Are y’all positive that the crew in the original Alien director’s cut were being turned into eggs by the pods? I didn’t get that impression from it at all. I thought they were just being immobilized/pre-digested as hosts for any new face-huggers that showed up.
Why a single alien would expect to get access to a bunch of eggs & facehuggers, I didn’t know, but I didn’t think they were actually getting turned into eggs.
It was pretty tough to see until a high quality print like the DVD was available, but Brett is definitely turning into an egg. The link I posted a couple messages back has some good stills, as does the bonus material on the DVD. But if that isn’t enough to convince you, Ridley Scott voiced this on the commentary track:
Again, not trying to mess with the “Official” Alien universe because it’s cool as it stands, but the original alien life cycle was very original and the scene where Ripley finds her crewmates turning into slimy blobs was very creepy and effective. It’s a fate worse than death – Dallas is DEFINITELY not feeling good as his body slowly overcome and he’s still able to comprehend what is happening to him.
EZ
If you listen to the director’s commentary, as well as read the book adaptatioin of Alien, and look up several other sources with descriptions of the scene, you’ll know that, yes indeedy, the others are being turned into eggs and not just cacooned for later impregnation. It does sound a little silly, but makes a lot of sense in the scheme of things, and is rather interesting. One thing I always wondered was “What does the alien do with all the dead, because they obviously don’t eat them.” Xenomorph are apparently able to just survive and grow without eating. Or if they do eat, I have no idea what they eat, because all the dead we’ve ever seen haven’t been eaten…just impaled, torn apart, and cacooned. The idea of the Queen makes for some pretty interesting and neat little story advances, but the concept that a lone drone could start to create it’s own hive if completely separated from a queen is pretty damn creepy, and I think could have been used as a great set up for the fourth Alien movie that the stupid shit they did come up with (think how many eggs they could have wandered across while cleaning up the prison planet from Alien 3 if they kept that little ability? No need for clones, Ripley, or a silly cross breed and stupid “Newborn”).
I also read in a few places that Scott's idea of the xenomorph (not necessarily O'Bannon's, though) was that the xenomorph were designed by an alien race that would deposite them on a foriegn planet to destroy all life on said planet. Then, once that was achieved, they would push a button, and all the xenomorph would up and die, and then the masters could use up all the resources un-contested.
The thing that I want to know is, when are we going to see the “warrior” caste again? Cameron’s vision of the xenomorph is one of the strongest and long lasting (with the queen, and pretty much every comic adaptation since has had the rigid headed aliens), yet Aliens is the only movie where the xenomorph didn’t have smooth heads. Personally, I like the smooth headed look best, but the rigid skull did have an interesting appeal. I wonder why noone else has thought to use it in any of the films.
Trying to reconstruct a reasonable life cycle from a series of movies (that have the goal of constantly interesting the watcher with new details) is pretty hopeless. Look at the Graboids in Tremors, fer cryin’ out loud! Interesting, but absurd.
That pretty much sums up the Alien lifecycle, too.
I’ve always suspected that O’Bannon derived his ideas not from nature, but from previous SF and SF movies. The original movie Alien owes a lot to Jerome Bixby’s underappreciated 1950s SF flick It! The Terror from Beyond Space, in which a monster gets aboard a space ship, gets about through the ventilation shafts, picks off the members of the team one by one, and is ultimately killed when they open the hatch to space. Bixby, in turn, must have been at least influenced by A.E#. Van Vogt’s short story “Black Destroyer”, AFAIK, the first treatment of the Monster Aboard the Space Ship. Black Destroyer was ultimately incorporated into a novel, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. One of the other stories worked into that novel was van Vogt’s “Discord in Scarlet”, which featured another monstere aboard a spaceship. This one laid eggs in the bodies of the crewmen. O’Bannon may have gotten his idea from this, or from a 1950s Corman flick, Night of the Blood Beast, a cheapie and none too bright (it was spoofed on MST3K), but which had the glimmer of a bright idea with the seahorse-shaped embryos of the monster implanted in the crewman.
(I should note, as well, that a couple of visual elements for Alien seem to come from Mario Bava’s Planet of Vampires – derelect alien starship on stormy planet, huge skeleton of previous occupant still in chair, etc.)
It seems clear to me that they thgrew a lot of ideas around in pre-production for Alien, and they never quite clicked. There are siome interesting pre-Giger drawings that show a very different alien ship, and a “temple” with hierogluphics housing the alien egg. (Giger himself later took a turn at the hieroglyphic slab showing the Alien life-cycle). So originally the Alien was apparently associated in some way with the aliens who ran the starship, either the same species or a symbiote or something. Later they changed this to having the Alien as some sort of predator species that invaded the crashed starshgip, and all the hieroglyphic stuff was dropped. I got the impression that the Aliens were supposed to get some of their input from their host’s biology, but that idea seems to have been dropped, too.
In the film as we had it, with deleted scenes that made the “director’s cut”, we start out with eggs, then face-huggers, then embryos, then aliens, which can directly place embryos in victims. There was no suggestion that the adult aliens could produce eggs. I sorta got the idea that they didn’t think this through at the time, and that any commentary now is hindsight and retroconning. (It’s like the 1978 Kaufman version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – at first the aliens are light seeds that fall to earth unnoticed. But later on, for no good reason, they’re big can’t-miss-'em pods.)
So I think Cameron and the other writers were completely within their rights by positing an Alien Queen Mother to lay the eggs. Makes sense to me. But there was no reason to expect later writers and directors to toe this line. Everybody wants to make up their own mythology.
Don’t. Get. Me. Started.
Perhaps the slime wasn’t turning Dallas into an egg. Maybe the alien kept going back to them and shaped and contained there putrifying nutrients into a makeshift egg case, made solid with their ‘secreted resin’('cos in that scene there is a whole lot of resin on the walls and all around the ‘eggs’). Once the heads had disolved the alien could have closed the egg over and because there was no queen pheromone in the warriors body this may have allowed them to inject the ‘egg’ with face-hugger DNA or embryonic cells. Perhaps the only thing that stops an alien from turning into a queen, is the presence of another queen (who maybe sprays them with hormone every couple of days.
I posit that watching the full grown alien spinning resin around an awake Dallas and poking him to ‘see if he is done yet’ would be the scariest scene ever.
She’s bad-ass, man. I mean [holds fingers about two inches apart] BIG!
The scene in Aliens where they hold their little conference always struck me as beeng too obviously expositional (“let’s figure out what we’re dealing with”), and a more likely use of the marines’ time would be to catch some sleep. Had that scene been just Ripley and Bishop, it would have worked better:
Bishop: [continuing to dissect facehugger] Magnificent.
Ripley: [walks up, shudders at Bishop’s work] These things come from eggs, right?
Bishop: Yes.
Ripley: Well, what’s laying these eggs?
Bishop: I’m not sure. A queen? It must be something we haven’t seen yet.
Look, if you have an MPEG veiwer, you can find a video clip demonstrating the whole process at this page: http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/video1.html Just scroll down to the middle of the page and click on “Reproduction Cycle” – just below “Sister Suzie the Floozie” and just above “Hatestang.”
Here’s a great site with a lot of information on deleted scenes and the like from the first 3 alien films:
In the section on Alien, it shows a couple conception sketches that talk about how, originally, the crew were supposed to find a diagram or sorts on the craft showing a pyramid, and then see said pyramid off in the distance. After treking over to it, it was here that they were supposed to find the egg chamber. This would make the story more that the derilict had crashed and encountered the xenomorph on this planet for the first time, therefore making LV406 the xenomorphs homeworld. But due to time and budget constraints, they ditched that idea.