My favorite alien organism in Predator Badlands was the brachiating carnivore with trilateral symmetry. That was neat.
I also like the novel communal (?) branch like thing that would strike like an army of snakes. Cool.
There was a grazer with a weird set of mouthparts that I didn’t get a good look at, unfortunately, but it had to be good because they were adapted to feed on razor-sharp fields of leaves. Show more next time.
I was mildly disappointed with the main big bad monster, which was just kind of ape-like, and had unrealistic powers of regeneration. I want to see the energetic breakdown of the metabolic costs of rebuilding whole body parts in seconds — that’s pure fantasy. Not going to happen.
Also, and this was a problem with the Avatar movies, too, if you’re going to get creative with strange background animals, do think in evolutionary terms. There should be some shared continuity of structure in various clades, not just random odd beasties with no visible relationships between them.
I was deeply disappointed with the main “alien,” the Yautja, who was just a man — a perfectly ordinary, familiar human being — wearing a mask with funny flexible fangs on it. Pathetic. Unbelievable. Cheap and cheesy. Drop that transparently fake alien from future episodes (you know they’re going to keep making these “predator” movies, and the weakest prop in the whole franchise is the predator.)
I’m also a bit tired of the “warrior alien” trope. Advanced alien cultures are going to be more diverse and complex than the “everyone fights for honor” nonsense that’s affected the genre since at least the Klingons, and it’s boring and makes those aliens into one dimensional characters. Stop it.
I guess there was a plot that I didn’t pay much attention to — it was something about big fights with an evil corporation trying to exploit alien monsters, don’t care, been there, done that. Elle Fanning stood out as a good actor who was playing two synthetic humanoids, but I never understood why, if you have mastery of building artificial organisms with intelligence that you’d put them in a limited human form. Get funky with it next time, and let the synth engineers imagination run wild. If I could do that, you know I’d have giant spider-squid hybrids with vaguely human minds running rampant over the cosmos.
Have you ever thought about or / and attempted to write your own SF novels or screenplays PZ?
Would be fascinating to see what you come up with and how you go with that – quite seriously, no sarc.
Guessing that you probly don’t have the time or inclination for it but still..
Of course, SF is often more about metaphorically examining and extrapolating from (& messaging / conveying truths about) the now rather than seriously attempting to predict the future than actually trying to be scientifically accurate as the main priority, again, still.
PS. Could convergent evotution do one helluva lotta of heavy lifting here?
Certainly basic morphologies and features do have obvs advantages and do tend to naurally recur, eg sharks, icythosaurs, dolphins.. & everything evolves into crabs eventually so I gather and ant eating critters – echidnas*, pangolins, um, anteaters, have similar features..
Exhibit A , Caecilians, worms, legless lizards, snakes, eels and nematodes.. the fossorial – & sometimes marine and sometimes terrestrial depending upon species lifestyle..
Physics sets limitations the best solutions to which are often at least similar and thus more likely to evolve as best suits..
.* Then there’s the co-incidental (?) similarity of the hegehog and the echidna…
Meh, the only good Predator was the one from 1987, but I’m biased because I met that one’s voice. (Fun fact: He also voiced Eeyore and Optimus Prime.) He explains how he came up with the vocals here and it is a great video:
https://youtu.be/gpjhI-eRE6c?si=LOZQwcpRn4zsdtQA
That man is the reason I could sit through Predator. I couldn’t handle the big “face reveal” until I found out he was the voice. Now that’s my favorite scene of any movie ever because of this!
I have to remark that in principle, rapid regeneration could be physically possible if there are some enormous energy reserves somewhere that can be mobilised in no time. The energetic breakdown could perhaps be something like a sudden shrinking of blood vessels.
I’m still waiting for Puppeteers.
@5 Chigau;
OMG! A Ringworld movie! Here, take my money!
Or, you know, science fiction. The creature was, perhaps, technologically enhanced.
BTW, do you ever enjoy any of these mainstream, big-budget, action/superhero flicks anymore?
Get funky with it next time, and let the synth engineers imagination run wild. If I could do that, you know I’d have giant spider-squid hybrids with vaguely human minds running rampant over the cosmos.
And kill enemies with webs and squid-ink? Please. I’d just send out a species of wolf-centaur hybrid, with opposable thumbs on all six hands/feet, plus a prehensile tail that can hold their weight and assist in climbing. They’d have a thick coat of fur to protect them in at least some harsher atmospheres (and also against bites and sings form large bugs like yours, NEENER). And wolves are pack-animals, so they’d be far better at unit-cohesion and chain-of-command than either spiders or squid. Also, wolf-centaurs look WAY cooler than big spider/squid thingies, which would help to win the hearts and minds of whichever population I need to liberate or conquer.
@Raging Bee #8:
…or eat.
“just a man — a perfectly ordinary, familiar human being” – but that’s what the monsters are these days…
I’m going to repeat my recommendation of Karin Traviss’s wess’kar series (first book, Series of Pearl), which has great aliens that are different from us both physically and ethically.
*City of Pearl not Series of Pearl. Darn!
I to find the “aliens” just a bit unrealistic much more magical dream fantasy creations for men in rubber suits closer to the ancient mythologies then real living breathing creatures, always stuffed with magic powers, monsters of the Id, Gods and Angels
Two words: oculus monster.
These days you’d think animating peculiar beasts would be much easier. Maybe use motion-capture but don’t tie it to a usual human body, but to an exotic. Or maybe make a “piano” where every motion of your fingers (in a capture-glove) would tie to some particular motion. Yeah, it would take a bit of time for the “animator” to learn to play it, but I bet it could generate really realistic motions.
vinnievidivici @6
I know!
There is potential there for a never-ending franchise.
Plenty of untapped material there; cf. https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Lensman_Universe
My favourites were the sessile Grog, the Zabriskan Fontema and the rollers from that planet.
And of course the alien Lensmen — Tregonsee, Nadreck, Worsel.
Proper aliens, those were.
[sorry, I did not look. that Wiki is shit. but the info I gave is correct]
Rich Woods @9: Or eat, yes. Being eaten by a carnivore with teeth and claws is a lot more dignified, and a lot less gross, than being eaten by a giant spider or squid. (If it came to that, which it wouldn’t since I’d be sending my wolf-centaur-soldiers with their own food and other supplies. And like I said, they’re pack animals, so they should be better at logistics than spider-squids.)
So you can put boobies on them, obviously.
[I too saw Avatar, macallan]
I also questioned how a warrior race with a barbarian aesthetic could build all those supertechnological devices and ships. Who tills? Who toils? One answer suggested to me was helots, which is as good an explanation as any.
Walter Solomon@7–
Speaking for myself, the list of science fiction films since 2000 is terribly short of great movies. Here’s my list of actually great movie SF in the last 25 years:
Donnie Darko (NOT the Director’s Cut!!!)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Children of Men
The Prestige
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Hard to be a God
Under the Skin
Mad Max: Fury Road
Arrival (although the novella is way better)
Thor: Ragnarok
Annihilation
The 2 Spider-verse movies
That’s it for me. There are a lot of good but not great movies (e.g. Inception) and a few well-regarded films I haven’t seen (e.g. Never Let Me Go), and I’m very enthusiastic for Klara and the Sun (due 2027, based on an incredible Ishiguro novel, although a bit concerned by the choice of director). Of those, only 5 are big-budget. In 25 years.
I think there are two drivning motivations for “man in a rubber suit” aliens.
1) The annoying habit of actors being vaguely human shaped
2) the inability of the audience to identify with, or take an interest in, non human shaped protagonists
I am not patient enough to go and see that, just the trailer seen on a big screenwas way too much. Bang bang booom arrrgh grrrrr crash meh.
And as #23-chrislawson says, SF movies have been really a sad lot in the last years. I personally saw a couple of bad rehashings of storylines from the 70-80s: Alien Romulus and Tron Ares, both a waste of camera time.
It does seem that, in spite of an abundance of vivacious, well-written SF there’s no appetite at all for original, new stories (Arrival was a welcome surprise).
chrislawson @23
Donnie Darko was a gem. Both Gyllenhaals and President Roslin from BSG. I didn’t even know who Seth Rogen was as I had never watched Freaks and Geeks at the time. The music was one of the best parts.
I liked the first Predator movie, but never really got into the franchise. Hollywood keeps going back to the well. They even stole the well from Ringu.
Not quite scifi, more action/horror, I thought Monster Island was worth watching. A classic creature feature alien encounter movie.
Apparently there’s more than one Monster Island. This one:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29262075/
Next film needs ‘Spiney Norman’ the giant hedgehog -bane of Dinsdale Pirhana.
.
What Do Hedgehogs Do At Night? (Caught on Camera)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=AwzyHaQU9zY
I suppose I could dedicate a video on that… 😅
But it would be a ton of work. It’s a lot easier for scifi producers to spin off a bunch of random aliens than it is critically evaluate them.
@29 oh birgerjohansson!!! THANK YOU so much for that link. My day shall now be joyous!
@5 Chigau:
A Ringworld movie will never happen in today’s climate. Too much kinky sex.
Skeptic Jackal, not just that; the tasp is a type of wireheading.
The most glaring problem with making a Ringworld (or Known Space) based media franchise is that, as with J. K. Rowling, it would give more money and prestige to someone who would, in all probability, use it to be more of a terrible, awful, bigoted, stupid person.
Source
I am interested in the energetics of growth as a general question. I’ve been thinking about it in relation to the idea of the ridiculously rapid regeneration of the world after the “global flood” that YEC insists on. We know that it’s physically impossible, but can we quantify how impossible it is, in terms of time and energy? Can it be at least approximately quantified?