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Ripley encounters the Alien Queen (Alien Blu-ray) |
d) Invention of the Alien Queen.
Cameron
thought it was very important to have something going beyond what had
been seen in the first Alien film. Although there were a number of aliens in
the new film that displayed a difference in appearance, they were mainly
a reprise of Giger's design, but he took a step in another direction.
He had to think "Oh alright, what's the larger biology here, what's the
larger eco system or life cycle let's say"
He thought "well
let's propose a society here"
He had to create a society or a hierarchy and a life cycle that made some
sense to him. These multiple aliens were a part of a hierarchical hive structure where the central figure is a giant queen
whose role it is to further the species, in his original treatment, he included drones as in a bee colony and so in the film the alien queen would
be the revelation about how the aliens' social order would work.
Something that he had was a dream about being caught inside a room that was a wasps's nest and he wanted to bring that dream into a horror movie.
See: Alien Queen in hive scene inspired by dream of a wasp nest
However this Alien queen would be like a termite queen that would become immobile with her enormous big distended abdomen which is at least four or five times larger than her body, and as a big egg sac its filled with eggs, with the ovipositor puts out perhaps fifty thousand eggs a day, or rather these egg like forms that Ridley Scott's original Alien film could never
account for, rather than what was cut out of it in terms of the cocoon scene.
So the direction to go was to take everything that's happening on an insect level and blew it up
to a much larger scale and took the HR Giger ethos in the kind of
overlaying of it.
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A termite queen being tended by her children, the worker termites.
Courtesy of Barbara Thorne
Source: https://www.npr.org/ |
So the idea was that it was a parasitic,
insect-like creature, such as a digger wasp that will paralyse
caterpillars or some other host and inject its eggs into them, then the
eggs would hatch out. Yet it had a different life cycle that was two-part, because the egg as a container for the face hugger would also give birth to this creature.
The face hugger would then inject its egg
into a host and give birth in a parasitic way - much like a digger
wasp's larva would emerge from a dead caterpillar - to the actual alien
itself that would become an adult.
So presumably, somewhere in this life cycle an
alien queen itself would emerge in the similar way that a queen bee is created. Off the top of his head Cameron would imagine that bees used hormones or some other signal to generate a queen when they needed one, and then a more accepted view on the creation of a queen bee is that it is developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature. That added a layer to the life cycle that Cameron felt was missing from the film "Alien", and it made sense to him. Also he
saw the tail as being a stinger that could be used to paralyse the prey
as well.
Earlier, he had been developing a story called "Mother" that was about a mother extra-terrestrial monster, that would do anything to defend its offspring. For
Cameron, in Aliens, the queen would be a character more than a thing or an animal.
It looked to him as if the producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler and Walter Hill were not really bothered about how the alien queen concept might have conflicted with idea behind the creation of the spores from the first movie and were not there to correct any misunderstandings that he might have had about it.
But as we would see by the development of the third film, the producers worked with William Gibson who found himself writing about the alien spores becoming near enough a fungal spore when the alien reproduced.
e) Two part life cycle
Another question was: Why would you have a two-part life cycle like
that?
Although the answer had already been worked out for the original Alien movie, it had not been clearly spelt out and perhaps not even so in Cameron's Aliens movie. His answer is adaptation. He looked towards the digger wasp as a comparison for the alien life cycle although the digger wasp's larva does not
adapt to its host. but he understood that the next generation of wasp should be more
effective at attacking that species of caterpillar. So, his idea for the
two-part life cycle was that when the face hugger laid its egg or embryo
inside the host, that allowed a process of adaptation where the
emerging creature would take on aspects of its host.
In the case of the
alien, it came out with fingers and hands and legs and arms that were
jointed with elbows and actually quite human in the architecture of the
body, but quite inhuman in the development of the head. So the purpose of that kind
of in between phase of the life cycle was
adaptation, and so Cameron went with the idea that theoretically the creature was either genetically
engineered or had just evolved naturally to adapt well to hosts
anywhere.
So, if someone thought about how a life form was going to take over a galaxy,
that is Cameron came to the conclusion about how it would be done. The life form has to be able to adapt to the chemistry and
the morphology of any potential host population, and if a creature is going
from planet to planet, these hosts are going to be organisms that it has never seen or been exposed to before. It couldn't possibly show up
perfectly adapted to prey on that host's population without having that
intermediate stage in the life cycle.
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alien warrior from Aliens |
f) A starting point for a creature that would lay the eggs?
Here we have HR Giger's mysterious painting "Alien Monster IV" (1978) that looks like some sort of representation of an immense next evolution of the alien creature.
This one though had wings and a bird of prey like head.
A tube curling around its rear ends with an "alien egg" like form being eased out of the end by the creatures fingers, although it might be something else and I don't know what.
Perhaps this was the starting point of the egg laying sakc
Of course it can be seen in the book The Winston Effect :The Art and History of Stan Winston Studio that Cameron's alien queen had hands based upon the ones in this painting which offered evidence that this painting was a point of interest.
g) Further questions about the space jockey
For a few not quite happy with what they were told to believe in the film, not happy with Cameron's simplicity that resulted were near enough a bunch of insects with the alien queen laying eggs with an egg sac like a termite queen's, the oddly oversized Alien Queen presented in the film was so big that some might have even wondered if this is the sort of size that a chestburster that erupted from the original space jockey in Alien might grow into, and if that was so, how did it manage to hibernate for all these thousands of years since the space jockey died.
- Q: Did you have the idea of the Queen from the beginning?
Cameron: I
thought it was very important to have something beyond that hadn't been
seen before in the first film, even though we have a number of aliens
throughout the main body of the film. They're mainly a reprise of Mr
Giger's design. I thought it was important to show some new form beyond
that. And, I think, there's a lot of revelation going on there, as to
how their whole social organization works. I think of the Queen as a
character, rather than a thing or an animal.
Q: Someone
raised the point that having the concept of a queen alien was in
contradiction to the reproductive life cycle of the alien as it was
implied in the first film
Hurd: Where did the eggs come from then?
Q: From the humans that had been infected by the alien
Cameron:
But you see, that was never seen at all. Yes, it's in contradiction to
the reproductive cycle that was in the original script of the first
film. But it's not in contradiction to what you saw in the film. What
you saw in the film was a thousand eggs. one of them hatches, one of
them goes through its life cycle, becomes an adult, and is killed. There
is no connection between the adult and the future eggs. Now in the
scene that was apparently shot and cut, and which I never saw, in which
Tom Skerrit and Harry Dean Stanton are turning into eggs, that closed
the cycle. But, to me, that was completely irrelevant to what you
actually saw in the film.
Unless you're
an ardent fan of the film and studied what was taken out, which to me
is irrelevant to the group experience of this movie, it's not a
contradiction, it's merely an alternative explanation. And a more
plausible one, really.
Q: Obviously, you've given this point a lot of thought. This change was not made lightly
Cameron: Yes,
it was a conscious decision. Had the first film appeared in its
complete form, then I would have had to take a different approach to the
story. But I felt only a responsibility to what people saw within the
first film, not the intentions of various people behind it
Hurd: Few people knew this anyway. Most people we spoke to assumed the alien was a shape changer
Cameron: No,
I don't think that's quite true either. Some people might have been
misled, but I don't think everybody was. I never bought it was a shape
changer. (L'Ecran Fantastique #73, October 1986/ Bloody Best of Fangoria v6, 1987/ Science Fiction Film Making In The 1980s)
- Cameron: They've
seen the eggs, they've seen the parasite that emerges from the eggs,
they've seen the embryo layed by the parasite emerge from a host person,
and they've seen the embryo grow up into a supposedly adult form. But
the adult form - one of them anyway - couldn't possibly have layed the
thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of the derelict ship. (Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer)
- Cameron: In
my story, the eggs come from somewhere else. At last that was my
theory. So working from that theory - acres and acres of these quite
large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall - I began to focus on the
idea of a hierarchical hive structure where the central figure is a
giant queen whose role it is to further the species. (Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer)
- Starburst: Haven't you messed around with the alien life-cycle in Aliens?
James Cameron:
Only in respect of Dan O'Bannon's original concept. It doesn't violate
anything that audiences saw within the final act of Aliens as the cocoon
scene was removed. If you follow Dan's original concept, the closure of
the original cycle was the human host turning back into a cocoon. I
never found that to be very satisfying as it showed, when one had the
facehugger attached, the embryo implanted, and when it burst out it
killed that person. There was nothing going on with John Hurt in that
respect. So there was a different version of it when the alien grabbed
Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It's certainly
no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another
host but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg.
That's something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow
because it involved the transformation of the human host and although
one can assume the alien can metamorphose, to have its biological
properties take up residence in a human being and change it was going
beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien's great
attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process but it has
a basis in science fact all the way through like the cycle of a digger
wasp which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to
mature. There's a validity in all of that but I dispensed with it
because we never saw that in the film anyway. Had it appeared in the
film I wouldn't have violated any logic turbulence. (Starburst 98, October 1996, interview with James Cameron by Alan Jones)
- James Cameron: I
think it's strange to think about further
victims becoming hosts. It would be somewhat difficult for audiences to
swallow because it requires the transformation of the human host. You
can accept the fact the alien transforms but to have its biological
properties take up residence in a human being was a direct violation of
logic. You can't suspend belief that way; it's too absurd. (Skeleton Crew, August 1990, p22)
- James Cameron: I had a story I was developing called Mother that was about a Mother extra-terrestrial - monster, basically, that would do anything to defend its young, its offspring. And I thought, "Well, what is ALIEN all about? It's about eggs. Well, who lays the eggs? Where did all those damn eggs come from? Don't we want to meet her?" So it was actually a fairly simple progression of ideas and it all happened very fast. (Famous Monsters of Filmland (Jul/Aug 2016)
- James Cameron: They've seen the eggs, they've seen the parasite that emerges from the eggs, they've seen the embryo laid by that parasite emerge from the host person, and they've seen the embryo grow into that supposedly adult form. But that adult form - one of them anyway - couldn't possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of the derelict ship. At least that was my theory. So working from that image - acres and acres of these quite large eggs - I began to focus on the idea of a hierarchical hive structure where the central figure is a giant queen whose role it is to further the species. (The Winston Effect, p78-79.)
- Hurd: Where did the eggs come from then?
Q: From the humans that had been infected by the alien
Cameron:
But you see, that was never seen at all. Yes, it's in contradiction to
the reproductive cycle that was in the original script of the first
film. But it's not in contradiction to what you saw in the film. What
you saw in the film was a thousand eggs. one of them hatches, one of
them goes through its life cycle, becomes an adult, and is killed. There
is no connection between the adult and the future eggs. Now in the
scene that was apparently shot and cut, and which I never saw, in which
Tom Skerrit and Harry Dean Stanton are turning into eggs, that closed
the cycle. But, to me, that was completely irrelevant to what you
actually saw in the film. (L'Ecran Fantastique #73, October 1986/ Bloody Best of Fangoria v6, 1987/ Science Fiction Film Making In The 1980s
- James Cameron: I
had to create a society or a hierarchy and a life cycle that made some
sense, so if the queen was a termite queen with her big egg sac and
ovipositor creating all those eggs that Ridley Scott or Giger never
account for in the original film - in fact, they did account for it, but
they cut it out of the film. They had some kind of strange life cycle
where some of the human hosts were encapsulated and then turned into the
egg from which the face hugger emerged, but that never made a damn bit
of sense to me. I figured it was a fair game to chuck it out because
they didn't put it in the movie. So the idea was that it was a parasite,
insect-like creature, like a digger wasp that will paralyse
caterpillars or some other host and inject its eggs into them, then the
eggs would hatch out. Yet it had a different life cycle. It had two-part
life cycle because the egg would give birth to a face hugger, which
would then inject a second egg inside the host. So the big egg was a
container for the facehugger. The face hugger would then inject its egg
into a host and give birth in a parasitic way - much like a digger
wasp's larva would emerge from a dead caterpillar - to the actual alien
itself that would become an adult. So presumably, somewhere in there an
alien queen itself would emerge in the same way that bees can use
hormones or some other signal to generate a queen when they need a
queen. That added a layer to the life cycle that I don't think was
really contemplated by Ridley and Giger, but that made sense to me. And I
saw the tail as being a stinger that could be used to paralyse the prey
as well. (James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction p38)
- James Cameron: Then
the other question is: Why would you have a two-part life cycle like
that? And the answer is adaptation. The digger wasp's larva does not
adapt to its host. but the next generation of wasp should be more
effective at attacking that species of caterpillar. So, my idea for the
two-part life cycle was that when the face hugger laid its egg or embryo
inside the host, that allowed a process of adaptation where the
emerging creature would take on aspects of its host. In the case of the
alien, it came out with fingers and hands and legs and arms that were
jointed with elbows and actually quite human in the architecture of the
body, but quite inhuman in the development of the head. I know the idea
used in some of the subsequent films was the dog version of the alien,
and I think even a cow version at one point. So the purpose of that kind
of intergeneration or intermediate phase off the life cycle was
adaptation, and theoretically the creature was either genetically
engineered or had just evolved naturally to adapt well to hosts
anywhere. So, you think about how you are going to take over a galaxy,
that is how you do it. You have to be able to adapt to the chemistry and
the morphology of any potential host population, and if you are going
from planet to planet, these hosts are going to be organisms you have
never seen or been exposed to before. You can't possibly show up
perfectly adapted to prey on that host's population without having that
intermediate stage in the life cycle. So that was the concept. (James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction p39)
- James Cameron: I had to think "Oh alright, what's the larger biology here, what's the larger eco system or life cycle let's say?", so I modelled it loosely on a kind of an insect structure where you'd have a queen, and then in my original treatment, drone workers like in a bee colony. I thought well let's propose a society here, sort of basically, as a queen and a big kind of an egg sack which was really modelled on the idea of termite biology where the queen becomes immobile, has this enormous distended abdomen which is about four or five times the length of the rest of the body and maybe even larger and it's just filled with eggs. She puts out fifty thousand eggs a day or something like that. I took it from nature as we understand.
I took everything that's happening on an insect level and blew it up to a much larger scale and took the Giger ethos in the kind of overlaying of it.
So the idea here was, when you first see her you even don't know what that is. There's the idea that Ridley and Giger explored, that it's hiding it in plane sight, she walks in and sees this thing.(From a documentary on the inspiration and design of Aliens that came out online)