No More Rubber Foreheads

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Can we agree, as a society, that if you have a decent budget, you should ditch the Rubber Forehead aliens and go with some proper alien life forms?

I mean come on, they were economically justifiable back when dropping different colors of ink into water was at the cutting edge of film technology. But now like? We should be able to move past it.

For the people saying "Oh, but an actor needs their face visible so they can convey emotions!", well, with all do respect, my answer is: Git Gud.

You ever seen Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers?

Watch the penguin. It has no lips. Its eyes have no color, no direction. It has no nose, no ears. It doesnt' really have a "face" in the conventional sense.
It is sinister as FRELL. The moment you see it, you know that penguin is up to something. It's menacing.

If a couple of blokes can achieve THAT level of acting with a faceless lump of plasticine? Ya'll favorite actors have no excuse. They can convey emotions as a giant spider or a blob of slime or whatever if they put their minds to it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Its doubtless harder to convey certain things without facial expressions, and if the effects convey those emotions, then its not really the actors doing it, is it (though motion-capture, like Gollum in LotR, is a bit of both)?

But a good actor can convey a hell of a lot with just voice- voice actors in games and animation come to mind, as do audio book readers. I particularly think of the Dresden Files audio books read by James Marsters, where he gave different characters different personas and emotions without the benefit of any visuals whatsoever.

I expect there's also a hefty dose of "the audience won't be able to relate to the characters if they don't look human" (which is probably often true, considering how many humans have trouble relating to and empathizing with someone human who has different-coloured skin or different-shaped genitals, or even wears different clothes). But to counter that, we have popular characters that don't look particularly human (off the top of my head, Watership Down's all-rabbit main cast).

So yeah, there's really no excuse for not having more alien-looking aliens. Except that it would make interspecies romance plots a lot weirder (I seem to recall one of the SFDebris reviews discussing this actually, using the example of trying to have a relationship with a sentient plant).

[Karha of Honor]

Hey, some of those look great.

[LittleRaven]

Can we agree, as a society, that if you have a decent budget, you should ditch the Rubber Forehead aliens and go with some proper alien life forms?

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

The best choice for any given alien is going to depend on the story you're trying to tell and the effect you're trying to convey. If you really want to emphasize the 'alien' part, then maybe CGI is the way to go. (although you want to be careful with that...even now, CGI has a way of aging very badly) But if you want to emphasize the emotional depth of the creature, then a rubber forehead may still be the right way to go....yes, the penguin is menacing, but it's not complex. Everything about the penguin is designed to look sinister, and it can't turn on a dime.

And of course, working in a visual medium still means you're dealing with real world costs and limitations. Even with a 'decent budget,' trying to do all Bajorans as CGI creatures would have been a disaster, both in terms of effects and storytelling. Decisions about how to do particular aliens are always going to happen on a case-by-case basis - there is no one size fits all answer.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is, itself, an absolute.

Maybe there are sometimes reasons for rubber foreheads, but it's the year 2017. Television has come a long flipping way. Can we stop making "human with goofy forehead" the default for space aliens and "aliens that look EXACTLY like humans" the fallback? Any alien that is seriously humanoid is, by default, soaking up a large portion of the suspension of disbelief.

Look at Rygel from Farscape. He's a damn puppet, and he conveys emotions so well that stage hands and directors would frequently hand notes to him.

[The Romulan Republic]

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is, itself, an absolute.

Brought to you by Obi-wan "Who killed your father depends greatly on your own point of view" Kenobi.

[LittleRaven]

Maybe there are sometimes reasons for rubber foreheads, but it's the year 2017. Television has come a long flipping way.

Of course. Creators have more options that ever today. Puppets, sadly, are probably still going to be very difficult for most studios....Farscape only pulled it off because they had Hensen's people behind them, but we have hopefully put the days of the Gorn behind us for good.

I'm not as in-tune with television sci-fi as I should be, but it seems like the trend these days leans towards 'no aliens at all,' but maybe that's just Expanse talking.

[FaxModem1]

I'm of two minds on this. You need, as they said, characters that are relate-able enough that they can express emotions, unless the look you are going for is 'utterly alien and menacing'. You can trick the audience a bit, and show that they are more humanlike than they appear, but it has to work through body language, or with soulful eyes. Note how alien the 'Prawns' are in District 9, but that they have very beautiful, communative eyes, are very human like in their body language, and are very relate-able.

Compare this to the killing machines from, say, Battle: Los Angeles, in which the aliens are made as ugly as possible, and made to seem menacing.

But, we can also compare this to the Newcomers from Alien Nation, in which the whole point was that these were people, and the latest wave of immigrants to come to America. The more similarities they had with people, the better. Them having more and more alien features than a muffin head would have made something lost to that, and interfered with the performance of the actors. After a certain point, it becomes hard for an actor to take his job seriously with all the crap being forced for him to wear, or if they are acting against someone in a suit that will be replaced by CGI later.

And, as has been noted, there is such a thing as sex appeal, and you'll notice that Aeryn Sun was played by a non-prothestic wearing Claudia Black, and we didn't have John Crichton fall in love with a Rygel-like puppet. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but there was a story that the aliens in Avatar were remodeled over and over again until someone said, "Yeah, I'd do it."

[LittleRaven]

Note how alien the 'Prawns' are in District 9, but that they have very beautiful, communative eyes, are very human like in their body language, and are very relate-able.

The Prawn are actually a fantastic example of alien design...sadly, an example that is probably still well outside the budget of any television show.

When I made my initial comment, I was actually thinking of something like Marritza in the DS9 episode 'Duet.' That role requires the alien to go from 'seemingly harmless' to 'channeling Hitler' to 'utterly broken by guilt' in the course of an hour. Harris Yulin, being the incredible actor that he is, manages to convey this perfectly even under the quite substantial rubber forehead of Cardassian makeup. Our special effects have come a long way since that episode was filmed, but even now, I suspect that performance would be very difficult to replicate with anything but a human actor...at least on a budget that a television show can reasonably expect to get.

I completely understand that a rubber forehead, particularly a badly done one, can make it hard to suspend disbelief. But the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good, and any sci-fi show has to deal with the reality of limited budgets and expensive effects. I suspect that even with our advances in CGI and puppetry, the rubber forehead will still occasionally be the best approach to putting an alien on screen.

[Arkle]

Having given it some thought, I'm actually not that worried about "rubber foreheads," so long as it looks at least vaguely plausible from an evolutionary standpoint. Beyond that, well, let's face it, Trek is not hard sci-fi the point of the story isn't to explore the "what ifs" of evolution in alien environments, it's using alien environments to tell human stories. A little more variety than we've had before would be nice, sure, but I only want to see that because of developments in make-up and CG technology. A good or bad script may gain points if it features an interesting alien lifeform not like what we've seen on the show before, but at the end of the day the story matters more.

tl;dr

Hard sci-fi; science matters more than story
Soft sci-fi; Story matters more than science