Arrival’s Aliens Almost Looked Even More Weird

Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral 2016 sci-fi film Arrival featured bizarre-looking aliens called heptapods – but creature designer Carlos Huante says that even weirder designs were considered. The film stars Amy Adams as a linguistics expert who is brought in to try and communicate with an alien species after twelve of their ships appear in locations around the world.

Because of the film’s premise, the aliens of Arrival couldn’t simply be humanoids with wrinkled foreheads or even Roswell-style aliens with pale skin and big eyes; they had to be truly alien, and communicate in a way that would be near-impossible to translate. The final design of the heptapods – who are given the nicknames Abbott and Costello – portrayed them as massive creatures who mainly present themselves via a six-limbed “hand” at the bottom of their body, move through a strange fog inside their spaceship, and communicate via inky black circles.

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Believe it or not, however, the heptapods were actually one of the more conservative designs considered for the movie – and they could have looked a whole lot weirder. Speaking in an interview with HN Entertainment, Huante (who is currently working on Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune, and also served as a concept artist on Blade Runner 2049 and Prometheus) detailed one of the wilder alien designs that he came up with during the development process:

“As we started and stopped through the year, Denis gave no-holds-bars parameters so I went very esoteric. He gave me two days to go nuts and I gave him two pages of little thumbnails of ideas that were aliens that were really far out concepts. One was like folding paper. It would constantly be unfolding itself which is the way it would walk and move. It was a giant, it wasn’t necessarily paper but it felt like it. There were no eyes on it and no face, eight feet tall and it looks like it has multi-limbs but no limbs per se. And that’s how far off I went for some of the ideas.”

As cool as the heptapod design ended up looking in the movie, reading Huante’s description is enough to make you wish that Villeneuve had gone with the crazy origami aliens instead. Concept artist Peter Konig shared some of the alternate designs for Arrival‘s aliens back in 2016, and you can check out some of those designs below.

Huantes went on to say that he was amazed that the heptapods – which are admittedly very weird-looking – ended up being the final design:

“I came up with the idea of what ended up in the film, which was the bizarre upper-torso kind of a thing, an anthropomorphic whale creature with the spider hand creature at the end of an umbilical cord. THAT was a really bizarre alien. I can’t believe it made it into the film.”

Arrival‘s decision to get creative with its aliens could have backfired by making them seem goofy or ridiculous, but Abbott and Costello have a powerful, enigmatic, and often scary presence in the movie – which is helped by the fact that they spend most of the movie obscured by the mist inside their spaceship. Arrival was praised by critics for its bold and subversive take on the familiar trope of aliens “invading” Earth, and it has a mind-bending conclusion… which we won’t spoil here for those who haven’t seen it.

More: Arrival’s Ending Explained

Source: HN Entertainment (via IndieWire)

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