Blurry tumbling neon spacecraft + puppet of toothpicks for an alien.
I generally love this movie but if I had been a producer, I would have been totally unhappy with 2 things.
The animation of the spacecraft was atrocious. Out of focus neon blobs that seemed to fly right through objects as well as people and the ground. Spinning and tumbling? Why? Just very badly done IMO.
The first alien to appear has the muscularity of a pipe cleaner. Huh? I could understand them being thin, perhaps from so much mechanization or low gravity, but this was just awful and extremely unrealistic looking - at the climax of the whole film. C'mon Speilberg..really?
A minor gripe was having the alien musicians apparently playing some kind of flatulent horns. Ridiculous. As least get some good synth tones and come up with interesting sounds, intervals, chords and melodies. Instead we get an experimental avant garde jazz quintet that came 900 light years to bark at us with tubas. So much for their culture. No wonder they came to earth - to listen to our radio stations and hopefully get some music lessons for their crew members.
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easyck
The first alien that was seen, skinny one, wasn't intended to be in the film. It was just a test shot to see how it would work out. There were originally meant to have many of them, but they were wire hung puppets, and all of the wires would cause arcs of light that would cause editing problems. The next choice was the bulbous headed aliens, and they were filmed in a haze for 2 reasons: to make their appearance mysterious, but also to hide the fact that the aliens' faces were pretty much painted on.
Be glad Spielberg's first alien choice didn't make it. He planned to put an orangutan into an alien costume, put skates on it and let it roll down the ramp.
GForce59
Well, we don't know what all those UFOs were exactly, we don't understand the aliens' technology -- the ones that tumbled seemed like they might've been non-piloted devices and that's just how they move, but other UFOs in the film, like the first three that descended on Devil's Tower seemed to fly in logical formation (maybe they were piloted). The fogginess surrounding the UFOs could've been caused by the brilliance of their alien lighting system, and I think lends to their mystery, their alien-ness -- you can just barely make out their shape, but not to much of it. Again, the craft are supposed to be alien to us, not everything about their movements and appearance is supposed to make perfect sense to us. Doug Trumbull kind of alluded to this being the intention here, and that we're not supposed to understand everything about them.
As for the tones -- maybe that's who these aliens are -- intergalactic pranksters, intergalactic musicians, maybe that's what they love to do, and made possible by their technology.
As far as the aliens' appearance, agreed, it could've been a little more imaginitive, I think that was the least imaginitive thing Spielberg did here
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Released: December 14, 1977
Synopsis:
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen.