Something I've never seen in discussions of the Alien franchise: xenomorphs work as a metaphor for unexploded ordnance.
Something I've never seen in discussions of the Alien franchise: xenomorphs work as a metaphor for unexploded ordnance.
- Weapons that keep killing long after the war they were used for is over (the Space Jockey isn't just dead, they're mummified, and there's no indication that there are any others of their kind around)
- Lay hidden and dormant, leading to innocent people stumbling on them by accident and getting killed (Nostromo crew finds the eggs and doesn't know what the fuck 'til it's too late, colony LV-426 gets wiped out because it was unknowingly built on top of a nest)
- They render entire areas unsafe to inhabit
- Aliens has often been considered an allegory for the Vietnam War, and that left enormous amounts of UXO across Southeast Asia that still persists today.
- The Weyland-Yutani and corporate profiteering aspect is a bit fuzzier, but I think there's a case to be made that their attempts to weaponize xenomorphs and the catastrophes this causes mirror the real-world military-industrial complex.