I recently watched Cowboys & Aliens and the aliens were terrible looking. Big hulking beasts, yet at the same time could command a spaceship... won't get into the movie but the design was uninspired and lame. As were the aliens in Cloverfield and Super 8. District 9 was a little better but still not that great.

What's the deal?

Mmm, the whole "insectoid thing with body parts that open up on each other with random teeth inside" is pretty overdone, isn't it? Alien/predator great movies but a lot to answer for!

Battle Los Angeles has some cool bio-mechanical aliens.

Shut up. I liked that movie.

cgi.

I liked that movie and how the aliens behaved. However the concept of the aliens was far better than their execution. They looked like stick figures with footballs for heads.

I much prefered the look of the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens.

Modern videogame design has made the audiences that Hollywood goes after (the under-25 crowd) expect only a few standard alien templates in their entertainment. It's all Halo's and Resistance's fault.

I believe it's the same concept artist that works on the Abrams projects (Cloverfield, Star Trek, Super 8) so that would account for the similarities there. Not sure who worked on Cowboys v Aliens. Personally I like the style, to me it's interesting and worked for those projects. But going forward, I think something different would be better, rather than repeating the same design too much.

because stan winston is dead

good answer.

I definitely blame whoever Abrams is using. Cloverfield, Super 8, and Star Trek all had these terrible, ill-formed aliens where you couldn't make out what part of it you were meant to be looking at.

yeah, they used to be wayyy better

The best alien design...

...and the cheapest, too!

I dug Cloverfield's design as seen in the film, once you pulled it away and looked at the model it didn't look so great. But in those far away shots with rockets and tanks it looked pretty epic. As much as I like the design of Predators and Aliens, they can be shitty if filmed poorly (like in the Aliens vs. Predator movies). Design is only one part of the puzzle.

ahhh, the golden age

What does a picture of Christina Hendricks husband have to do with this thread?

This is what I was going to say. I read an interview with that guy once where he talked about how he tries to make all of his creatures "unique", and all I could think was "are you fucking kidding me?". Super 8 needed an alien design that would blow everyone out of the water. Instead, we got the smaller cousin of Cloverfield.

I really liked the District 9 prawns. I like it when aliens look humanoid none of this Transformers robot shit.

I'll see your Alf and give you...Mork!

Oh, wait...you're talking movie aliens. Here you go:


For every really cool alien, there's things like this. Some have more imagination than others, I guess.

For the low budget I think it looks pretty well. It's when these movies spend upwards of $150 million I expect to be blown away.

For the record, my favorites are the Xenomorph in Alien and E.T. The original Star Wars aliens are also some of my favorites.

I agree with the statement regarding Stan Winston being dead. Also, H.R. Giger is not consulted anywhere near the amount he should be for creature design.

Everything old is awesome and everything new is stupid.

See I would argue that Giger is consulted - or rather, ripped off -- too much! While his original designs were fantastic, too many movies these days take the template used in Alien and just offer half-assed copies of it.

Yep, that's the argument we've been making in this thread.