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BeamBrain [he/him] @hexbear.net

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.
6 comments

  • Oh I loooove this take.

    Generally speaking, xenomorphs do represent the monsters humans created, and while it wasn't that great, Alien: Covenant confirmed that. The Vietnam reference jumps out at you when you watch Aliens, so why the heck not, comparing the xenomorphs to unexploded ordinance makes plenty of sense to me.

    The only issue I see, really, is that the xenomorphs can move once hatched. I was thinking about the scene in the first movie

    Anyway, I've been analyzing the alien movies for a while now and get easily excited over new theories, thank you so much for sharing yours!

  • I've heard the Weyland-Yutani thing before, but never the "unexploded ordinance" angle. Also the xenomorphs are like the United States of space.

  • Nuke all that damn unexploded ordnance from orbit

  • I think it works. I took it as a given, the subtext of the franchise is about our ability to engineer our own end in the pursuit of elite dominance. among the humans, this manifests as capitalism, the company, the bio-weapons programs, and licensing/intellectual property. the engineered/deployed xenomorphs would explicitly qualify as a biological WMD in today's terms. among the engineers, it's more vague because their society is opaque and quasi religious to the audience... but seems stratified. my analysis gets murky with their role, because we only have a few silent scenes with them in groups, and a few with individuals seemingly reacting in situations with different motivations. and it might be pointless to try and reconcile the earlier franchise to the later works made 40 years later.

    and ultimately, they engineer their own end, not just from the xenomorphs, but the humans and the human engineered David.

    it's kind of grim, the broader idea that intelligent societies strive intellectually to manifest the means of our destruction.

6 comments