When the crew of the Nostromo make contract with the dead, infested ship, is it stated anywhere or implied that this is the first extra-terresterial contact man has ever had… or not?
Certainly, in the sequel, the marines talk about “bug hunts” as though they’d done them before, so one can assume alien lifeforms were known by then. I forget what the gap was between the movies, though, but it’s safe to assume this wasn’t a big change from the first movie’s setting.
I certainly had the impression that there had been contact with other extra terrestial species.
And as Mr Dibble says, this is confirmed in Aliens. And in fact you could probably presume Humans have encountered sentient alien creatures. I think it is Frost and Spunkmeyer(?) talking over breakfast on the Sulaco, about getting some more Arcturain poongtang. They joke that Frost’s was a male, but he comes back with when it’s Arcturian it doesn’t matter. So unless the Marines are into a bit of ET beastiliaty, presumably there is a sentient species on Arcturas.
Back on Alien The thing that had always interested me and left a question in my mind about the set up, was the instructions given to Ash.
If the company only knew that it was an alien beacon, why would they send instructions to Ash that any alien life form retrieved was more important than the crew. If it was just a chance find, why would there be any expectation of not only finding alien life, but finding a living alien, and finding a living alien that might prove a threat to the crew and provide some commercial advantage to the company?
I’m wondering about an Alien prequel, showing a scouting team sent by the company to LV-426 to investigate the alien beacon, and subsequently got taken out by the aliens, but not before sending back some initial reports about one of the scouting party being ‘face-hugged’.
The company then has some inkling (or so they think) of what sort of creature is in the space jockeys ship and having lost all contact with the scouting party retasks the Nostromo, and sends instructions to Ash, to retrieve a sample of this creature.
Well, the first AvP could be thought of as a prequel in that sense. They find aliens on property owned by the Weyland company from before we fan wanked the merger with yutani, a company that’s owned by Bishop’s human predecessor. So we could postulate that they salvaged enough tech to be at the front of the space expansion, and had their eyes out for signs of aliens and predators ever since. Yeah, I bet that’s what they were thinking when they wrote the Alien script.
In the novel, Ash admits that the company had completely decoded the beacon, and it was warning, with specific details as to what the Alien was and how it functioned. So they comapny had pretty good intel on how valuable a weaponized Alien would be, leading to their decision that the crew was expendable.
Huh, thanks for that mate. Makes sense, and is a nice wrapped up explanation for the events of Alien.
Opens up a whoel raft of questions though about what hapenned between the movies and if the info about the Aliens was still known within the company when the decision to terraform the planet was made. (If they did know that was might callous)
BTW Was that novelisation done by Alan Dean Foster? Or am I thinking of the Aliens novelisation?
Yes, it was Foster. Also included a scene (apparently filmed & deleted from the movie according to the other thread) where Ripley comes across Dallas and Brett, who’ve been cocooned by the Alien and had eggs implanted in them.
