I don’t think they are evolved to live perfectly off humans, they are evolved to live perfectly off anything. No doubt they lived just as well off that “Navigator” species the crew of the Nostromo found (the thing strapped in the chair on the derelict ship where they originally found the eggs).
Yes…it was fired once to prevent Shatner from making another record or something.
“Xena can’t fly!!”
“I told you…I’m not Xena…I’m Lucy Lawless.”
Ok…back on track…
I would guess that the Aliens can eat pretty much anything…like billy goats. Metal, cables, garbage, whatever. They obviously have very different biologies from Earth creatures. Acid for blood that can disolve almost anything would make sense.
I guess the point is that we don’t really know what makes them grow. It’s scarier that way.
I think you’re all overlooking the obvious here.
Baby Bio.
I’ve never heard this before. A parrot? And digital additions of alien creatures in 1979?
There is a rumor that the actors were unaware of what was going to happen, but that’s somewhat inaccurate. They had been told generally of what the scene was going to be. Ridley Scott’s commentary on either the Legacy or Quadrilogy version describes this.
Lordy loo I feel old when people start talking as if Digital effects have been in film for a long time.
Ok, let’s get a few facts stright on your trivia. In 1979 there were no digital effects used in film, they were either optical effects or physical effects, such a puppets and make up.
The thing that burst from his chest was exactly what was seen on film, a slimey gooey puppet with an operator below the table forcing it through the fake stomach Mr Hurt had attached to him.
The actors saw a bit but not all of the preparations for the scene. The reaction was not to what burst out but how much fake blood and guts were sprayed at them once the camera rolled. They expected a lot less grew and none of it spraying at them.
Even if they had no idea anything was up their first hint would have been when they walked in to the set and saw the crew in rainslickers and the cameras covered in plastic.
Don’t believe me? Rent the latest edition of Alien (from the Quadrilogy set) and check out the suplemests. One of the documentaries has a good few minutes devoted to just that scene.
The facehugger requires a very humanoid creature to work - face, stomach, trachea, etc. How did it, inside the egg, know to jump exactly through the space helmet facemask, hug the face, get the ovipositor down the throat …
Each stage of the alien requires a digestion that can use human tissue.
All it really needed was something moist to shove its ovipositor down. It’s spider like shape means it can fit onto a wide variety of things – there’s nothing that says that if your ass was the first thing it got to it wouldn’t attach there instead.
Plus there’s nothing in any of the movies (even the crappy last two) that say exactly what the alien can or can’t digest.
Suurrreee…tell THAT to the folks over at ratemypoo.com!
The room with the dangling chains and the water wasn’t necessarily leaky… It’s actually one of the “wheel wells” for the Nostromo’s big lading gear. The “foot” has been folded up and has retracted up towards the ceiling, and it’s here that the Alien was hiding. (You can really only see this in the widescreen version.)
I always thought the water was the result of condensation. The big foot (and the whole compartment) was outside the ship in subfreezing temperatures while the Nostromo was on the ground. When pulled inside with the doors closed, water in the air would condense and possibly freeze and as it warmed up, would drip down into the chamber. Since there was no standing water (thanks to the omnipresent grooved flooring in sci fi movies) this water could be collected and reused by the ship.
OR – after being retracted into the ship, the landing gear gets hosed down by an automatic spray system to get rid of contaminates and it drip dries. Such a system might possibly be leaky with an old tug like the Nostromo, but again the water would likely be collected and recycled from the regular wash routine.
This is all conjecture, but I always liked how it seemed that some thought was put into the designs of the Alien universe…
EZ
Sorry, I don’t mean to hijack, but I’ve always had questions about the Aliens:
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On the planet Acheron, what is that giant humanoid thing? I believe some call it the pilot.
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How did the crew of the Nostromo know that it was a warning beacon?
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Am I seeing this correctly? Did the Aliens terraform their surroundings? It seemed that condensation and humidity increased like 134827% And, those scaly things seemed to be everywhere.
That’s fine, if you’re just wondering where it got its energy… But the question here is mass. If it had all the mass it needed when it burst out, then it would have already been full-sized. Unless it’s just really low-density when full-grown (which rather diminishes its terror), it had to have ingested something in the meanwhile. Not necessarily something which would give it energy, since maybe it had enough stored up in an alien, ultra-efficient equivalent of baby fat, but it had to eat something to give it its size. Metal might work here, even if it hadn’t been raiding the pantry.
Nah, it’s a dry heat!
The simplest explanation for all the seemingly nonsensical smoke and steam and whatnot is to keep the guys in the alien costumes from looking too silly and fake. The “secreted resin” along the walls in the gestation chamber is a mystery, though. Theimplication is that the aliens use it as natural camoflage (note the alien who blended in perfectly, grabbing Deitrich after she looked right past it) and lie in wait for more mammals/hosts to show up, which strikes me as unusually passive behaviour for such an aggressive species.
Well, I see ElectricZ beat me to it. It’s condensation forming on the landing gear after it was retracted from the very cold LV-426 surface. It’s still a hell of a lot of water, though. I guess they have amazing new anti-mold treatments in the future.
Maybe it ate some of the several hundred million tons of ore the Nostromo was hauling?
Well, it helps in defense of the hive, which some drones are obviously charged with. They seem to arrange “raiding parties” (been playing too much WoW) when they want more hosts, or discover a target-rich environment (they didn’t attack Ripley & Co. one at a time… they got EVERYONE to charge headlong into those autocannons!).
Yeah, the landing gear explanation works, so’s I retract my criticism, Governor.
I’d imagine spaceships would have pretty intensive atmospheric sensors, and have installed a few Living Air machines throughout the vessel to deal with fungal invasions. 
I stand corrected. Sorry…but I must have been whooshed by one of the actors as I vividly recall seeing an interview or commentary where they described this “trick” on the actors in great detail. I swear I am not delusional…and I remembered thinking what a cool story that was about the making of the film. I tried to Google for verification and came up with zip. I will never repeat the story, although I wish I could remember what show I was watching when they related it.
Whatever.
I retract that wonderful tidbit until I someday see in print where the hell I heard that story related.
IMO the simplest explanation is the one given in the movie: the hive is located directly beneath the atmosphere processes which is cracking the poisonous (presumably methane and sulfuric acid) atmosphere into an Earth type. That results in lots of gasses being exchanged via a lot of pipes and a lot of heat buildup from the fusion plant. I once had a rat gnaw through a PVC water pipe and that caused a mess, it’s hardly surprising that when a swarm of aliens decide to nest under an atmosphere processor you get a lot of pipes and insulation torn and blocked and that’s gonna lead to a shedload of steam and other gas escaping.
I always took the secreted resin to have precisely the same function as the resin secreted by bees, wasps and other colonial arthropods when they make nests in human structures. It’s not camoflague, it’s primarily sealant. It insulates the hive and allows control of the atmosphere as well as preventing hive parasites from getting into the eggs. When you have eggs the size of a wine barrel and a species like this the hive parasites are gonna be nasty SOBs so resin would have been essential for the survival of the species in its native environment.
As for the camouflage, if you see Alien3 you will notice that one manages to camouflage itself perfectly amongst some ordinary pipes while in Aliens the queen unwraps herself from the landing gear after three characters have looked at leats casually at the ship. The point is that these things are good at camouflaging themselves anywhere, the one that got Deitrich wasn’t doing anything special as a result of the resin.
There were no actual living Aliens there, only their eggs. Presumably there was a population of Aliens at one time – which is why all the beings on the ship have gaping exit wounds in their chests – but they starved to death after laying their eggs.
Your kidding right? You never heard of this movie?
Well yes, I mean what did the race of Aliens use for food before humans came along? Did they just eat every living thing on their planet then go into egg-bound hibernation waiting for passing spaceships?
The thing to keep in mind here is that LV-426 isn’t “their planet”. In Alien, only eggs are seen, and those are in a cargo room of a crashed spaceship, which leads to the assumption that the spaceship was delivering eggs from one unknown location to another unknown location and an outbreak occured, which caused the crash onto LV-426. No need for the aliens to eat anything, as only eggs in stasis existed.
The “alien homeworld”, if one exists, has never been seen or discussed in the movies.