The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.
And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever.
(Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
They infiltrating to investigate. It needn't be an endorsement of the practice.
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
The concept of meat isn’t foreign. Meat that’s sentient and has no cybernetic parts or phase is.
And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
And, ofc, in-drama logic; the beings (of silicon or whatever) are/were blending in with humans to study them.
In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.
I think the real reason is simply budget.
I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.
(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).
I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.
One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.
---
Perhaps the makers of the movie neglected to read the story before creating a script?
I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
I'm also a big fan. He's awesome in a bunch of things, but my favourite is Cain in Robocop 2. Such a great performance.
"Jesus had days like this. Hounded and attacked like a criminal. But like him, I don't blame you. They program you, and you do it"
"Frank. The Benzedrine's got my teeth wiggling. Cut it... Scopalomine, five mills per"
I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.