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OldBoy

i liked seeing the cocoon and the fates of the crew and then Ripley putting an end to. gave more credence to the use in Aliens and at least told us what humans were used for by the Alien...

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OldBoy

no one turned into an egg. they showed the cocoon to show how they implant and breed. to each his own. no biggie...

Abob Teff

That is what I believed for years ... and the way it should be ... but, alas, Ridley Scott is a f—knut who people believe is a genius (nobody believes that quite as much as he does though). He claims the people turn into eggs. PEOPLE .... TURN INTO .... EGGS.

Just think about that for a little bit. Either he is a raving lunatic or he has the world-comprehension skills of a five-year old.

brayzie

Abob Teff

Not cocooned into eggs ... cocooned into “incubators” for the facehuggers that come from the laid eggs.

Well, it's an interesting combination of elements making him a... tough little son-of-a-bitch.

Artman

I saw the 25th and 35th anniversary screenings at the Cinerama... the last one w Tom Skerritt Q&A... can't top those, so I'm good on my Alien theatrical viewings. But yeah, Ridley has always been open to working with the studios, the 25th anniversary DC was just mostly for the studios, it was never a true directors cut...that's how I viewed it.

brayzie

windom

I could never figure out how the alien went from chestburster size to fully grown in maybe a few hours. Wouldn't it need to consume a lot of organic material of some kind at the very least?

brayzie

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Josh-da-man

The impression I got from the Directors Cut is that the xenomorph does indeed turn its victims into "eggs."

It is implied that is what happened to the Space Jokey's crew, and that's where all of the those eggs in the derelict spaceship came from.

brayzie

Because of this thread I was just thinking about that as a possibility. Was it ever documented that that was the original intent?

It's a little too convenient though since there's some kind of bluish beam covering the eggs which seems that the alien eggs were cargo of some sort and that the jockeys had some kind of security in place that would keep the eggs in stasis and not start hatching.
Or...maybe the jockeys were in something akin to suspended animation not unlike the Nostromo crew and the xenomorph that killed the pilot immediately started transforming the many occupants of the ship into eggs.

OldBoy

I don’t see how or where it ever implies they are turned into eggs. We saw the mother in Aliens laying eggs before Ripley went all Predator on her and babies asses. Those are eggs for face huggers. Now, I don’t know how else they could be made with whatever sustenance the mother needs. Convenient we keep sending more and more humans to continue their species. How many bulky looking, drab colored ships they gonna send for gods sake?? Is that how they are produced and always have been? Humans are just incubators for facehuggers. That’s all. Where is it shown otherwise in first?

Josh-da-man

Yeah, the effect in the movie is definitely a laser/fog effect (like you might see at a concert), though the characters describe it as some kind of mist around the eggs. I'm guessing that was the best way the special effects team could put a layer of mist over the eggs in the 1979 and have it look eerie and exotic, though it does look like an obvious laser.

I'm guessing that the "mist"" over the eggs was simply meant to imply that they were still alive and undergoing some kind of respiration process.

Josh-da-man

Alien was filmed in the late 1970s, including the crew turning into eggs. Those parts were left on the cutting room floor. Aliens came out in 1986 and was a sequel to the theatrical cut, where it was never shown where the eggs came from. The directors cut of Alien was assembled and released years later, so it doesn't fit in with what we saw in Aliens.

OldBoy

But we still saw a mother laying eggs. Isn’t that definitive that that’s where eggs come from? Like many earth species...

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brayzie

Oh yeah...I forgot about the description in the movie. The eggs themselves could have been producing the mist.
Damn, everything in the original movie was so good. The slight exploration of the derelict ship takes up very little running time of the film and yet there's so many interesting theories and possibilities you could derive from what little is presented on-screen. And even then, it only creates more questions which adds more mystery and more alien-ness to the story. In that regard I think it's a far superior film to Aliens, although Cameron's film is more fun because of the world building involved.

Josh-da-man

Yeah, Alien is an absolute masterpiece of ambiguity.

It explains very little about the aliens or the space jokey or the derelict ship, or even about what the company knows.

It sets up these really intriguing mysteries that will lose the power once they are explained.Of course I want to know who and what the Space Jockey was, where the aliens came from, how those eggs got on the ship, but I also realize that once all of this is explained, it gets locked down to something specific and loses the ability to be anything else. (Which is why I hated Promethea.)

And that, J. J. Abrams, is how you build a real mystery box.

OldBoy

Right. If never explained in first, it is explained in second and thus retroactive to apply to first. That’s all we know as fact now. There are no facts in TE of how. What was cut means it doesn’t exist in lexicon of franchise. Aliens explains both movies. Case closed.

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OldBoy

Well, if there were no facts, only conjecture, until Aliens, so that’s it. That’s the question answered.