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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Except that all the scenes shot on the Moon seem to have Earth-normal gravity.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

It seemed pretty obviously artificial to me (it was realized through a laser rented from The Who who were doing a show nearby at the time).

Which is basically my point - the thing in the chair in Alien has an even more different face from a human (no visible mouth, for one thing), yet was susceptible to infection.

Well in Aliens they loose hundreds of adult aliens going after just seven potential hosts. It seems the aliens are not wired with conservation of resources in mind.

LV-426 may not have been its ultimate destination, only where the ship crashed after the pilot was infected.

They're just that dangerous. Even the trained scientists in Alien: Resurrection were not able to keep the aliens contained.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Its mouth was covered by a facehugger.

They had no way of knowing how many potential hosts were in the colony. There were quite a few more than seven at first.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

It doesn't look like it has a facehugger over its mouth, and if it is meant to be a facehugger then why didn't it fall off and die before the emergence of the chest burster, as they always seem to do with humans (and predators)?

It's still a point against the idea that the aliens failing to eat humans is a waste of resources. If they aren't intelligent enough to avoid losing hundreds of warriors for seven hosts then they aren't intelligent enough to avoid wasting resources by failing to consume humans either.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Good question, but perhaps we shouldn't use facts that were only established in the sequels to criticise Alien.
I see no reason why different aliens couldn't behave in slightly different ways.

When I spoke of waste I was not thinking of their intelligence, but of the process that produced them. Whether they evolved or were designed, it seems like a design failure that they would not take advantage of the most abundant food source around, if they do eat.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Well, that's how the life cycle worked in Alien too - the facehugger died and fell off before the chestburster emerged with Kane.

I thought you might be referring to that. If they were designed, then having them wired to waste resources and make obvious mistakes like wasting large quantities of warriors going after a few hosts may be a good thing - it will make them easier to control when the people using them as weapons arrive for the clean-up.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

But the other facehugger, that infected the alien, apparently did not. It's 50/50.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

It still doesn't look like the other alien has a face hugger on it to me.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Is this scene on YouTube anywhere? I don't know the names, and using keywords like "Alien" and "face hugger" either come up with no hits or Brazilians.

You mean you don't have Alien on DVD? Shame on you.

Try googling "space jockey" - that's what they called the thing during production.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

There's a screenshot at imdb.com, and here's one of Giger's original drawings.

They're not fully conclusive, but I have to admit that they seem to support Jason's view more than mine.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Okay, weird picture. I can't see where the alien stops and the chair starts. So do we know how the space jockey died?

Eh, I may just have to re-watch this one. It's been decades since I've seen it.

Rewatch the movie.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Brazilians?

Old joke. An educationally-challenged woman heard on the news that twelve Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq yesterday.

"Oh, that's terrible," the woman says, then thinks for a moment.

"How many is a Brazilian?"

**********

The joke gets updated to reflect whatever war is currently in the news. It's my hip trendy word for "lots."

Is that why the ship crashed? No landing strip?



In the movie, they note that the space jockey's ribs have broken from the inside out. I had always thought that the space jockey just had an elephant-head type morphology, but I can certainly see that a face hugger would give a similar appearance. However, there's a big difference in scale between the space jockey's facehugger (if that's what it is), and Kane's.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

Talking about Alien: anybody else amused by those computer terminals?

I didn't notice it the first time around, but when I watched Alien again last year,
what most stroke me as weird is how unimaginative the computer interfaces are.
Here you have the technology to build huge vessels capable of traveling to other star systems,
but they still use those dumb black-and-green terminals

Still love the movie, though

The green Screens were bad enough, but what made it really laughable was the typewriter sound that accompanied any displayed characters.

At least green Screens were the available Technology, but I never had a terminal that made those sounds.