I’ve only seen Prometheus, but my impression was that the engineers had created the xenomorphs (and humans) some time ago, and then gone into decline/extinction. (The one David fights in Prometheus was in stasis, IIRC?) My point being, the xenomorphs have had centuries, if not millennia, of not having their lives micromanaged by engineers, and would have had time to start evolving a culture on their own.
In the first movie, the alien hides in the escape pod, and doesn’t reveal itself until the pod has launched away from the self-destructing ship. Could have just been a fortunate coincidence for the alien, of course. I don’t recall if it was in 3 or 4, but there’s one scene where some aliens trapped in a lab conspire to kill one of their number, so they can use its acid blood to effect an escape, which could indicate an ability to reason, or could just be a highly specialized implanted instinct. Aliens has the most complex behavior, but it’s not clear how much of that is coming from the queen, of course.
How two queens would interact is an interesting question. I’m guessing they’d be hostile to each other, if only because a scene of aliens tearing each other apart would look super sick on screen, but possibly they’re capable of actual co-operation.
Of course, what makes the xenomorphs cool is how, uh, alien they are - if they do have a culture, it wouldn’t be immediately recognizable to humans. Maybe all those scalloped ridges on the walls of their hives are their equivalent of the Bayeux Tapestry, describing their glorious triumph over the perfidious colonists of LV-246.
The hordes on LV-426 all came from the existing eggs. They had no contact with whatever passes for xenomorph culture, they exist in isolation. Unless they have genetically-implanted memories. The queen should have been specifically made from one of the chest bursters from a random colonist.
I don’t mean to get too out there. The aliens’ life cycle makes no damn sense.
Hmm, this franchise makes me think of what I posted in the Toy Story franchise: A franchise loses it youmph when the subsequent films start making you question the basic premise. One alien, hatched from a pod, becomes a monster in a sci fi gothic thriller? Fine. But genetically engineered living weapons born with memories that can take on the features of the creature they spawned from? You’ve lost me.
They’d invent it, of course. I’m not saying it’d be the same “xenomorph” culture everywhere there are xenomorphs. Each isolated colony would be inventing their culture independently.
They grow to fast without taking in anything resembling food, or excreting anything recognizable. (Is alien pee acidic? Talk about writing your name in the snow/bulkhead!) They don’t seem to be very genetically diverse (maybe they all have inbreeding-related issues?) but that may have been anticipated in their design. All the aliens in LV426 are brothers. Who is fertilizing the queen?
And later movies have aliens that resemble the host. Why? It seems counter-productive. Can you get so many generations removed that an alien-from-a-human can’t recognize, and attacks, an alien-from-a-predator or an alien-from-a-dog?
I know - if they were designed solely as weapons, none of this matters. But then each generation is disposable. They aren’t supposed to have multiple family lines.
No, you definitely want weapon-aliens to breed. One bomber-load of eggs might be enough to take out a small colony-town on its own, but concentrate a full nation’s worth of defensive military might on them (instead of a single transport of marines), and they’d make short work of them. What you want to do is to drop them in a wilderness area, let them breed up from there, and then expand out to other areas once there are too many to easily deal with.
Where do you get the idea that they don’t eat or shit? That’s not from any of the movies, AFAIK. The first film had a deleted scene where they found the creature had gotten into food storage, but really, “How would the alien find food on this space ship designed for the specific purpose of transporting and sustaining humans?” isn’t the sort of question that really needs to be answered on screen.
Weren’t you just complaining that the aliens lack genetic diversity?
Dropping them into large urban areas would work, too, as a demoralizing terror tactic against the civilians, and as a constant draw of man power away from the front to hunt down and sterilize hives before they get too established.
According to Alien / Prometheus canon, didn’t the Engineers also design us humans? Were they disappointed because we were too aggressive or not aggressive enough?
Because the films don’t show it. (Ok, they don’t show the humans shitting either…fair enough) So, what are they eating? The bulkheads? Are aliens generating acid from wheat and freeze dried protein or other human foods? And what about the teflon-like substance their blood vessels are? Not a lot of sulfur or flourine or antimony in food to make the quarts of acid or acid-resistant innards, or the silicon-PTFE exoskeleton, an alien has. Assuming they could make it without killing themselves with their own blood first.
As long as they are alive, and not machines using acid as hydraulic fluid, they still have to take in energy somewhere. Eat, breathe, sit in sunlight, whatever. They have to replace all that karo syrup they drip everywhere. So what is it?
The same stuff the humans are eating? It’s an artificial environment created to sustain biological life, it’s not a surprise that biological life is able to sustain itself there.
Are you just being a contrarian? First law of thermodynamics! It has to take in more mass than its final weight, it has to take time to process these foods into acid and teflon. Most of those elements aren’t available in large quantities.
The Na’vi are intelligent, feeling creatures that value life. They love one another and their world. That’s pretty much as far different as you can get from the creatures whse mating practices involve, “being face-raped by a crab and having a smaller giant cockroach explode out of your chest.”
No, I just don’t understand where you’re getting all these assumptions from. How do you know the alien isn’t eating more mass than it’s growing? How do you know the specific chemicals it needs to generate its largely undefined biochemistry? How do you know how much of these materials the interstellar mining ship might have been carrying? You’re assuming that the films’ got all of these things wrong, but I don’t get what you’re basing that off of.
If we’re being really pedantic, the film doesn’t explicitly show us that the grown alien has gained more mass; it’s bigger, but for all we know it’s mostly hollow, like a balloon. Which might explain why it can move so fast - it floats! And Ripley etc could have killed it by attacking it with pins. Yes, the first person to burst it open would have been drenched in acid, but that’s preferable to them all getting killed. Which is what happened anyway, with their stupid electric prongs.
This would explain the sequence in Aliens where Ripley manages to hold onto a ladder without getting her arms ripped off whilst an alien queen dangles from her leg (whilst being blown out of an airlock by a mass of air). The queen is basically a balloon animal! They’re not so scary now, are they? Imagine squeaking them against your cardigan and sticking them to things, or giving them to kids. Imagine putting your lips against an alien bottom and inflating it. Imagine that.
The ship’s cargo, whatever it is, is in the refinery out back. It’s not accessible. The Nostromo is a tugboat. It’s the little part on the front, the part that landed. It has (I think) three decks, bridge, engineering room, hyperdrive, sleep pods, Narcissus escape pod, weird hanging chains (why) dripping water and lots of empty space that make no sense if the crew spends their trip sleeping. However the sleeping pods work, the crew isn’t eating or drinking (or, likely pooping). So the food supplies are probably small-ish, freeze dried veggies and protein and corn bread, just enough for their time awake. (Just speculating: the Nostromo goes out, hooks up to the refinery, or whatever they are hauling, puts the ship in FTL, and goes back to sleep. Total time awake: couple days. Total trip time: never specified. Months, not years, makes sense.)
So the xenomorph(s) have to consume something. They have to process this sustenance into acid and teflon and whatever their brains are, and their digestive tract, and their two jaws and their karo syrup, and whatever other internals they have, and grow big. Something in their systems digests what they eat and moves it around to where it needs to go. This takes time. It was shown that they shed their skin at least once. Polymers require complex reactions, and probably release a lot of heat. Somewhere inside of them they are separating what little flourine, sulfur, antimony and other heave metals are in the food supply, saving it until there is enough to whip up a batch of super acid and the teflon to contain it. This all takes time. More than the hours shown in Alien. And this, using a food source not designed for that. And requiring more energy. It’s all unbelievably complex.
I like the film, but they’d be more believable if they were vat grown replicants. Which don’t really make sense either. If replicants can stick their hands in boiling water, why don’t you test for that? (I know why! Ouch I am not a replicant! Burn cream, please!) Why not just imprint a little tiny sign on every skin cell that says “I am a replicant” like the snake serial number? Save a lot of trouble. But I digress.
The acid blood thing isn’t actually that implausible. All we know is that it eats through steel (or whatever structural metal they’re using), and doesn’t eat through the aliens’ own bodies. Most acids attack metals more vigorously than they do most organic substances. Maybe antimony etc. is one way to make an acid-proof material, but it’s hardly the only way.
