Even decades after its release, Alien holds up as one of the greatest science fiction and horror films of all time. This Ridley Scott classic was a game changer that began a franchise of films that still continues on today. This tightly written and filmed movie knows just how to build up all of the suspense and create the most terrifying mystery that most people could imagine, which results in one of the most memorable movie twists of all time.
Alien is definitely mysterious, intentionally so. It certainly builds up the suspense and fear factor, and obviously it's more convenient for the writers to have to explain as little as possible to the audience. While the thrills are fantastic, we still want the answers too! Of course, there are some questions that are better left unanswered, but here are 10 questions about Alien that we still definitely do want to be answered.
Why Didn't Kane Notice Anything Prior?
Okay, clearly, being attacked by an alien that clutches on to your face for hours before suddenly releasing you isn't a very typical experience, even for these seasoned astronauts. However, Kane wakes up and is eating his dinner with the rest of the crew just before the alien bursts from his chest, and somehow he doesn't seem to be feeling that strange beforehand?
Yes, he's visibly sick, but if an organism of that size was growing inside of you and about to break free, wouldn't you feel something? It's like a nightmarish version of I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.
Why Didn't Anyone Listen To Ripley?
It's obviously one of the most standard horror movie conventions: one of the characters always warns against a certain course of action, no-one listens, and chaos and death ensues. It's entirely understandable that the crew wasn't willing to let Kane just suffer under some foreign alien attack without doing anything.
They've all been trained in the protocols, though, and Ripley initially refuses to let the others come back into the ship because the organism could contaminate the entire craft. Granted, no-one could have known how bad things were going to get, but there are rules for a reason, people!
What Were Those Other Aliens?
Of course, whenever anyone thinks of Alien, they think of the alien life forms that cause all of the chaos and destruction for the crew of the Nostromo, the aliens commonly referred to as the facehugger and the more mature xenomorph.
However, when the Nostromo first lands their craft they find another spacecraft and the desiccated remains of some kind of other alien. It's unclear what it is or where it came from, but it's very clearly not human and it's safe to assume that it was also killed by the aliens that go on to destroy most of the crew of the Nostromo.
How Did The Alien Get Where It Was?
The titular alien of Alien is a creature that is shrouded in a lot of mystery, but there are some questions about it that just need to be answered. For instance, how did it even get to this abandoned place? It's not something that is capable of space travel, but this barren wasteland obviously doesn't hold any other life forms, so how did the xenomorph wind up there in the first place?
The mystery behind the how, what, or why definitely makes Alien an even more terrifying movie, but it's a bit difficult to swallow the fact that the alien was just here in this abandoned place indefinitely.
How Did The Facehugger Penetrate The Space Suit?
Even a team of astronauts and scientists can't seem to detach a facehugger from its host (at least not without harming said host), so it's safe to assume that these tiny demonic scorpions are impressively strong.
However, how strong would they have to be to bust through a space suit that was presumably designed to endure the most extreme conditions that a human being can be subjected to? Beyond that, how exactly can the facehugger snap through a shield of glass without being cut or injured in some way? Yes, they must be hardy organisms, but they're still living things.
Why Does It Require A Host Body?
There are plenty of parasitic organisms that do require host bodies to survive and flourish, but the fact that the aliens require a host body in order to incubate isn't really explained at all in the film. While it's not too far of a stretch to imagine that the aliens need a nice environment in order to hatch, it's kind of confounding when you consider where the Nostromo finds the alien eggs initially.
The place that the aliens are inhabiting is an incredibly hostile environment, so it's a little strange that they can't be born in equally hostile conditions.
How Does Anything Living Have Acidic Blood?
One of the greatest successes of Alien as a film is how unreal everything about the aliens really is. They're creatures unlike anything a normal human has ever seen, and they're strong enough to do some real damage even to the most prepared person.
One element of the creature that is obviously terrifying is the fact that it's blood is acidic. However, when you get past the initial shock of that revelation, it's really a puzzling aspect of the film. Yes, they're aliens, but at their most basic they're still a living organism made of organic material, so having blood that can eat through steel but somehow doesn't erode flesh is inexplicable.
How Did The Alien Survive The Ship's Atmosphere?
Once again, the xenomorph and its "adorable baby form" the facehugger may just be organisms that are very highly evolved and capable of surviving in nearly any environment, but basic common sense would dictate that the aliens shouldn't have even been able to survive for very long within the ship.
We know that the planet that it's found on is a dangerously different atmosphere because none of the characters walk out there without space suits, so logic would dictate that the reverse would be true: anything that could live out there would have some serious trouble surviving inside the Nostromo.
How Did The Alien Survive, Period?
The aliens are obviously a pretty hardy species since they managed to survive in a barren wasteland for an undetermined amount of time, but presumably they still need something to survive besides air. Every living thing consumes something to sustain itself, and if the desiccated alien corpse is anything to go by, then it seems reasonable to assume nothing new has been there in a very long time.
The alien appears to be a predatory species, so one would assume that it's a carnivore, not an herbivore. It didn't look like there was anything else alive around it, certainly not enough to survive on, so how exactly did it survive?
Why Was There Only One?
Although we only see one fully-grown xenomorph in Alien, there are facehuggers as well as what look like eggs on the planet that the Nostromo lands on that the crew explores. Why exactly is it that there is only one fully grown alien there?
Perhaps they're a solitary species, but the volume of eggs would indicate otherwise. Perhaps there were actually more fully grown aliens on the strange planet, but only one of them wound up on the ship in the end. Once again, though, that begs the question: why did only one decide to board the ship?