The engineer is already long dead, so it’s arguably switched from alien to corpse. There are a bunch of other eggs/ovomorphs on the derelict, but only one hatches and attacks John Hurt, so without sequel media (Aliens/Alien Isolation) showing that other eggs were still viable, they could be argued to be maybe-dead, too. Even accepting that they’re viable eggs, counting them as aliens is counting your chickens before they’ve hatched, which is inadvisable enough that there’s an idiom about it.
If you’re saying the facehugger and the adult xenomorph are different creatures, then that’s ridiculous, as it’s clearly closer to being a larva, and plenty of real creatures have a child stage that doesn’t resemble the adult stage at all and where a big mass of tissue is discarded when transitioning into adulthood.
Ridiculous might be a strong word for a fictional creature, but if we found the corpse of a bipedal extraterrestrial on the surface of Mars, would you be unwilling to call that thing an alien?
Perhaps not, but I’d not give it equal prominance in a news report or a movie adaptation if it was next to a living one, and I wouldn’t do anything else silly like claim a billion aliens had been found because it had gut flora.
If it’s a side step, then so was your question. You took away the one obviously-much-more-alive-and-capable-of-interacting-with-the-plot alien. This is a semantic argument, and you’re using a different sense of the word than the titles of the films were using, so it’s not even a valid semantic argument. A reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be able to drive a herse in a carpool lane just because there was an occupied coffin in the back and a sign said vehicles could only use the lane if they contained two people because they’d have to use a definition of person other than the one the sign obviously meant, just like how they couldn’t claim that the sign was talking about a nearby swimming pool or running track and therefore irrelevant to drivers because lanes separate competitors in races.
Alien
Aliens
I remember Aliens coming out and people shitting kittens, “There’s going to be more than one of them?!”
Was that their response to the movie, or the kittens?
Response before watching. Response during was when kittens were shat.
There was a cat in the movie. I didn’t watch the sequel, did it reproduce?
Made me think of Scott Pilgrim. “Break out the L word.” “Lesbian?” “The other L word.” “Lesbians?”
Is that really more accurate than you would expect though?
while not a showy response… yes
I wouldn’t expect the plurality of the title to accurately reflect the number of aliens in the movie, tbh
I understand the point that there are more Aliens in Aliens than in alien, but there is more than one Alien in Alien.
So it’s not super accurate.
I guess my memory is off. I thought the first movie was just the one. been a while since I watched it
Well theres the dead pilot (space jockey), and the collection of eggs, then theres the offending face hugger and then the resulting adult Xenomorph.
…so it is just one adult Alien? (not counting facehuggers) lol
now I’m just curious
Singular of the second-mouth, skull-punchy sort, yeah.
The engineer is already long dead, so it’s arguably switched from alien to corpse. There are a bunch of other eggs/ovomorphs on the derelict, but only one hatches and attacks John Hurt, so without sequel media (Aliens/Alien Isolation) showing that other eggs were still viable, they could be argued to be maybe-dead, too. Even accepting that they’re viable eggs, counting them as aliens is counting your chickens before they’ve hatched, which is inadvisable enough that there’s an idiom about it.
If you’re saying the facehugger and the adult xenomorph are different creatures, then that’s ridiculous, as it’s clearly closer to being a larva, and plenty of real creatures have a child stage that doesn’t resemble the adult stage at all and where a big mass of tissue is discarded when transitioning into adulthood.
Ridiculous might be a strong word for a fictional creature, but if we found the corpse of a bipedal extraterrestrial on the surface of Mars, would you be unwilling to call that thing an alien?
“This isn’t an alien. It’s dead.”
Perhaps not, but I’d not give it equal prominance in a news report or a movie adaptation if it was next to a living one, and I wouldn’t do anything else silly like claim a billion aliens had been found because it had gut flora.
Equal prominence is a bit of a side step, and i never mentioned a living one next to it.
Also I’m fairly sure any biologist would be claiming each distinct species found within the alien as being new discoveries also.
If it’s a side step, then so was your question. You took away the one obviously-much-more-alive-and-capable-of-interacting-with-the-plot alien. This is a semantic argument, and you’re using a different sense of the word than the titles of the films were using, so it’s not even a valid semantic argument. A reasonable person wouldn’t expect to be able to drive a herse in a carpool lane just because there was an occupied coffin in the back and a sign said vehicles could only use the lane if they contained two people because they’d have to use a definition of person other than the one the sign obviously meant, just like how they couldn’t claim that the sign was talking about a nearby swimming pool or running track and therefore irrelevant to drivers because lanes separate competitors in races.