Where are all the cool alien movies and TV shows?
After re-watching the absolute masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), I was in awe. This got me thinking a lot about aliens, and it seems to me that that is an area where movies and TV shows have been lacking in recent years.
When I say "aliens", I mean something truly alien, foreign, mind-bending, even terrifying (although I'm not very fond of horror) -- so not the tame, often humanoid extraterrestrials that we fully understand, like you usually see in Star Trek and Trek-like shows. But rather stories of contact that make us rethink the boundaries of existence.
A recent movie that touches on that was 2016's Arrival, which has more than one similarity with Close Encounters.... Another is Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
I realise you've asked in ~movies, but if you're a reader, I would like to recommend The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Both are very readable sci-fi romps, which directly deal with the question of interaction with other sentient species in very interesting and quite different ways. Without getting too much into spoilers, Chambers' book reads a little like a cross between Firefly and Mass Effect, with a ragtag crew of aliens making a journey across space. The crew contains a variety of different species as well as humans, and the protagonist has the opportunity to get to know all of them over the course of the book, giving the reader a great opportunity to explore other minds. Tchaikovsky on the other hand is somewhere in between Battlestar Galactica and a David Attenborough documentary. There are two timelines and stories occurring at once which are dead set on a collision course. This book alternates between the perspective of the "aliens" and of the humans. It's definitely my favourite of the two, as it raises some really interesting ideas seen through the lense of a dying human race and through the eyes of a thriving alien society. Both books involve artificial intelligences quite heavily as well, and the exploration of consciousness and perception continues from this angle too.
Both are two of my favourite books, and I wholeheartedly recommend them. There are sequels to each, which I found a little less exciting than the first in both series, but the sequels also do a good job of continuing to play around with these ideas and throwing new challenges into the mix.
I think sometimes these sorts of story can be really difficult to tell in the visual medium, particularly if your question is about the nature of consciousness and what it might mean to interact with beings whose conceptualisation of the universe is completely different to ours. They can often fall foul of telling instead of showing, but that's only because showing can be so tricky to do in a way which brings enough viewers along to understand what's happening. I'm not saying that books are the perfect medium for this sort of story at all. OP and comments both list some great examples of alien stories in cinema and TV done right. But with books you get the extra context of a narrator and internal monologues, which can fill in the blanks a lot more easily, and sometimes more engagingly than can a character explaining something on screen.
The Expanse starts out solid, then gradually devolves into space opera ... still good, but increasingly disappointing. But one of the core plot points revolves around a very interesting, fairly original, probably alien ... something.
I recently finished a binge of The Expanse. I second this comment, and would even go so far as to say that seasons 5 and 6 simply are not worth watching - it barely has anything to do with seasons 1-4. The thing that grabbed me about the show is this original something, which the last two seasons almost don't even mention.
I couldn't ever get past the first few episodes of the The Expanse. Not one of the characters felt likeable to me, or at least not enough to compel me to keep watching. I found the world-building very cool, and it came off as very realistic, which I appreciated. But you can't base a show entirely on world-building, and after like 5 episodes I still didn't care a jot about any of the characters, and gave up.
Oh I felt the same way. Couldn't get into it the first time around - awful characters, but I did start to like some of them once things got going. It unfortunately takes way too long for it to get going. I also never felt that it gets as good as its reputation would have one believe - I have no idea how some people rate it as the best TV series/sci-fi series there is. While it gets better in season 2 and 3, there is always a certain amount of soap opera between characters, to the point that I would never actually recommend this show to anyone. The awful inter-personal drama only becomes so much worse in the last seasons. It's really not that good of a series
Nails it on the head for what I also felt. The Expanse began with the feeling that grand cosmic wheels were in motion, and people were powerless to stop them — and we got to watch where the wheels would roll.
Then it became an inter-personal drama about one family's mommy-daddy-son issues, which was... not interesting.
I wish they'd get more surreal and otherworldly and not just horror-themed (though I loved horror-themed ones as well; I'll take what I can get).
I love Annihilation's idea of something prismatic bending light, time, and life together of everything that goes within inside it.
And I know the movie wasn't very good to most people's standards, but the book Birdbox throws out a theory, which I liked, that the things driving everyone mad were just aliens from another dimension clumsily wandering through our world and driving everyone mad who gazes on them.
And then there's Solaris. The idea that, if we encountered an alien, we wouldn't know it/it's nothing like anything we know.
I didn't know about Annihilation, but I really liked Ex Machina, so that is definitely on the list now!
I saw some of Birdbox, but it felt subpar. Maybe I'll finish it.
Tarkovski's Solaris (1973) is a masterpiece, not exactly about aliens if I remember correctly. I haven't seen Steven Soderbergh's take (Solaris, 2022). Which one are you talking about?
I've only seen Soderbergh's Solaris, which if I'm being honest was meh, but I appreciated what he was going for/love alien premises too much to say I disliked it.
I will someday see the 1973 version. It's in the queue!
I will watch the new one as well!
I strongly recommend the first Solaris, it was made by Andrej Tarkovski, a Russian master that often dealt with heavy symbolism, mysticism, neo-platonism, and Christian Esoterism. He was not a stranger to weirdness, I'll tell you that! I also recommend his other science fiction masterpiece, 1979's Stalker.
Color Out of Space (2019) might fit the bill, but If you don't like horror it might not be your cup of tea. Also got A Quiet Place (and its sequel), Underwater (2020, technically not aliens, but had some cool Lovecraftian vibes), Love and Monsters (2020, think Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland but with giant mutated creatures instead of zombies). Then there's Alien: Covenant, all the Godzilla/Kong movies, Bumblebee, The Shape of Water, a couple Predator movies (including the recent Prey). And I'm also pretty sure there have been two Tremors movies put out since Arrival. There are 7 in total now plus a TV series and I love them all... Does that make me a terrible person?
I'll second both Color Out of Space and Underwater. They're both great flicks. While you did mention Underwater isn't really a movie about aliens I think it's still worth OP's time because it's very much in the spirit of what they're looking for.
What you're after is rare for scifi, doesn't get made often because it's considered 'too smart' for audiences to follow. Those films are lucky to break even when it's time to count coppers, so smart contact stories are more common in books. I can think of a couple films that might tickle your fancy, though. Other comments have already plugged most of what's out there.
If you haven't seen 2001 and 2010 yet, do put those on the top of your watch list.
Jordan Peele's new film Nope came out last month and is a contact story that was very much inspired by Close Encounters, among others of the genre. Like all of Peele's films, it is also something else.
I really enjoyed the film and would recommend seeing it on a big screen.
Under the Skin is superb.
2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind.
I was looking around the Dust Shortfilm YouTube channel, and I saw this gem called FTL, that meets your expectations on odd eldritch creatures from space. Probably some other stuff on the channel that will catch your interests as well.
Seconded. Dust is a gold mine. Mountains of scifi shorts, some suck, others will blow your mind in 15 minutes. I'd say you'll find more engaging, thought-provoking stuff digging through their archives than exists in the sum total of film and television combined.