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-Do you believe that everyone who thinks it has a meaningful message is an idiot? That anyone who finds it beautiful is blind?

I think almost anything can have a meaningful message. I don't know about beautiful, I feel like making something beautiful is almost to easy. I'm not gonna call somebody an idiot for finding a valid message as long as they don't believe they are so smart for finding it. The same goes for beauty, beauty is in the eye of the beholder afterall isn't?

-What are you referring to by the 'athetic fallacy'? That he was not immortal? Are you sure he wasn't immortal? Would it change your opinion of the story if he was?

Pathetic fallacy is the human tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman objects. Perhaps it may suffer from that, but then again, the sentience of the alien is not stated. I do not believe that this technique figures in ImmorTall because I believe that the alien was sentient, but that's my opinion.

-What was the story?

What happens, as I understand it, is this:

An alien crashes in a rural area a la Superman, as suggested by the background, the grass, the trees. the fern, the flowers, the ladder and the apple tree, the adult male's clothing, the fence, the style of the house, the smoke from the chimney, the stumps, the bushes... The alien, controlled by the player, crawls out of the ship to an obstacle cause by its own descent over which he cannot climb. This bit is conjecture as the girl approaches the alien and pulls it up over the small "step". The girl becomes emotionally attached to the alien. The alien also grows, presumably in the way of Clifford the Big Red Dog or some other similar otherworldly growth pattern such as growing legs to mimic the indigenous inhabitants of the world.
They come across a boy, presumably the girl's brother. The boy feeds the alien an apple. The alien grows further and the boy proceeds to ride on the alien like in Danny and the Dinosaur. They come across two others who are presumably the boy's parents. The adults are alarmed and enter the house. The boy appears to sulkingly follow. (The boy appears to walk like that regardless.)
As the alien passes the house with the girl, the two others in front of the house earlier emerge. The woman feeds the alien a jar or jug or canister of something and the alien grows further. As they proceed onward (At this point it is still impossible to enter the ship.) A tree crashes and a plane flies overhead spewing smoke from its tail. Then appears a barbed wire obstacle in the background. The player is told to shield the family.
At this point, the alien can return to its ship and leave because, for some odd reason, the ground has changed in such a way that the previous obstacle is no longer there. If the player chooses to leave, the little girl starts to cry (emotional attachment) and the father starts waving his arms about above his head. By stepping back to the family, the older male stops waving his arms. By proceeding further, the girl stops crying. (emotional attachment)
By protecting the family, it becomes apparent that the alien also has superhuman speed (Superman, once again. either that or the game lags incredibly when the bomber and tank drop the bombs and launch the mortar because there is slow motion of projectiles and a lot of motion blur) and far greater stamina (in the RPG sense). By successfully protecting the family, the alien sacrifices its life and it begins to snow. The older female and the the young girl mourns its death. The older male and the boy walk off. (Will not touch the gender issue.) The older female walks off, but the girl lingers, but even as she leaves, she is no longer as chipper as she was, even during the war. She no longer skips.
Not protecting the family seems to have no consequence other than there being no one to mourn the death.
And with either ending, it ends with Live (forever immortal) A moral? A message? The meaning is context dependent and can go several ways. Immortal as he is immortal if he leaves and lives or immortal as he lives immortal within their hearts through sacrifice.

This leaves questions: Why is there an army there and why is the family following the alien into war zone? One could make assumptions but that requires far to much faith on the part of the story.

-Do you believe that everyone who thinks it has a meaningful message is an idiot? That anyone who finds it beautiful is blind?

I am more critical than the average person. I've watched far too many short films where the story was predictable and to my regret, sophomoric. The Oscar Wilde quote "All art is quite useless." comes to mind, but that may be another matter entirely. I agree with Reton8 on the delivery. The delivery is weak, almost bare-bones cliche spin-the-wheel to pick an emotional issue.

I'd have more reason to believe they were an idiot for not exploring the option of returning back to the ship.

-Would you go up to a family that lost a loved one in war and tell them that a story about someone sacrificing themselves to protect others is superficial?

I fully believe that a work of fiction is nothing more than a transmission of reality through the mind of its creator and not an actual reality. Yes, there are books and films that are moving and seemingly real. Art may be a reflection of reality, but it is not reality. Reality is not what's through a screen but what's beyond it. What is the sound of dripping water? underwater?

I'd link to a short film here, but it contains inflammatory content that would certainly derail this conversation. It is certainly emotional and moving, but I'd also say that certain aspects of that short film were superficial. Would I say it was superficial if it happened in real life? No. But it isn't Rodney King. It isn't the L.A. Riots. (It's not about the L.A. Riots but the film contains racial tensions.) It is a piece of fiction. By saying that, that is not to write off fiction as meaningless entirely, but to delimit the boundaries of what I perceive as effecting and evincing of reality.

The war in this story is a bad plot device, a stretch toward superficial emotional appeal. The war just exists to have conflict in the story. There is no reason that it could have not been a different threat. It isn't stark. It's meaningless like the random innocents that pop out from behind crates so you lose points in vidoe games.

-What are you referring to by the 'athetic fallacy'? That he was not immortal? Are you sure he wasn't immortal? Would it change your opinion of the story if he was?

The pathetic fallacy is in the weather reflecting the emotion of each stage, the change in the sky as the story progresses. It can be further ascribed to the alien, but that would require more conjecture than there are things to base that conjecture upon, as the player controls the alien's actions.

The background is imbued with color when the girl pulls the alien up and (this may be unintentional but subconsious) but the luminosity also increases as the alien is helped and fed, further indication that the sky reflects the emotional aspect. The color literally fades to gray as a battlefield appears. Then in one of the endings, it snows when he dies. Winter is a symbol of death and this reflects the emotional aspect of the weather. However, it does not snow when he leaves (but it does leave when he arrives /pun). It, however, whites out to the end screen as with any ending.