1- The cat locked itself in a locker.
2- The Alien grows from 7 inches to 7 feet tall without consuming anything or anyone.
3- Ash, a very strong and intelligent robot, tries to kill Ripley by shoving a rolled magazine in her mouth.
The movie doesn't address any of those issues. But the novelization attempts to explain things better. Apparently the Alien was breaking into the food lockers. It was eating something. I would guess that when it opened one of the food lockers, Jones jumped inside and the locker door swung shut.
I can't think of any other way to explain it. I know cats are very curious. I've often opened kitchen cabinets and later heard one of my cats crying to be let out. They jump inside and I close the door without seeing them. Of course I have NO idea why the Alien would bother to shut a door!
As for Ash, I remember reading somewhere that it wasn't so much an attempt to kill her, rather it was more to "violate" her. ... something about weird robot sex.
Right. I also think the xenomorph was kind of a Lovecraftian creature with a very strange biology (acid blood for example) that didn't really follow the rules of biology as we know them.
Ash couldn't have sex and I think he both envied and hated human beings. He especially hated Ripley, it seemed. Using the rolled up magazine was sort of his way of humiliating and degrading her, much like a rape.
A rolled up pornographic magazine, no less. See what they did there?
shareThe novelization is a cheat because it came out years after the movie, but I get your point.
My interpretation was that the Alien is so different that it was a combination of bio and tech, so it could probably consume metals using its acid or its saliva as a decomposition conduit.
The whole idea behind the Alien is that it's, well, Alien to us. It doesn't follow the preconceived notions of humanly known physics and biology.
>>>>The novelization is a cheat because it came out years after the movie, but I get your point.<<<<
Alien movie released in 1979
Alien novelization by Alan Dean Foster released in 1979.
I'm not sure how you get years later. Possibly a couple of months between film and novel, but likely they were released close together.
novelizations are not movies. They're like a cheat sheet or fillers for people who didn't get what they wanted out of the movie.
This is the same useless argument people try to make for Prometheus by using material only available in after-market materials like the BluRay/DVD comments, BTS vids, etc.
The movie left it open to interpretation. I supplied mine. Alan Dean Fosters supplies answers after the fact
I think Foster's "explanation" doesn't cut it for one simple reason. He placed the scene into the book after Brett's death. The already adult alien raided the storage, so the rapid growth the scene is supposed to be explaining... already happened by that point.
I was never bothered by the rapid growth, since this is a sci-fi film and we are talking about an alien creature of which we don't know much physiologically. I provided a possible explanation in my recent comment:
https://moviechat.org/tt0078748/Alien/5e51e3fdd7d6b221a719f048/3-Things-that-dont-make-sense?reply=5f329a538f206a2193af0351
YOU said the novelization was a cheat because it came out years later. My ONLY point is that the novelization came out the same year as the film.
Novelizations often differ from the film. This is commonly, though not always, because the author is working from an early script rather than the final version, as well as notes and a film "bible."
As such they often can supply excellent background information that must be cut from a film for dramatic reasons.
I would expect that Foster used an early script and notes for his novel. It was likely handed in before the film was released. I would recommend you not discard information from novelizations.
I agree that a film should hold together on its own merits without a novelization to support it. But those novelizations can add flavor and nuance to a film.
1. pjpurple answered this pretty well, I thought.
2. We don't *see it* consuming anything. We know that Kane is SHOVELING food right before it bursts out. I assume it's a super-tapeworm and is ingesting everything Kane ate and storing it up. It probably tracks down other sustenance afterwards, either by doubling back and raiding supplies from the kitchen, or maybe even finding supplies elsewhere on the ship. We don't know that it needs to eat human food. As part of its whole "hyper-efficient killing machine" anatomy, it might be able to ingest and grow off of eating metal, or fuel, or something else weird.
3. Ash might have been trying to force the whole thing into her windpipe, which would certainly make it difficult to breathe. After that, he might have throttled her or just beat her skull in. Despite being an android, he was very "human" in his moods and thought processes, so he might have just grabbed the nearest thing and tried to do damage with it - not really thinking about efficiency so much as just fighting.
1- Jonesy was kinda crafty.. even evading death by the Alien multiple times
2- it might've consumed some crackers off-screen, maybe even grabbed a beer
3- that's just the cold blooded option to kill someone
"it might've consumed some crackers off-screen, maybe even grabbed a beer"
I literally thought of Stone Cold when I read this 😁
Cats often get in to scrapes that seem unusual, but then it's no biggie.
We never see the Alien eat, but that doesn't mean it hasn't. We never see the Alien go to the toilet either, or anyone else for that matter.
Ash is malfunctioning.
If the locker was left open, a cat getting itself stuck inside is not hard to believe.
true. in the script and the novelization they explain the alien got into the food supply. Also, the alien's biology is totally different and almost incomprehensible to them. Truely alien. It can do things that they'd never seen before, like bleed acid.
Ash was "twitchy", as Bishop says in Aliens. I think he hated Ripley and was malfunctioning, not thinking logically.
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3. Yeah, makes sense. Kind of like HAL in 2001. He couldn't deal with his conflicting orders.
share1. Cats are graceful creatures but at times they are also clumsy and derpy. Just type "funny cat compilation" into YouTube. If the locker was left open and it closes automatically, there can be a situation where the cat accidentally bumps the locker door when jumping in, causing it to close with the cat still inside.
2. We don't know much about the alien's physiology now, let alone at that point in the original movie. So I can speculate and come up with numerous explanations, but there is no way to check their validity.
I never took issue with this, but one such explanation which I thought up is that the alien drains the resources from Kane's body, supporting its growth inside him, but in the process it's also creating a "packet" which is approx. a walnut sized spherical object, very dense in nutritions, separated inside its body. Once it bursts out of its victim and finds a suitable hiding place for the growth process, it absorbs the packet, getting a nutrition boost, supporting the growth from cat sized to adult sized. I don't think we should get bothered by how this explanation checks out the facts of earthly biology, as the creature in question is... well, alien. And if pressed, I could come up with 2-3 other explanations, which are just as fantastical as this one. This is a sci-fi movie, and the point of the scene is that the alien is totally unpredictable, and we don't know how exactly it's doing what it's doing.
NOTE: Numerous times in this thread it was mentioned that the alien raided the food storage in the novelization, as Alan Dean Foster tried to explain how it got the nutrition to grow. I think he made a crucial mistake, since that scene takes place after Brett's death, so the adult alien is raiding the food storage, which doesn't make much sense, since the growth itself that this scene is supposed to be explaining already happened.
I seem to have hit a character limit, so continued in my next post below with #3.
3. Ash is very clearly malfunctioning at that point. Sweating "milk", twitching uncontrollably, moving erratically. He is glitching, so he does not go for the most efficient solution, but a... weird solution for killing Ripley. And of course there is the fact that Ridley Scott mentioned that Ash opting for suffocating Ripley with a fallic object is his way of expressing his sexuality. Which is weird that an android would have such thing, but... the good thing about this scene is you can read it this way if you so please, but simply saying "he is glitching" also explains everything about the scene - IMO.
share"but in the process it's also creating a "packet" which is approx. a walnut sized spherical object, very dense in nutritions, separated inside its body. Once it bursts out of its victim and finds a suitable hiding place for the growth process, it absorbs the packet, getting a nutrition boost, supporting the growth from cat sized to adult sized."
How is it going to gain a couple/few hundred pounds from a nutrition source the size of a walnut? Juvenile blue whales gain about 200 pounds a day for their first year of life, but they drink about 150 gallons of milk (which weighs about 1,300 pounds) a day to do it, plus they weigh about 6,000 pounds at birth, so putting on 200 pounds in one day is proportionally the same as a 10-pound newborn Alien gaining 1/3 of a pound in one day.
No creature that small could put on that much weight so fast; it simply couldn't eat/metabolize enough food in the given amount of time to do it. Even if it had a perfect 100% efficient metabolic system (which would be a drastic improvement over a hypothetical cold fusion reactor or even an antimatter reactor, which itself would be drastically more efficient than fusion), at the very least it would have to eat and metabolize e.g. 200 pounds to gain 200 pounds of body mass in such a short time.
Also, if it had such an impossibly efficient metabolic system, how is it containing and directing such massive amounts of energy while it's using it to build body mass so rapidly? 200 pounds of food/matter, if converted to energy with 100% efficiency = 1,949 megatons of TNT. By comparison, the highest yield-nuclear bomb in history, the Tsar Bomba, yielded about 50 megatons.
Nice scientific summary, but let me ask you two questions:
1. Did the Alien gain 200 pounds going from chestburster to adult sized?
2. Is the alien's metabolism 100% the same as a juvenile blue whale's?
You see, your whole argument is built on these two assumptions. And that's what these are: assumptions. We don't know the weight of the adult alien. At no point in the movie did it stand on a scale for us to take a measurement. And we don't know anything about its metabolism.
The adult alien does not necessarily weigh 200 pounds. It's insect-like after all, it might not be that heavy, it's an exoskeleton basically, so it might only weigh 30 pounds. Or even 15. You know, extremely light on its feet, moving gracefully, but due to the underlying structure, extremely powerful. The structure gives the strength, not the weight. For a real-world analogy, take ants. They are extremely powerful in the sense that they can carry much more than their body weight. Just googled it, and according to some sources it's anywhere between 50 times and 5000 times (!) their body weight.
No creature that small could put on that much weight so fast
It might not have to be that much weight. Oh, and one more thing: No animal bleeds acid. It only makes sense to an extent to apply real-world logic to sci-fi movies, but there is a line. And the whole point of the movie is that nor the crew, nor we, the audience don't know anything about the structure and the biology of the alien.
So why are you okay with it bleeding with acid, but not with the rapid growth?
Do you accept that maybe the alien is not that heavy, but structurally strong due to its exoskeleton design?
"1. Did the Alien gain 200 pounds going from chestburster to adult sized?"
It gained in the neighborhood of that, since one of the characters, after seeing it for the first time since it was "born," said it was as big as a man.
"2. Is the alien's metabolism 100% the same as a juvenile blue whale's?"
There's nothing special about a blue whale's metabolism compared to any other known animal. The only reason it can gain ~200 pounds a day is because it's so big when it's born (~6,000 pounds), which allows it to eat enough (~1,300 pounds of food a day) to gain that much weight in that amount of time. There's no way a 10-pound critter can eat and process 1,300 pounds of food in a matter of a couple/few/several hours.
"You see, your whole argument is built on these two assumptions. And that's what these are: assumptions."
No, I never made the second assumption; quite the contrary in fact. I said it would need an impossibly efficient metabolism to gain so much weight so fast. And then you have the problem of containing and directing multi-megaton-levels of energy.
"The adult alien does not necessarily weigh 200 pounds. It's insect-like after all, it might not be that heavy, it's an exoskeleton basically, so it might only weigh 30 pounds. Or even 15. You know, extremely light on its feet, moving gracefully, but due to the underlying structure, extremely powerful. The structure gives the strength, not the weight. For a real-world analogy, take ants. They are extremely powerful in the sense that they can carry much more than their body weight. Just googled it, and according to some sources it's anywhere between 50 times and 5000 times (!) their body weight."
It doesn't work that way. If you scaled an ant or any other insect up to the size of a man, it would weigh in the same neighborhood as said man, and it wouldn't have a particularly impressive strength-to-weight ratio. Strength-to-weight ratios don't scale the way you think they do. Look up the "square-cube law." Also, just the amount of water alone in an organism the size (volume) of an average man is going to weigh in the neighborhood of 100 pounds.
"It might not have to be that much weight."
It would have to be roughly that much weight else it couldn't function the way it does.
"Oh, and one more thing: No animal bleeds acid."
What of it?
"And the whole point of the movie is that nor the crew, nor we, the audience don't know anything about the structure and the biology of the alien."
We know enough about it to get a good idea of its weight. We know it has as much or more liquid in it than any known organism that size, since it's full of blood and its drool flows like a river. Plus, the soft tissues of an organism (muscles, organs, etc) are inherently mostly water (75% range), otherwise they'd be dry / shriveled up like beef jerky (even beef jerky is about 25% water). We know that it's strong, fast, and durable, which requires a good deal of mass in the muscular and structural elements.
"So why are you okay with it bleeding with acid, but not with the rapid growth?"
Acidic blood doesn't violate any known laws. We have acid in our stomachs, and hippos secrete acid from their skin. Organisms can and do produce acidic liquids.
If we treat Alien as a real world scenario, your arguments are spot on.
Yes, I am familiar with the square cube law. No, I don't mind if a sci-fi movie breaks it in order to tell a story.
Yes, I agree that in real life, metabolism has physical limitations. No, I don't mind if a sci-fi movie breaks out of these limitations to tell a story.
Yes, there is a problem of moisture - good point at that. Still, this is a sci-fi horror movie, with a touch of cosmic horror. The alien should be unknown and diabolical in nature. Is it breaking a couple of laws? It makes it all the scarier. For dramatic purpose, it has to be unpredictable.
There is a certain point where "it's a movie" replaces real world thinking. And this is it.
I concede my nutrition blob theory - it wouldn't work. Still I have no issue with how the movie presents this rapid growth. It has every right to present it this way - and everything about the alien is well built up dramatically.
I came up with the nutrition blob theory to try to humor some people who must have a scientific explanation to everything. And you know what? Most likely there could be no acceptable scientific explanation for the aliens growth. Let's say there isn't. Does that diminish the movie's dramatic structure? Does that lessen the impact of the horror the crew is experiencinc? For me the answer to both of these questions is a resounding no.
If you think the movie is somehow worse because of this, let me ask you a question: Did you take the same issue with Star Wars movies that depict FTL space travel? If not, what is the difference between the rapid growth in this movie and FTL travel? Both are scientificlally impossible, are they falling into the same category for you?
"If you think the movie is somehow worse because of this"
I don't.
"Did you take the same issue with Star Wars movies that depict FTL space travel? If not, what is the difference between the rapid growth in this movie and FTL travel? Both are scientificlally impossible, are they falling into the same category for you?"
Travel that's effectively faster than light is something that may be possible in the future. I say "effectively" because you wouldn't actually travel faster than light, but rather, you'd warp space to shorten the distance between two points so that you can arrive at your destination faster than light-through-normal-space would. Star Trek calls it a "warp field," "warp bubble," or "subspace." Star Wars has "hyperspace":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Also, there's a difference between something impossible that's part of the premise and something that isn't. For example, in a Superman movie it's part of the premise that Superman can fly. But what if Ellen Ripley started flying in an Aliens movie without explanation?