Plasticine aliens

Which two aliens? There's the giant alien "leader" with his spider-like limbs accompanied by the grand musical burst which scares the humans, and the lone alien who does the hand signals - those two?

I've just rewatched this movie in the Director's Cut, and yes, the HD definition really does bring out the problems with the first alien. In fact, I swear I can see the wires used to hold him up! The second alien is definitely animatronic or even stop-motion.

Then again, when we see Gillian taking photos of the crowds of aliens outside the ship, their eyes look human but over-sized, sometimes even cartoonish. The second alien mentioned above doesn't really look like them.

I don't know if you knew this, but I once saw a DVD extra on how they wanted the aliens to look when they came out of their ship, and they tried speeding them up, so they looked like human child-sized ANTS scurrying around at the speed real ants do. That idea was shot down FAST.

Well, they are the creations of the 'Visitor' mythos, whether you adhere to such things or no. You'd probably move like you were made of Plasticine, after whizzing around Venus a few times with some scared Swabbos and an annoying kid. Sorry. 'Alien' came out two years later, and 'Close Encounters' clearly isn't that kind of film.

As seen in 1977 I thought the special effects work for the aliens was good. It's just not possible to create ultra-realistic especially on a budget. That or a man in a rubber suit is just visual short hand for the viewer. Central casting does not have actual aliens to pass out on assignment to every movie and television series that wants one. For younger people just seeing CE please realize that back in 1977 there was not HD to make editing decisions over. I'm sure that 50 years into the future today's production techniques will look like crap to people of that time.