They only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you.
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.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
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.
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with!
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?
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.
Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn.
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.
Plus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical.
I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
I guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals.
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.
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
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.
