Starfish Aliens / Film

Starfish Aliens in film.

Animation

• Astro Boy has one pop up for Astro to challenge just before the cut to credits, likely as a nod to his alien-fighting ways in the original. The alien in question is the Artificial Sun (which was a man-made creation in the original anime), and is basically a small (at least compared to the actual Sun) one-eyed sun with Combat Tentacles.
• Home (2015): The Gorg are literally this, as they resemble starfish.
• Treasure Planet: The Flatula are sapient, slug-like beings with several suckers and tentacles on their bodies that speak a language which ressembles flatulent sounds. Many other characters qualify.

Live-Action

• 2001: A Space Odyssey: The aliens are so alien that they can't even be shown on screen. The novels imply that they started as Starfish Aliens, but later transformed themselves into Mechanical Lifeforms, and eventually into Energy Beings. The author felt like showing the aliens would inevitably diminish their impact; in a supplementary book called Lost Worlds of 2001, the author records failed experiments with writing about both Human Aliens and worlds filled with Starfish Aliens, before he finally decided to have the monoliths be the last relics of an unseen, long ago vanished civilization.
• The Abyss: The creatures definitely qualify. They're classed as aliens by fans of the film even though they come from underwater instead of outer space (as far as we know). They're certainly strange in appearance and they are able to completely manipulate water — the Director's Cut reveals they caused the storm on the surface and created tidal waves ready to bury most of the world's cities — and in one case one alien creates a huge long strip of solid water and is able to morph it to resemble Lindsey's face.
• Alien: The Xenomorphs seemed surprisingly human for the first two films, considering their life cycle. Alien³, however, shows what happens when one hatches from a dog... and it looks like a dog. Expanded universe material ran with the explanation that a Xenomorph's physical characteristics are based on the species it hatched from, and the common humanoid Xenomorphs are only what they look like when they incubate in a human. The Alien vs. Predator introduced a breed of Xenomorphs hatched from the Predator, which made its film debut in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. While still humanoid, the "Predaliens" are significantly larger than the common human-hatched xenomorphs and had additional physical characteristics modeled after the Predators, such as a set of four mandibles around its mouth and head appendages that resembled a Predator's trademark dreadlocks. This would seem to raise questions about the humanoid-but-fifteen-foot-tall Queen, until you recall the Space Jockey from the first movie. This was confirmed in Prometheus, which implies that the modern Xenomorph was be the result of a "goo"-infected human impregnating a woman, with the resulting creature then impregnating an Engineer. The chain of DNA is still ongoing; since the Xenomorphs evolved through artificial means, their genes are apparently still co-dominant with other lifeforms.^note A number of works, including the majority of the Alien vs. Predator franchise, run with the explanation that the Queens are the mature form of the Praetorian caste, which in turn mature from Warriors, which are the mature form of Drones.

• Arrival's aliens are tentacled creatures with no visible eyes or mouths but are incredibly intelligent. They don't perceive time in the same way humans do and are able to see the future.
• Avatar: Although the Na'vi are somewhere between Humanoid Aliens and Rubber-Forehead Aliens, it's explained in the film that Pandora's trees communicate with electrochemical signals through their roots, much like the neurons in a brain... and there are more trees on Pandora than there are neurons in a human brain, effectively making the entire world one huge, superintelligent organism.
• Battle: Los Angeles: The invaders appear to be this. They look vaguely humanoid, but their bodies are some form of cybernetic and biological construct that is grown to specific battlefield needs, and their primary interest in Earth is its water supply and habitable conditions.
• Dark City (1998): The Strangers at first appear to be pale, bald, black-clad humans. But when one gets his head split open, we get a glimpse of a sort of glowing sea anemone-like creature within a human shell.
  Mr. Hand: You've seen what we are. We use your dead as vessels.
• Dark Star: The alien looks like a beach ball with eyes and feet.
• District 9: The aliens have two functional arms, two legs and a central head, but that's about where their resemblance to humans ends. They're all 'worker drones' who, without a queen, have little initiative of their own, with digitigrade limbs, an additional pair of tiny arms on their stomach, chitinous exoskeletons, antennae, claws, mandibles, tentacles, and all number of other insect- or crustacean-like attributes. The human residents of Johannesburg even call them "prawns". In a deleted scene, it is explained that the prawns have one gender and reproduce asexually. In that scene the humans claim that prawns have no attachment to their offspring, but this is shown to be a lie in the film, one of the many human attributes possessed by Christopher Johnson.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008): In the remake, Klaatu noted that he was assuming A Form You Are Comfortable With to interact with the humans. Upon being asked by the heroine what his true form was, he refused, stating, "It would only frighten you".
• In Edge of Tomorrow, the Mimics are portrayed as giant masses of moving tentacles, and the designer specifically distanced their design as far away from any terrestrial animal as possible, even using obsidian-like texture for the tentacles instead of biological textures. The Alpha is larger and has a more definite shape and even defined eyes and a mouth.

• Forbidden Planet had the Krell — we never see them, there's no surviving record of their appearance, but their triangular door shapes and headsets that could accommodate a really large head imply something vastly different from humans.
• Galaxy Quest's Thermians usually look like Human Aliens, but their true form bears a strong resemblance to cuttlefish. Or octopuses humping squids. Doesn't stop one of the human cast falling in love with one.
• Gamera 2: Advent of Legion has the titular Legion, a race of monstrous, eusocial, insectoid aliens with a kaiju-sized queen resembling a cross between a rhinoceros beetle and a skeleton. They colonize planets by way of massive, explosive pods that launch their eggs into space.
• Horror Express: The alien invader is an entity of thought or very mean Energy Being. It can take over people's minds — several at a time, be they dead or alive. Those it possesses have their minds cleaned out by removing the wrinkles in the brain so they can't think. The only telltale clue is that those possessed by it eyes glow red in dim light.
• The Host (2013)'s Souls, which inhabit and take over human bodies, look very much like some sort of undersea creature.
• Invader: The alien is distinctly nonhumanoid, even being able to reconfigure its form — not by shapeshifting, but rather by unfolding, extending and withdrawing parts of its body.
• Men in Black: Many aliens, especially background ones. Examples include the two sea-anemone-like aliens who run the computers at MIB headquarters.
• Midnight Special features beings from a parallel universe who appear to have strange otherworldly powers — and they're capable of mating with humans. The only time we see them from Sarah's perspective, they're represented by moving shapes of light.
• Monsters (2010): The aliens are giant squid-crab things with bioluminescence that grow from mushroom-like polyps.
• In Monty Python's Life of Brian, Brian is at one point rescued from falling off a tower by a spaceship containing two squidlike aliens with giant eyeballs for heads. The ship flies into space and enters into a dogfight with another spaceship, is damaged, and crashes back on Earth not far from where Brian was picked up. He walks away unscathed; the aliens never appear again and no further mention is made of the incident.
• Night of the Big Heat: The invading aliens are jellyfish-like creatures resembling melted plastic lamps who glow brightly and emit massive amounts of heat.
• Nope features a UFO that is actually a singular predatory lifeform which unfolds into a strange creature that resembles a cross between a deep-sea animal, an imax lens, and a biblical angel.
• Starman: The title character; we only see his true form at the very beginning, which looks like a giant glowing ball. He can only interact with other species by cloning a temporary body for himself (sort of an environmental suit). The cloning procedure itself can be a bit unnerving, although the alien is quite friendly once you get to know him.
• Star Wars has many examples:
  • The primitive Amani from Maridun are bipedal, but their bodies resemble those of flatworms, they have vaguely humanoid faces, their legs are rather short and they also possess a pair of long, spindly arms.
  • The Yuvernians, a sapient race of two-headed beings with elongated heads, each one sitting on top of its own long, lanky neck. We have yet to see the rest of their bodies, but looking at their two heads is more than enough to know they don't possess the same basic humanoid body plan as other species.
  • The Sy Myrthians, sapient mammals who move on a large, gastropod-like foot akin to those of the Hutts.
• Stepsister from Planet Weird: The Zircolonians are actually sapient gas bubbles, but can take on a human appearance on Earth. However, even then, they still occasionally fear things that wouldn't harm a human, such as a light breeze or a hairdryer.
• Starro The Conqueror appears as the main antagonist of The Suicide Squad, and it isn't dubbed as Project Starfish for anything.
• The Thing (1982). There really is not a word other than "The Thing" to call it, because no one even really knows what it is. It is capable of perfectly replicating anything it has ever come in contact with, and every single cell of its body is a separate, hostile organism. It's so utterly alien that people aren't even sure if it has a true form or not, even the huge, grotesque monstrosity it forms in the end. The closest we might have to an original form is described as the insectoid manifestation in the following example, but of course there's no knowing for sure if it isn't merely yet another assimilated form.
• In The Thing (2011), the original concept for the movie, the "pilot version"^note conceived when the filmmakers were going for a more practical effects-led vision, but abandoned after being ordered to use CGI instead, reveals the alien pilot of The Thing's ship. Words can't convey how weird it is, and the pilot isn't even corrupted by the monstrosity. In addition to looking utterly inhuman, the creatures technology is equally weird as the ship it pilots seems to be powered by thought. The pilot died after crashing the ship to trap the titular monster, which initially appears as a giant bug.
• Warning From Space has literal Starfish Aliens. They're quite aware of this too, so they transform themselves into humans in order to communicate with Earthlings. May be a borderline case of this, as they speak Japanese/English from the onset. Also the inverse is true with the aliens more than a little weirded out by the human form when they encounter us.

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