I like your old man's--dad's?--theory!!! Now that makes sense to me--it does look like vents and cables as such, which would camouflage within a spaceship environment. And since it would take many light years to travel from one galaxy to another, they would have time to evolve like that. Also a possible need for camouflage: I mean you send a bunch of killing machines out to travel through space for years and years, what do you feed them and how much of that food can you load on a space ship that would last hundreds of years? The simple solution, they kill and eat each other? It's one big continuous hunt on the traveling space ship, with only the queen and the eggs exempted. It's survival of the fittest, so the fittest learn to blend into their environment. It would also explain why the little lizards had to grow up within a matter of hours so they could compete, else the whole generation would be gobbled up. The only gap is, where are the victims for the facegrabber to grab? Do they kill one alien to give birth to another? That would seem to be the only way--unless down in that gigantic ship they keep and breed some sort of host animal. That's possible
Tell your dad I really like his explanation!!! You should listen to him more often!
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Yup, by old man I meant dad. And I'll pass that along.
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It tickles me, too. I don't know exactly what the creators intended, though I do think we can assume they had some sort of evolutionary wrinkle in mind, given that the Alien takes on the properties of the host it lays its eggs in. In
Alien, the one that comes out of John Hurt walks upright. In
Alien 3, one of them comes out of a dog, and runs on all fours.
You raise some good questions about how they would procreate. There is some precedent, for lack of a better word, with the idea of them killing one another if necessary; in the fourth film,
Alien: Resurrection, multiple Aliens are being held captive together, and one of them breaks free by hurting the other so that its blood will drip through the floor, allowing it to escape. Granted, this took place long after the first two films, but it's still interesting.
I suppose one other possibility is that they can live a very, very long time. Fun to speculate, either way. Oh, and I hadn't thought of hypersleep as giving them time to evolve; nice point!
Yeah, anytime you sit down to a sci-fi film you've got to suspend disbelief. Yet I'd bet evoultion on another planet would go one way or another (the equivalent of fangs and claws or the equivalent of stingers) as it has on our planet since it is usually the special features that take over, while the ones not often used fade away. It's a small thing, but something to think about. That wasn't what I disliked about the film--the fact it had fangs, claws and tail didn't bother me. It was all the blood it produced!
It's certainly possible that they went with acid as blood just because it's friggin' awesome, yeah.
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Makes you wonder what the heck the rest of their body's made of.
Nice save, Yoda!
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Yeah, it can go either way.
I'm just having fun with it, of course. I agree that, compared to some of our own animal life, the eye placement seems somewhat counterinuitive. For us, it seems like predators tend to have eyes closer together, while prey have eyes that cover a wider amount of ground by being spaced out, both for obvious reasons. This seems to applies primarily to mammals, though, and the Aliens are pretty far from mammalian. I like to think of them more like Hammerhead sharks; soulless predators both, and both share similar eye placement.
Well, that depends on whether you accept the idea that these are synthetic killers dispatched to clear other life forms from inhabitable planets. If there is animal life on a planet, then there has to be some kind of plant life which in some cases take the equivalent form of brush and trees. Or it could be that the plant life is more like algae, in which case much of the surface would likely be bare and hard so that the alien might break spindly limbs if it falls.
Ah yes. Sorry, I forgot that some of your response was in response to TNBT and the suggestion that they could have been bred to wipe out planets. They do seem somewhat ill-equipped for that task, barring a world very unlike our own. Or -- random speculation again! -- they might blend in well if they were basically just there to infiltrate urban centers, particularly from an advanced society (as I'd assume a futuristic one would be) with a lot of confined spaces and, well, tubing. The
Star Wars planet of Coruscant, which is a planet made up of one giant city, comes to mind.
vulnerable in that the queen and eggs are all together in one nursery and therefore vulnerable to armed intruders. Isn't that how they wipe out the aliens in one film? Same thing as in Them! with the queen ant and eggs.
Ah, I see. Yeah, that does seem conveniently centralized. Certainly a bit of a flaw in terms of vulnerability, though one that
does mirror some of our own creatures, like ants. And in their case, the Queen can defend herself, at least. And how.
But you're trying to apply my remarks to sci-fi films in general when what I was discussing from the start is why don't sci-fi monsters reflect the atmosphere, gravity, light, heat, etc. of their own planets rather than all apparently having come from an earth-like planet. For instance, look at the creatures in Men in Black or Star Wars--much more a variety of creatures than in your usual sci-fi--some run faster and leap higher than any animal on earth, some dress in human skin, some breathe through their eyes, reflecting differences in their home environment. I got the idea from TV programs speculating on what life forms would be like on other planets, considering their different atmospheres, temperatures, surface, etc. It's just a fun thing to kick around. For me anyway.
This is my mistake, I failed to realize you were talking about sci-fi films in general. Yes, I agree, they're all a bit too suited to our own climate. I guess there are
some reasons for this, such as a lot of sci-fi films being about other planets like ours (explaining our interest in them in the first place), but plenty of others fail to capitalize on the potential differences we might have with life forms on wildly different planets. Unless, of course, you believe that life can only evolve on planets rather like our own.
An example of the kind of thing you're talking about can be found in a book called
Out of the Silent Planet, the first in a science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis (yeah, the Narnia guy). In it, there's a planet with several different races of alien, one of which is made up of extremely tall, thin beings, because the planet's gravity (or part of it's gravity -- I don't recall offhand) is weaker than our own. I always thought that was a nice touch, provided I'm not imprinting some explanatory theory of mine onto the characters retroactively.