r/DC_Cinematic • u/curiouslittleSI98 • 7d ago
DISCUSSION DC shows need to get away from alien/ extraterrestrials in human form
What has been proven early on in the DC cinematic universe is that the budget does not allow for accurate representation of alien characters. Peacemakers entire first season plot was butterflies taking over humans ( allowing for least amount of CGi or make up) which is fine.
Lanterns is where it really gets muddled. I understand the plot device of “blending in with humans while on earth”. Really it takes away from illusion of this being in the DC universe. What you get is a show with regular looking people with two of them exploding like they got bomb strapped to their chest. Even the guardians in human form makes you feel like the budget was that of a day time soap opera.
Going forward if the budget doesn’t allow for superpowers or practical make up effects stick to vigilante crime fighters like a Batman, green arrow, wildcat or question character that’s actually able to be represented properly.
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u/Upper-Capital-2876 7d ago
Once it's a neat misdirect, multiple times over and over again is simply lazy writing and sfx budget consideration
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u/Magnolia-jjlnr 7d ago
multiple times over and over again
This felt lazy the first time around. I can't remember a single live action where the aliens were hiding in human forms with basic human abilities without looking cheap and lazy
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u/MrBaronKnight 7d ago
One thing that they can do with "hiding with human" aspect is that they can make them uncanny. Not for zoe ofc but for antaan group. Make them aside from antaan and the infiltrators, move and speak weird. Here they're just like regular people with explosives vest.
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u/Magnolia-jjlnr 7d ago
Obviously that would be much more interesting than "aliens who look and act so much like humans rhey might as well genuinely be humans", however they would probably need to change the whole premise because the hiding wouldn't make sense anymore.
I wouldn't mind because I found the plot to be boring (not saying it's bad)
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u/Agent_Anomaly 7d ago
The only alien behavior shown was from the guardian lady, she didnt understood stuff like race, etc which was nice but thats just it. The Antaan group were just as good at blending like Zoe or Noah
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u/Leafsnail 7d ago
Idk how it's a misdirect exactly? The first episode is about an alien in hiding in human form and strongly implies the show will be about aliens hiding in human form. It's OK if you don't like that but I'm not really seeing where the mislead was
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u/Magnolia-jjlnr 6d ago
They mean misdirect in the sense of the concept itself, not the plot of Lanterns specifically.
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u/Vegetable_Drag_3300 7d ago
There's no misdirect, Lanterns ep 1 already establishes that there are aliens on earth
Also it's a Green Lantern show, obviously there will be aliens
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u/Magnolia-jjlnr 6d ago
The term misdirect here refers to the concept in general, not the concept specifically within the show itself. It's a nice misdirect (to them cause I never found it to be interesting) until shows use this as a cope out
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u/TheMightyMonarchx7 7d ago
It’s wild that the CW tried harder.
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u/Slow-Chemical1991 7d ago edited 7d ago
Holy shit this. The CW might have been cheap AF and held back by corporate’s inability to treat them as anything other than cheapass shows… but they weren’t ashamed of the material they were adapting like how Lanterns was.
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u/kyoka_suigetsu91 7d ago
At least on the CW it made sense everybody knows cw shows have low budget so we go in knowing that the vfx isn't going to be anything special... But lanterns was a HBO show with allegedly a pretty decent budget
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u/kabbajabbadabba 7d ago
decent? it had 16m per episode. GoT final season was about 20m per ep.
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u/Habib455 7d ago
As I’ve been telling people, 16m isn’t the actual budget. I looked into finding the source for the 16m and there isn’t one. As far as I can tell, it came from some Facebook post that people or articles kept reiterating that as fact. There’s no official or unofficial budget information for this show from a credible source
There’s precisely 0 way that this shows budget is 16m. Less than 20 tv shows have a budget over 15m and the ones that do are visual spectacles that are akin to stretched out blockbuster movies more than anything.
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u/kyoka_suigetsu91 7d ago
Idk how much they can do with that type of money so to be safe I just said it was "decent" you know how people get if you misspeak
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u/Equal-Ad-2710 7d ago
The CW really are the most comic books adaption and that’s both the best and worst thing
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u/NoNefariousness2144 7d ago
And the whole structure of the Arrowverse felt like comicbooks in TV form. You would get crossover events that required you to watch episodes from different shows, and every few weeks you'd sometimes get characters from one show having a guest role in another show.
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u/Dolphin_King21 7d ago
We don't need another Supernatural type show where everything non human appears as human to save budget. This isn't CW. Supernatural literally had a DRAGON. And it was just..a guy. People want to see aliens in their space cop show. Even the Arrowverse showed aliens better than this.
This is a show that cost 130 million dollars to make by a company that makes billions, and this is the best they can do?
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u/One-Recognition5807 7d ago
Yep and the cw also made a city or a town look bigger and more put together then this show which just looks like ok we're at the stadium set the farm set
Like the cw had issues but at least even when we're rushing the story made sense
Like even when we're gonna go the lanterns route but we're told no u felt how the writers and even I think the actor hated that idea and made a cool tease here there is just oh ok cool can I have my 20 bucks back
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u/Wild_Title_9185 7d ago
CW got so much flak , most of which it deserved but I liked the costumes and whatever they tried with villains and aliens and shit . Atleast they tried but here they just didn't even try . Everyone was like we want HBO to do it better and here we have HBO not giving us nothing , one costume of Hal which rugged and shit , nothing for Job. CW also gave 20 episode seasons and a season every year , it did have lot of fillers but flash/arrow season 1 were better comic book shows than lanterns
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u/MIAxPaperPlanes 7d ago
The CW not only did it look like crap but it's not like they had them permanently in alien form it would be for like 1 minute before they go back to human, or they'd just flat out not do it in later seasons
I still remember for Smallville they have Doomsday a human persona he was in most of the r Season
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u/TheMightyMonarchx7 7d ago
Not one true form Manhunter scene. Not one. Also I don’t believe the writers understood what a robot is
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u/Kutullu987 7d ago
It looked like shit 9/10 times, I rather have a human playing characters than ps3 models
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u/PuzzleheadedTry7370 7d ago
And it looked like shit.
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u/theclockmasters 7d ago edited 7d ago
Even if it didn't look like shit, people wanted Korugar, Betrassusian, Martians just walking around in Rushville during this type of plot. Which makes absolutely no sense in this show.
I saw someone say: "When Hal went to visit Sinestro, there should have been different alien guards there walking around and talking to him"
People just want to be able to scream: "Look its Glup Shitto, I can put a check on my list"
Edit: Wording and formatting
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u/infinityman5296 7d ago
Personally I want the show to work to make me believe this is a huge universe in which humans are only a small part.
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u/Thalenn99 7d ago
Honestly most movies/shows need to get away from this. A huge portion of fantasy/scifi stories hype up their villain as this unfathomable supernatural/alien/monstrous threat and then when you finally get to see them it's.....
Some dude/chick in exotic clothes.
I get that it's easy on the budget and a "human" villain is easier for actors to portray, but it's become so overused.
It actually worked in Lanterns because the plot was written to be about an alien-in-human form, though, so that was kinda the entire point.
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u/Karkava 6d ago
They're not even exotic! They just dress up in the dullest and most drab clothes snd expect us to take it!
Probably the most exotically dressed "alien" was in Weapons where the witch in question stands out from this gritty realistic setting by being a dolled and caked up parody that belongs on a live action Dr. Seuss movie!
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u/M-I-T-B 7d ago
While I tire of the hate that's brewed after the finale, THIS I rock with all day. I feel like they could have circumvented showing aliens by at least giving them alien weapons. There's no reason why Antaan and his group descended upon the Macon compound with just assault rifles and bombs. They had a chance to show some creativity with alien weapons at least and they didn't do that, which was highly disappointing. I enjoyed it very much, but that definitely took me out of it.
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u/theaveragenerd 7d ago
One of the things that really bothered me about Lanterns is why wasn't the casting for Guardian Lianna a little person? There are plenty of instances in the comics where a Guardian disguised themselves as a human but always kept their stature.
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u/Flioness 7d ago
She wasn't little in her true form either though.
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u/theaveragenerd 7d ago
And that is what bothers me. It's things like that that they could have adapted from the comic but chose not to. They wouldn't have needed CGI budget for it either.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 7d ago
And they gave her a weaponer of qward outfit and did Jack and shit with it.
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u/RoadsidePicnik 7d ago
But they can save money on costumes and VFX while dressing the normal humans in clothes that are on the shelf at your local mall. Didn't you get your Supergirl KFC bucket?
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u/Merlin_the_gentil 7d ago
How fucking hated the "Human disguise". I rather prefer painted humans and bad CGI. See Doctor who or Star trek.
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u/Suspicious-Hotel8092 7d ago
The beauty of both Who and Trek is that the budget varies so wildly from episode to episode that one day you’re looking at a fairly realistic and convincing alien creature and then next week it’s the tin foil man’s turn in the spotlight
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u/TatterMail 7d ago
I can’t get over that stupid bomb countdown, beeping like it’s some bugs bunny cartoon
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u/PrepotenteDeLaRosa 7d ago
100%. As soon as they mentioned that there are a number of species who cna take human form, I knew the whole show would be like that. It's cheap and disappointing. Can't convince me otherwise.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 7d ago
The sad thing is it wasn't even cheap. They just did it cus they were ashamed of making a comic book show.
They clearly just wanted to make a police procedural and tacked on the green lantern stuff after the main script was finished.
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u/mega512 7d ago
It's a cop out when they do this. Just show some aliens, This is GL ffs.
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u/TitanX11 7d ago
They did. Sinestro lol. Red paint
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u/TheCrazedEB 7d ago
I was expecting a Men in Black scenario with Aliens taking human disguises, then revealing their true forms once the jig was up. But instead we got the same CW level of limitation human disguises, just with HBO-quality cinematography and post-editing. Soon as the 1st Guardian appeared in Human form, I sighed, then she showed 9 seconds of her true form from the back, then quickly transitioned back. From there on, I knew we were cooked.
We still never got to see a Man Hunter's true form too. Like... cmon.
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u/Accomplished_Store77 7d ago
CW shows were cheap and melodramatic as fuck but atleast give them credit for trying.
CW gave you a literal Shark man. And a Talking Genius Gorilla.
As cheap as those shows were they were never afraid to put wierd looking shit on screen.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 7d ago
This is what the CW gave us.
Let's be fair to them, they fucking went for it and when they had the budget they didn't miss.
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u/a89925619 7d ago
Come on. You know that if it’s the CW, we would have gotten a 30 seconds fight scene with a Man Hunter in it’s true form
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u/temporaryidiot595 7d ago
Let’s give the CW some credit. The first 2 seasons of Arrow and the Flash had some of the deepest choreography/action sequencing you can see movies or television (in fights that mattered).
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u/a89925619 6d ago
I am a big arrowverse fan myself. The original comment meant to say that the CW shows did usually try to give us these things (sometimes in a limited extend) despite the limited budget.
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u/postulate4 7d ago
Today, we have HBO giving us a one-sided 10 second fight scene with a Man Hunter in its human form.
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u/ninthguest 7d ago
I 100% agree. Bring on the prosthetics. They weren't afraid to suit up aliens in the CW shows. Kind of odd that they'd steer away from them, and I do believe its due to keeping costs low.
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u/kyp-the-laughing-man 7d ago
The butterflys are okay because we saw their alien form and the 'transformation'. I loved how body horror that was. So they are not just some abstrakt, unseren alien thats just a human. They felt way cooler to me
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u/zorobreath 7d ago
It's the cheapest way to have aliens in the show and I hate it
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u/InspiredNameHere 7d ago
This is when I really miss Farscape. They weren't afraid to have full non human aliens show up plenty of times.
Sure, the main aloens were humans in colored paint, but Pilot and Sparky were puppets just fine.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 7d ago
Even the colored painted humans were still weird usually, had strange and different customs. Hell they even just color shifted the film in one episode so the trees looked blue. Cheesy but so cool too
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u/ObligationIll2271 7d ago
Don’t get your hopes up. The Paramount merger hinted at lower budgets for DC projects, so we’ll either get very few aliens or CW level aliens.
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u/Fares26597 7d ago
And if they do aliens disguised as humans, just please don't put them in sleek black "tactical" outfits as if that's gonna make them seem more interesting. If anything, it has the opposite effect.
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u/Kolchak2099 7d ago
Yes, this a thousand times. It's not clever and it just makes the show seem embarrassed by the source material
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u/Trekman10 6d ago
Y'all are so spoiled now smh. I was raised on star trek and the human looking aliens mattered less than the plot, story, characters, etc
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u/Atmosphere_Master 6d ago
Because you didn't have a better option, Men in Black has better looking aliens than Star Trek and it's a goofy comedy for families
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u/Trekman10 5d ago
You're just illustrating my point. It's not "better" just because the aliens look cooler.
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u/Neptune_as_Boy 5d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, but you can see how a property that deals with aliens not bothering to have even one alien design can be a bit disappointing for some people, right?
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u/sies1221 5d ago
Star Trek had fucking aliens in it. So what if they were bipedal, they put some effort into making them aliens. They also were in space, and went on cool adventures.
They didn’t hang out in some podunk town fucking around without using all their cool shit for eight episodes
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u/Extension-Humor4281 5d ago
Star Trek had aliens with prosthetic features every few episodes. Meanwhile this supposedly high quality HBO show couldn't even afford to put prosthetic ears on sinestro.
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u/Ok_Simple_459 4d ago
Rumor has it DC had Ulrich Thomsen on a diet exclusively of beets so that he naturally turn pink. Saving them a fortune on the makeup department.
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u/Junior-Ad-2207 6d ago
if you give them CGI they are just going to complain about how awful it looks
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u/NanaDTio 7d ago
They got away with it this time, but after all the feedback they’d just be dumb to keep doing it.
There are humans, and many naturally human-passing aliens. But for the ones that aren’t, “human form”ing them everytime feels like the Fox “black leather” XMen. Like no I would really prefer the yellow spandex
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u/One-Recognition5807 7d ago
Yep like I get it if it's oh your hiding but why did the rest of the aliens that were gonna nuke have to look human Honestly if wasn't for sinsetro has to look a certain way I swear he'd look human too
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u/Desperate-Network990 7d ago
correct me if i ma wrong this was earth, aliens were suppose to hide their identity. In contrast how would you say Loki did with their multiversal portrayal while all characters being human? Does that require criticism. I mean from ur perspective it does.
I dont mind i love both series i adore them. Its the story which matters to me and its the viewership which matters to show, and lanters blew up, its like the biggest show this year till now.
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u/MoMo-D-Tempest 7d ago
Especially Cw live action dc comic shows are most known for it. saves time and money. But less exciting especially the cw lowest budget cgi or they make them completely human looking cw just lazy and doesn’t care for make up artistry and accuracy In majority of shows.
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u/An-29 7d ago
In defense of CW, they really did not have a big budget loaded to have full CGI aliens appear all the time. They were still in that TV show budget.
But even then, they still actually tried to show the aliens when it is needed and not have them human the entire time. Sure it didn't look great all the time, but looking at Lanterns, they still would've gotten flak if they went with the full human appearance for alien route, so at least they tried to show the aliens with what CGI they could.
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u/RuneKnight3 6d ago
The issue isn't aliens in human form or even humanoid aliens. The issue is that DC is so risk and expense adverse that they are proclaiming these shows as tentpole, that they will spare no expense to make them awesome, and then spare every expense doing anything with them. You look at shows from thirty years ago or more and with a sound stage and some putty they created full species and fantastic environments, but today they want to film in Wyoming, claim its Nebraska, and THEN not do anything interesting with the theoretically saved budget of filming in small town America.
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u/Neptune_as_Boy 5d ago
I watched Firefly last year and it was kinda suprising that most of the time I didn't think about the lack of budget at all. Like yeah, when there was an effects shot it didn't look movie level, but it didn't really took me out of it.
I guess my opinions is they should have went for it in Lanterns. Yeah, there's a risk some of the audience will say "This doesn't look good". But at least you would have fulfilled the implied promise that the Lanterns show would have Green Lantern stuff in it.
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u/evileyejosie 7d ago
this entire reddit thread proves nobody watched Supergirl. cuz that movie had tons of unique looking alien.
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u/Sycopathy 5d ago
It literally scopes the conversation in the title to 'shows' in the DCU why would Supergirl be relevant? Superman also had unique looking aliens in it but they are movies, so outside the scope of the thread topic.
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u/RockAndStoner69 6d ago
Yeah, they were kinda cool. But it got to the point where they were just a string of humanoid forms in masks. Get too many different custumes and it breaks the immersion.
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u/ksee_yen 7d ago
Aliens we didn't care about. The point of this post is that we actually liked these characters but they were just people. This is not how superhero stuff are supposed to be made. One or two projects ok fine, but this is happening way too many times
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u/osi4000 7d ago
I don't get this complaint, the aliens in the show are trying to keep themselves hidden and avoid discovery, why wouldn't they blend in with society and look like regular humans? Only point about this that I can sort of agree with, is that I wish we got to see Zoe's true form when she died.
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u/Hayabusafield77 7d ago
This would be fine if they ever revealed their true alien form at any point
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u/Zero-meia 7d ago
Not one single chase of an Alien looking like an Alien while using the ring hurt me, honestly. I overall liked the show and its direction, narrative wise. But as I keep thinking about it the worse it is getting. Still a lot of "potential" but damn, to finish a whole season with this feel kind sucks.
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u/blackdragon1029 7d ago
Face Off that Syfy show showed you can make a lot of cool stuff with make up. Even if you don't go crazy with it like kilowog you can still make humanoid aliens. Katma tui is just a basic purple person. Make people orange and give them some make up. Give them tusks
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u/Turbulent_Safe1983 7d ago
It’s my issue with making a bunch of shows for the universe. They’ve got more in development but a seasonal series is too limited compared to a movie
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u/20Derek22 5d ago
It’s there whole thing at this point. Look at Supergirl. Set in space on alien worlds and half the alien designs were at the level of put pointy ears on them.
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u/temporaryidiot595 7d ago edited 7d ago
The fucking CW with the Dominators managed to do decent fully CG aliens across three or four shows in a single pay period on an $11 budget while paying three different show leads. Before 2021.
Buffy had full face vampires in the first episode. STARGATE ATLANTIS HAD DOZENS OF FULL COSTUME ALIENS A SEASON.
I’m thinking this man. HBO hasn’t ever dipped its toes in sci-fi and their costume/vfx departments weren’t deep enough to accommodate.
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u/Obsidian_Wulf 7d ago
If you would have told me that this wasn’t a green lantern show, and was instead just a spy thriller with a good cast, based on these photos alone I would believe you simply because they’re all in human disguises.
I feel like TBTB saw how bad the Green Lantern movie did and swung SO FAR in the other direction as far as creativity is concerned that they lost the thing that helps make green lantern green lantern, to me at least.
This show was grounded on earth, to its detriment, because of budget I feel. And you can tell.
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u/One_Spoopy_Potato 6d ago
It was also filmed on a budget of half a ham sandwich and a shoe string.
And they wanted the shoe string back.
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u/Splerry 7d ago
Yall, the last time DC did a live action green lantern it was packed full of constructs and aliens and was ABYSMAL. Yall claimed it had no story focus and was too reliant on spectacle. So they did the opposite and proved GL can work without spectacle and can have a great nuanced story. This was Gunn proving to DC that GL can work, give it a moment to have a massive budget and big action scenes now that they know there is demand for it in a world that people approve of.
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u/fromidable 5d ago
Of course, they wanted this to be a mystery, which would have been a bit harder if we knew who the aliens were. But, I think we’re deep enough into the DCU to see a few actual non-human looking aliens hanging out.
I really hope they go for more weird shit soon. If anything, Damon Lindelof has shown in the past that you can mix it into grounded effectively. Or, you know, just show the afterlife as some generic hotel.
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u/tryswanson 7d ago
Saw a ton of alien looking aliens in Supergirl
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u/Ophelia_Yummy 7d ago
While yes, but all of them are straight out of Guardians of Galaxy…not one original design in that movie
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u/RoadsidePicnik 7d ago
Supergirl used GenAI for everything. That feels like an unfair comparison to Guardians of the Galaxy and all the hard work on that movie.
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u/MDrok6172 7d ago
AI doesn't truly create. It takes wxisting things and Frankensteins them together. AI was probably inspired by GotG
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u/kyoka_suigetsu91 7d ago
Those were some of the worst looking aliens I ever seen lol and I'm not talking about the vfx I'm talking about the designs... But that's probably just my opinion
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u/Serious-Company6803 7d ago
They looked super weird for sure, and like you said it was the design, not the vfx. Supergirl made Guardians of the Galaxy look good.
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u/kyoka_suigetsu91 7d ago
Lol exactly I guess they were trying to make them look unique but I wasn't feeling most of them but wtf do I know? I guess that's probably the best they could do 🤷🏾♂️
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u/smilinganimalface 7d ago
To be fair with Lanterns, I felt like part of it was in the interest of keeping up a mystery of who could be what given the nature of the mysteries they were unraveling. Like with Penguin, I think it is very reasonable no matter the budget for them to get people in makeup and prosthetics and be able to wholly transform them. I guess we will see in S2.
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u/Batman1997123 7d ago
What’s annoying to me tho is how convenient it was for this show.
Superman and Supergirl showed aliens that actually looked like aliens but in Lanterns, 3 of the 4 alien species they showed just so happen to have human disguises.
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u/xubax 7d ago
Well, the story would be very different if they didn't blend in, wouldn't it?
"There's a manhunt here in town, I wonder who it is? Oh, look, there it is."
It sounds like you want a different story.
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u/Capable-Locksmith-13 7d ago
You do understand you can have both right? You can have aliens disguised as humans for the purpose of them blending in and also have aliens who appear as themselves?
What we wanted was a better show that didn't require its fans to come up with a million different excuses for all the bad choices the writers made.
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u/xubax 7d ago
Okay, so what aliens in this story should have shown up as themselves but didn't?
Sinestro showed up as himself.
Again, sounds like you wanted a different story. A story about aliens who were out in the open?
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u/Capable-Locksmith-13 7d ago
When Antaan is relaying the story of his people we could have been shown scenes of their world. We could have had scenes of the Manhunter on different worlds, adopting different looks. This isn't hard.
It's a shame that I have to hold your hand and explain to you how the creators of a show about intergalactic cops failed at exploring the intergalactic part. The fact is the creators going out of their way to not be creative is just stupid.
Stop making excuses for bad creative choices by people ashamed of the IP they were adapting. I didn't want a different show. I wanted this one to be better.
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u/xubax 7d ago
LOL
it's a shame you can't accept a piece of work that someone else has done without complaining that it's not what you would have done.
ROFLMAO
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u/Commercial-Lychee700 7d ago
It made total sense and was stylistically and tonally appropriate for lanterns. It would have been terrible to have weirdo aliens in this season. You want something other than this show, that's not a flaw of the show, that's just you wanting a different genre of media.
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u/diwamatkar 7d ago
I was okay with mern because we do see their alien counterpart. But wtf were they doing with aliens in Lanterns?
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u/Antec0231 7d ago
I really thought we were done with this kind of stupidity. Feels very early 2000’s Smallville. If they don’t have the budget to do it right then write it differently with a different character. So annoying.
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u/Expensive_Ad_8933 6d ago
while I do agree with you, I must say that on Lanterns specifically it was well justified. Like, the whole point is that they're all aliens trying to camouflage as humans. Sure, they could've done something like MIB, but I don't think it's all that relevant to this specific series.
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u/Mrpoindexter007 3d ago
Peacemaker gets a pass since we got to see their original form and they showed plenty of other aliens
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u/baghead_22 2d ago
The guardians is the only one that is a bit egregious, the rest from lanterns literally just needed a line or two saying that they're part of one of the dozen human looking aliens in the DC universe.
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u/Quixotic_Cowboy 7d ago
It is called having a budget that is blown on overpriced actors.
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u/GroundbreakingAsk468 7d ago
I’m not sure why people are blaming the budget. The budget for 8 episodes of Lanterns was $152 million. The budget for House Of The Dragon for 10 episodes was $200 million.
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u/New_Cockroach_505 7d ago
Lanterns budget was 100m with a 20m tax break (I’m assuming the 100m was before the break), so it was either 80-100m. That’s not a lot.
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u/GroundbreakingAsk468 7d ago
Everything on google says it’s $130. Nowhere is it as low as $100.
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u/New_Cockroach_505 7d ago
https://film.ca.gov/film-and-television-tax-credit-program-approved-projects-list/
Check the website yourself. Search “Latitude”, its shooting name.
104m was its expenditures. 20m was its credit. Seems people just combined the two. Based off the wording you should be subtracting the credit or ignoring it.
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u/RoadsidePicnik 7d ago
Hoult only got $3 million for Superman (2025) and I think he was the highest paid actor.
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u/Temporary_Target_777 7d ago
No no, this type of critism isn't allowed about the show about space cops that patrol entire sectors of space where everyone is a human on earth, even the aliens.
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u/InfiniteHorizon23 6d ago
So lazy. Shows with a tenth of the budget looked more premium, I don't want to hear budget talk from anybody.
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u/Baxxtabb 7d ago
Lmao, do you not understand the concept that they're getting to blend in? How the hell would an alien blend in if they don't appear human? Come on now. It's common sense.
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u/Resident-Mixture-237 7d ago
The manhunter could be anyone.
*cuts to 7 ft tall red and white robot
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u/Secret-Put-4525 7d ago
Sure disguise yourself. But you shouldn't rob the audience of seeing them in their alien form.
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u/Resident-Mixture-237 7d ago
Well we do see the butterflies’ true form. We get a glimpse of the guardians. At what point of the story would the other 2 make sense to drop their disguise? Anton and his groups whole thing was sneaking into the town. Zoe’s whole thing was looking weak and defenseless to manipulate people. The second she turns into a giant robot no one would hesitate to kill her.
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u/Secret-Put-4525 7d ago
She should have transformed when she started killing. Anton should have tranformed when they attacked the compound. They didn't do it because they disdain the source material.
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u/Resident-Mixture-237 7d ago
It wouldn’t make sense for her to transform then. The second she transformed into a giant robot the town would turn on her. Part of her manipulation is her appearance. The second she turn into a robot John would have no issue shorting her and she stops blending into big crowds so she’d be easier for Hal to find. Anton makes some sense, but you would have gotten like less than 2 minutes of a guy in blue skin and you would have complained about that too.
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u/Capable-Locksmith-13 7d ago
They didn't have to show her transforming in front of the townspeople. She could have just appeared in her true form, and nobody would have been any wiser. They only knew her as Zoe so it's not like they would suspect that she's the giant robot. Stop making excuses for the creators bad decisions.
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u/Resident-Mixture-237 7d ago
Again the goal was to protect herself. Hal would have found her immediately. The town would have turned on her the second she turned frightening looking and John would have killer her a lot easier. Her transforming makes 0 sense for the story.
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u/Capable-Locksmith-13 7d ago
It's almost like you didn't read what I wrote.
I said she didn't have to transform in front of the townspeople. There are numerous ways they could have showcased her true form without revealing it to the townspeople. They could have shown it in a flashback.
The fact is the creators just didn't want to and now everybody has to come up with an excuse for why it was secretly genius for them not to do so.
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u/Resident-Mixture-237 7d ago
So you’re solution is to have a random scene where she transforms for no reason whatsoever behind closed doors so we can see her robot form. You do remember for like half the show we didn’t know she was the manhunter?
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u/Respwn_546 7d ago
I think it could have been solved with some prostetic and make up, only a few scenes would have been enough and I doubt it would have cost that much
Show me a green, blue, red guy and I'm mostly sold
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u/Trajen_Geta 7d ago
It’s kinda sad, but practical makeup can work wonders and won’t blow a budget like cgi.
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u/TheHammy_Sammich 7d ago
As much as I loved the season, it needs to be campier- like MIB but with lanterns or John and Halogram
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u/Chumlee1917 7d ago
It’s either spend a fortune on prosthetics that torture the actor or spend a fortune on CGI They chose the cheapest way
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u/g4n0esp4r4n 7d ago
they are on earth they don't need to look different from humans, it isn't a big deal.
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u/Awesome_Hamster 7d ago
I know right! Sinistro is the worst. It's clearly just a dude covered in purple makeup. 😠
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u/Micktrex 7d ago
This why I got so bored of Supernatural. A few monsters looking like humans with sharp teeth/claws and weird eyes is fine. But when everything is basically some variation of that it gets really stale after 14 seasons or whatever it ended up being. It was popular enough for that many seasons but the budget never improved? Okay, CW.
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u/SarcyBoi41 7d ago
Yeah. If they're gonna use shapeshifting aliens, they should at least have them shapeshift into Martha Kent for literally no reason.
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u/chronobolt77 7d ago
All of the aliens wearing human form make sense to me except the Guardian(s). Like, you're just blue and have weird proportions. What's hard to comprehend about that?
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u/darkjuste 7d ago
How is it that when I said it when the show was running I got downvoted to next Tuesday and now suddenly Lanterns criticism is ok?
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u/Batman1997123 7d ago
What’s wild about Lanterns is that those were most likely creative choices rather than a budget thing.
It’s been shown with Peacemaker and Watchmen that HBO could definitely adapt big sci fi moments in these DC shows but it was hardly there for Lanterns which shows that the whole “alien disguised as humans” thing was a creative choice from the showrunners.