The Form of Transformers

Last night my boyfriend and I went to see “Transformers” at a huge cinema complex on Ste Catherine’s. The movie has been a box office hit since it came to theatres, but still, we could not believe the crowd that showed up.

But in this post I’m not going to talk about the crowd, or about Montreal or any of that stuff I usually ramble on about. Today, I am going to talk about aliens in the movies.

Though Science Fiction flicks seem to be among the most imaginative of all fiction films, I have to question the level of creativity that goes into actually designing the figure and the shape of aliens in the movies. Has anyone ever noticed that they almost always resemble humans? I don’t mean they look exactly like human beings, I just mean they have similar characteristics. For example, they almost always have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. They almost always have two legs, two arms and a torso. They almost always stand upright.

Look at E.T. Now Spielberg is one of my all time favourite directors, but doesn’t E.T. look a little bit like a decrepit, old man? He has a human-like face, hands with fingers and the sweetest blue eyes ever!

On all of earth—let alone in the universe, or the galaxy—there is way more variation in the shape and form that different species take than that of cinematic forms of extra-terrestrials. Consider a whale. Doesn’t it look completely different in shape and size than a human being? What about birds, insects and plants? Some of them may have two eyes, but none of them walk upright on two legs. And we all co-exist on earth. Imagine the variation in shape among all life forms in the universe!

Furthermore, when an alien in the movies doesn’t look like humans in shape, then they usually take on a human form so that we can have a conversation with them or something. Look at Star Trek humanoids.

They are almost always smarter than us, hence their commonly oversized heads. Or they will experiment with our species because humans are somehow way more interesting to them than any of the other millions of life forms on earth ("Species").

And if they are not smarter, they will be stronger, and thus have a bigger, dinosaur/human type form, like the reptile, salimander, two-legged alien in "Aliens".

If this is the extent to which we can imagine what aliens must look like, then I think it all says a little more about us—humans—than it does about extra-terrestrials. I think it says we are maybe just a little narrow-minded. I mean, isn’t it kind of egocentric to assume that aliens must have a resemblance to humans?

This all reminds me of Decartes and his theories about God (I swear, there is a connection). Descartes said that God must exist. Since we humans can think of the existence of an all powerful and perfect creator, there must actually be one. He proved this theory by showing that every fictional or make-believe thing that humans have ever imagined or thought of, has never actually been entirely fictional. Take a unicorn, for example. A unicorn is a creation of the human mind. Not so, Descartes would say. A unicorn is actually a horse—which really does exist in the natural world—with a pointed horn—which really does exist in the natural world—added to its head. So the unicorn may not exist, but the parts of a unicorn do exist, and it is really in the assembly of those parts that human creativity plays a role.

Descartes said that since we have the idea of a perfect being, of a creator, then some form of this being must actually exist; for how can we have an idea of something without any pre-emptive inspiration for the idea?

But I will only use the parts of his theory that don’t talk about God to support this post. I’m talking about the parts that suggest humans are creative only in the sense that we creatively assemble parts of objects and beings in order to produce a new one. The actual raw materials—the parts of the already existing things—we don’t create out of pure brain power.

Another example: Mermaids. Mermaids are half-women, half-fish. Again humans were creative in that we took parts of two already existing things, and assembled them to make a new form. We did not actually fabricate the entire mermaid out of thin air; we simply cut and pasted different parts of two different, and very real, life forms to create a new one.

And there are many more examples, like centaurs, or any make-believe organism that has more than the natural amount of any common characteristic; like animals with two heads, six eyes, twelve arms or any other number of something else. This also works the opposite way: a Cyclops. Playing with size is another way to make a natural being seem imaginary, like the ROUS’s (Rodents Of Unusual Size) in “The Princess Bride.”

I realize that for the sake of the movies, they have to make the aliens somewhat human-like so that the human characters can actually communicate with them, but I do yearn to one day be completely wowed by the creative shape and form of a cinematic extra-terrestrial.