xenomorphs.txt
So you see in the first movie the xenomorph has a rounded head, versus the ridged head of the xenomorphs from the second movie. Also the first movie's xenomorph, called the Big Chap colloquially or Kane's Son if you want to be poetic, has a humanoid skull visible in the transparent dome in the front of its head but it's never filmed in such a way that you can get a good look at it during the actual movie. Now, I'm not saying one design is strictly worse or better than the other, and I think it's valid that for the second move they changed the smooth head to something more conventionally menacing and faceless to emphasize the overwhelming horde of monsters that the second move builds them up to. And of course the second move famously adds the alien queen laying all the eggs, likening the aliens to ants or termites. Something that kind of bugs me is that later Alien media follows on from that, making the xenomorphs mostly menacing in giant hordes but the problem is that there's at best a one-to-one relationship between the xenomorphs' prey population and the number of xenomorphs that actually show up, each alien needs its own host, and for me that takes away from the suspension of disbelief of how you can have these giant swarms of xenomorphs. Sure you can say the same thing about zombies, but the zombie bite to zombie process is a lot easier than having to subdue something, bring it to a facehugger, and wait for that gestation to complete.
The thing is, in the director's cut of the first movie there's a scene where Ripley comes across the captured crewmembers webbed onto a bulkhead and - and this isn't, like, explained or made obvious in the film - these cremembers are being grotesquely turned into eggs, meaning that the creature has a way to reproduce on its own without a queen. Don't get me wrong, I like the queen thing fine and clearly a lot of other people do too, but that wasn't the only direction the sequel could have gone and I think there's value in exploring how a second movie would have gone building on the alien in a different way than making it part of a hive society. In my experience, the alien is the most horrific movie monster - its whole life cycle is horrific from beginning to end - with the only other thing coming close being the titular thing from The Thing but the problem - and the thing that makes the film so fantastic, don't get me wrong! - is the thing doesn't have a set shape. Which is great for the film! But it's hard to really build off that, really expand the thing universe meaningfully. There's The Things short story which is a great view into the possible psychology of the thing but that aside there isn't enough to really expand on it for me you know. But with the xenomorph you've got these iconic design elements - the elongated skull, the inner mouth, the tail - that you can transpose onto basically any other design and have something recognizably related to a xenomorph. Much like the in-universe creatures, the xenomorph's advantage is its adaptability - the adaptability of the design of the creature itself - and this allows it to perpetuate itself in pop culture. So the xenomorph has this recognizable visual language that allows it to be a distinct movie monster that the thing lacks - it's difficult to distinguish one horrible mass of flesh from another, you know? - which is my problem here. I want more of that kind of horrific space monster and I think limiting xenomorphs to just being spawned from eggs laid by a queen gets in the way of that. I'd like to see more of people going back to the first movie and extrapolating more about the creatures just from what we're shown there. And of course the best outcome would be a slew of wholly new space monsters, each uniquely horrifying to the same extent - at least the same extent! - as the xenomorph.
