So you’ve seen at least one Alien film, right? HBO was running the AvP crapfest, and I watched bits and pieces of it. It was so bad you couldn’t even really make fun of it. But I did watch the entire fight between one of the aliens and one of the predators, and I have a question. Actually, I have a few questions, but these are the ones that stick in my mind:
So the alien has these multiple sets of jaws. We know that. They look cool when they’re fighting. We know that the aliens breed by inserting a parasite into a host. Then the baby alien kills the host when it pops out of the chest. But here’s the thing: WTF do the aliens eat?
I mean, they grow like hell, especially in the first movie, and yet, they do not eat the bodies of their hosts. They did not eat the Chinese food for dinner, like the crew of the first ship. They didn’t eat all the people in those webs in the second film. They didn’t eat Newt in the third film.
And yet, they grow.
What are they, air ferns?
I don’t think those teeth were made for chewing.
We see that a LOT in big-screen and small-screen SF, and the Aliens series is one of the worst offenders. Despite the fact that those films play some cool “science” bits into the story, I’m afraid they’re not SF. They’re fantasy movies with “rockets and ray-guns.”
Star Wars and Star Trek are the same way. You could replace Emperor Palpatine with some lightning-powered sorceror, the Death Star with a really big castle, and the story wouldn’t change a bit.
I had to endure multiple showings of AvP (I’m just too lenient).
You’re right, the alien hordes grow without any any apparent food source. You’d also think they would get really dehydrated along the way, what with all that alien-mucus slicking up the joint.
Did you notice that in the first few movies, it took about a day (or longer) for the alien bug to bust through his host’s chest cavity, but in this one it was about a half-hour’s time?
Why didn’t Norad see this huge Predator space ship flying around?
What’s the pan-galactic fascination with sliding cut stone walls, floors, and ceilings in creepy temples?
And how exactly do those things work?
Why didn’t what’s-her-name freeze her tuchus off running around the South Pole in a t-shirt at the end?
It also seems somewhat inefficient and redundant for the alien to have evolved the retractable inner set of jaws and teeth. If it’s the carnivore’s equivalent of a salad fork, meant to facilitate getting into those hard to reach crevices to get the last bits of meat, I don’t buy it. Table manners don’t seem that important to the alien species. We gave that thing a nickname: The Nibbler.
Evolved? Obviously the Alien species is the product of Intelligent Design!
(In this case the designer was H.R. Giger, and his design got passed along to a committee of movie producers, screenwriters, and special-effects technicians. Oh. The. Horror.)
No Howard, not intelligent design, but unintelligent design.
You know, since they lost the veterans of vaudeville Hollywood has been getting schlockier and schlockier.