Effect. 2.

 

[Spacelord]

I really liked those tentacly fish-like bastards from The Faculty. Did look awful lot like shrimp, though - which is why I've become wary of shrimp, as of late.

Anyway, this is sounding suspiciously like a Spore creature editor contest in the works!

 

[Spacelord]

Also, what about those things from Pitch Black? Those were pretty creative.

 

[PatientGrasshopper]

The new Dr. Who has some pretty good ones. Some things that are beings of light. The Vorlons and the Shados from Babylon 5. Tribbles from Star Trek, or Changelings from Star Trek.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

The new Dr. Who has some pretty good ones. Some things that are beings of light. The Vorlons and the Shados from Babylon 5. Tribbles from Star Trek, or Changelings from Star Trek.

*cough* Vashta Nerada *cough*

 

[KaZZaP]

I'm not really 100% but I'd be willing to bet that theres some non humanoid in Hellboy 2 somewhere, and as for the CGI vs older methods I plan (hope) to get into the movie making buisness and pay attention to things like that in movies and the best SFX master is the director of hellboy 2 Del Toro and he (aswell and I) despise CGI characters. Nothing is worse then some crappy actor looking 10 inches away from where the character allways is and CGI just looks fake. The best way to do it is costume, make-up, puppets assisted by CGI to add some tenticles or w/e. Like the Faun in Pans Labrynth was allmost all real, the only thing CGI on him was his legs and it makes for a much more real and belive able character.

 

[Drednought1]

i cant remember what movie it was in but i remember an alien taking a vaguely floral form, kinda like a Venus-fly trap.

 

[Eipok Kruden]

The aliens from Crysis were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I think they're pretty
original.

EDIT: Oh, and the daleks, can't forget them. I know they've been mentioned tons of times already, but I'm mentioning them again.

 

[Aardvark]

The aliens from Crysis were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I think they're pretty original.

They were just ordinary humans in alien masks. Your PC just isn't powerful enough to render them properly.

/me runs

 

[SunoffaBeach]

2001: A Space Odyssey

Solaris (Stanislaw Lem: "As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.")

 

[internutt]

Animorphs had a lot of non-humanoid aliens, the yeerk slugs, the giant Taxxon Centipedes, the blue centaur Andalites. The problem with these sort of creatures is making them cheaply and believably. We can't really have a sci-fi series with Power Ranger Monsters after all.

 

[Laughing Man]

Pilot and Moya from Farscape

 

[Jamash]

The Transformers are actually aliens too, even though we more commonly recognise & class them as robots.

I like that idea of an aliens life force which inhabits an artificial body, not actually artificial intelligence but an 'real' alien intelligence in a non-biological form.

The 'aliens' in 'Maximum Overdrive' are like that, I think. Malevolent intelligence from a comet which enters machines & attacks mankind.

 

[HydraZulu]

Personally, my view on the subject is that humans in general have such a specific and narrow-sighted view of "life" that aliens could be 6 inches in front of their faces, and there's a 99.999...% chance that they won't notice. We may be imaginative little creatures, but we still can't think of anything beyond our own experiences and knowledge, because even if it were mentally possible, our minds would have no way of comprehending it, translating it into a form that we could understand, or describing it. Even if we did meet an alien, there is only a small chance (again, 99.999[infinite]%) that it will be such a unique and "alien" (heh) design that we wouldn't even have the vocabulary to describe it to other people.

I've got more to say, but it'll wait until after dinner.

 

[ianuam]

The reason they create aliens that are reasonably similar to humans (i.e bipedal, arms and face) is that they wish the audience to have some form of identification with that alien. If you took the abstract approach within a tv show or film when it comes to alien design, then not only is it harder to create model wise but you also have to work harder to get the audience involved with greater focus on the humans.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Art is fundamentally about people, anyway, so the only reason to have aliens or elves is for comparison/contrast and some of the Issues that come up. It doesn't really matter just *how* they're different.

You neglected my example of the Cheela... who don't even live via chemistry, as their biological processes are based on nuclear physics. Each is an eight of an inch long and weighs a quarter ton, and they live so quickly that you might start a conversation with one Cheela but end it with his(?) grandchild.

-- Steve