Brian Roberts
“Arrival” is this year’s science fiction film about an alien visitation, and it has been garnering rave reviews. One reason is it’s surprisingly quiet and cerebral approach. The emphasis is on communication between two species, rather than action or battle. The lead, Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is a middle-aged female linguist who has been given the task of interpreting the aliens’ communications.
The aliens, who are dubbed “heptapods” on account of their seven limbs, have arrived on Earth in twelve large ships that hover above specific points of our planet. The question immediately becomes: Are they hostile, like the creatures in “Independence Day” that also arrived in huge ships, or do they come in peace? Since the aliens invite people into their ships every 18 hours, they’re probably friendly – but people still don’t know what they want.
Portraying aliens convincingly has long been a challenge for filmmakers. For decades, they were limited by the technology of the day and the fact that aliens were generally played by human actors. The latter fact put constraints on what the costumes could be like. For example, the plots of the various “Predator” movies called for agile and physically powerful antagonists, so the actors playing the titular creatures could only wear costumes that let them move around easily. Consequently, the Predators look humanoid, as do many movie and TV aliens.
One early exception to that rule was the predatory and parasitic Xenomorphs from the “Aliens” movies. Ridley Scott, who directed the first movie in the 1970s hired the Swiss artist, H.R. Giger, to design the title creature. Carlo Rambaldi, a special effects artist who had also worked on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” built the Xenomorph costume, which had over 900 moving parts in the head alone. It was still a man in a suit, but far less humanoid than most such examples. Rambaldi also worked on the alien in “E.T.,” which was portrayed by a puppet. Between its blue eyes and child-like size, E.T. was far cuddlier than many other aliens. It was simply an explorer who had the bad luck to get separated from his people and stranded on Earth. Some human children befriended it and they eventually devised a crude, monosyllabic form of communication, including the phrase “E.T. phone home.”
The development of CGI in the late 80s and early 90s proved to be a game-changer in the portrayal of extraterrestrials, for filmmakers were no longer limited to puppets and costumes. If somebody could draw it and transfer the image to a computer, filmmakers could use it. For example, in 2009’s “District Nine,” the aliens were hulking, bipedal arthropods nicknamed “prawns” for their lobster-like appearance. They were refugees stranded in South Africa and treated as third-class citizens.
The filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp, wanted the creatures to be ugly but still sympathetic. In an interview with “Variety,” Blomkamp talked about the psychological difficulties of making an ugly and non-humanoid extraterrestrial. He pointed out that people don’t really empathize with something unless it has a “face and an anthropomorphic shape.” Sympathetic aliens therefore have to be somewhat humanoid, while hostile aliens do not.
Denis Villenueve, the director of “Arrival” apparently did not feel such constraints, for the heptapods look more cephalopods than anything humanoid or even mammalian. By using a non-humanoid but familiar form, Villeneuve may be trying to emphasize the ambiguity of the aliens’ motives. While technology now allows for the portrayal of non-humanoid extraterrestrials, filmmakers are still constrained by human imagination and psychology.
