Alien Life Cycle & Meals

I always think it kills some people / animals outright and it will eat them. It merely grabs others and they're the ones who'll be incubated. Brett's dead corpse is in that restored scene to only be eaten later as far as I'm concerned.

I've heard people say perhaps it eats metal , explaining its appearance. The metallic environments of Alien films partly reflect the mysterious, sinewy, darkness of the beast itself. And I do think environment , expected prey, and not only host, does affect the alien's form. The alien is, metaphorically in film terms, a nightmare, and those can subtly change. But I don't personally see it gorging on metal to achieve that. However , that wouldn't be uninteresting as a complementary diet so I don't rule it out. But, it would have lessened some of the mystery to have it be a definite seen feature. Psychopaths kill like the alien does but only lunatics eat metal. So it would reduce the human metaphors of the alien.

A good question, but in the first film I always assumed it eats Parker's brain - a mouth comes out and burrows into his head. It appears to rape Lambert to death. Brett is the only character to be cocooned, and my guess is they deliberately cut that scene for that reason - because it makes it a bit too convenient to the premise to have it do whatever the script requires to each member of the crew. But youre right about it appearing as an adult out of nowhere - maybe it was eating food supplies. I think eating metal would have been something that would set up an alarm or set off a warning light or something.

I watched it the other night, funnily enough though. I noticed when they find Jonesey in the lockers there seems to be some kind of blood-like liquid running down the lockers. Alien spit? Could easily have just been raiding the storage. In terms of the Alien killing the crew - i think as picnic said, the alien is just a nightmare. It kills because that is what it does. A perfect, hostile organism that exists to kill and procreate. Im sure i also remember someone saying somewhere that the Alien life cycle is very short, and that the original idea is that when Ripley finds it in the shuttle it is already dying...

the alien eats people from Alien3 on. Will just assume we didn't see it on film. I figured the alien stole food from the galley (I heard a rumour the novel mentions this).

Way back when before Damien Lindelof was even able to take a shit using a trainer potty, I use to collect Starlog magazines and obsess over articles about science fiction in movies. One of the biggest topics was the Alien/Xenomorph's life cycle, and the common speculation was that it had an advanced genetic mutation capability that was far beyond what the human species or any other life form from planet earth could replicate.

It is a common theme in many old Sci-Fi horror flicks where a monster or alien species has the ability to either replicate clones of existing life forms (The Body Snatchers) or increase in size by feeding off nuclear radiation; things human beings are nowhere near capable of doing themselves.

The theory that the Alien eats metal is well represented amongst fans. Also when you observe its nest, on closer inspection the material appears to be made out of the ship’s metal hull that is formed into a melted web. One of the original intended abilities of the Alien was to be able to secrete acid through its skin and reshape its environment. This would make it the utmost unstoppable killing machine, as you would be unable to hide from it when it could just melt its way through any barrier to get to you.