Movie Villains

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April 02, 2004

Aliens

They lurk behind every corner. They hide in the shadows. They seem to be everywhere. And when you least expect it, they strike -- from below, from above, from behind, or maybe from right in front of you. Most are too terrified to fight back, and those that aren't get ripped to pieces by their gigantic jaws and razor-sharp teeth. The really unlucky ones, however, are taken deep inside their lair and become the victims of their parasitic offspring. And in one agonizing burst from beneath their rib cages, the victims die as the new Aliens greet the world.

These slippery and sickening xenomorphs were first found on the planet LV-426 when the cargo ship Nostromo answered a distress call. Its crew discovered a race of extraterrestrials long dead along with other beings growing inside a field full of eggs. One of the crew came back to the ship with some kind of being attached to his helmet. It had crawled in and attached itself to his face. Days later, the being died and fell off by himself. For a while, the crewmember seemed fine until one fateful day when he was overcome with pain in his stomach. Moments later, an alien burst from his chest, killing him immediately and ushering in the age of the Alien.

Nostromo crewmember Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) would miraculously survive her ordeal with the alien, which shed its skin numerous times, transforming into a giant hideous beast that tore her crew apart. She blew the beast into space and retreated to a cryosleep chamber. 57 years later, she would be found, only to discover that LV-426 had been settled by colonists hoping to establish new cities on the planet's surface. And the Company involved with sending them there had recently lost contact with the colonists. A troop of Space Marines would be dispatched with Ripley aboard as an advisor to determine the problem. Sure enough, the Aliens had taken over the settlement and the Marines tried to fight them off. Eventually, Ripley would escape again, this time by blowing up the entire settlement in a massive explosion. But even back on the mothership, she'd have to defend herself from an Alien Queen one more time.

Time and again, Ripley would find herself at odds with an Alien, but the conditions of her surroundings (and herself) would be different each time. Ripley would crashland onto a penal colony planet to discover she had been "impregnated" with an alien before the crash. She would find herself fighting off another hideous alien before doing the only thing she could do to kill this final beast: jumping into a giant incinerator, committing suicide.

Though it all, the Company would be after their precious Alien specimen. Determined to be the ideal planetary weapon, the Aliens could kill in so many ways, using their physical strength, size, and survival instincts and abilities. They even had acid for blood, which made it more difficult to kill them (for risk one would die with them). But the Company would strike again years later, using a DNA sample from Ripley to clone her with the Alien beast inside of her. During the process, things didn't quite go according to plan and Ripley emerged with some of the Alien race's more subtle attributes, like senses of smell and increased strength. An Alien would be extracted from Ripley's body surgically, but once again, a race of aliens would wreak havoc for the scientists trying to control them.

Without question, the Alien is one of the strongest and most lethal villains in the movie universe. Even one - as it has been seen numerous times - can cause incredible hardship. Many of them working together are a total nightmare. And that's the thing: the Aliens do have the ability to work together, and certain specific members of the race have emerged. The Alien Queen, specifically, is quite large and powerful and has the ability to produce dozens, if not hundreds, of new eggs. So it would seem the only way to rid the universe of these beasts is to destroy their home planet and pray they haven't gone anywhere else. As one Space Marine once put it, it's "the only way to be sure."

Posted by Destro at April 2, 2004 09:03 AM