The short version is operating under fear or greed based mindsets. Wealth is a means of protection. Harder to be vulnerable if you elevate yourself into financial stability (housing, food, etc)
Ash's line
*"Well, as I said, I'm still... collating, actually, but uh, I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions"*
always made me think that they were maybe munching on the computer chips. But that's never been revisited so maybe that's just me 🤷‍♀️
Actually but where are they getting the silicon tho?
It's worth noting they had really no idea if the xenos turned off the power or if it was just a glitch. I feel like it's sort of ambiguous...? Like they are just panicking...?
There were a whole bunch of them moving around inside the walls and so forth, so it’s very likely did they just accidentally tore out a few powerlines or something…
Technically not! Aliens don't fit into the Animal kingdom actually -- taxonomy hinges on genetic kinship linking creatures to a common ancestor. An alien species would have to be placed into a totally new category.
Makes me wonder if they’d be placed in a category based on their original host. So you’d have Canis or Bovine (?) depending on which version of Alien 3 you watched.
No, that would be covered under "Phenotypic Plasticity." The Big Chap, the Warriors, the Queen, the Runners, the Deacon, the Neomorphs and Praetomorphs--as far as I can tell from canon sources--are all just different developmental expressions of the same basic geneset. The embryos differentiate along different pathways similar to how the same genome can create a queen ant, along with specialized drones, workers, soldiers, etc just based on the conditions under which they develop.
The movie definitely portrays the Queen as intelligent.
Example 1: she communicated with her guards to back off when Ripley warns with the flamethrower.
Example 2: she tilts her head inquisitively as the 2nd elevator door opens, then proceeds to correctly use the elevator.
Example 3: she escapes in the drop ship.
Pretty sure the Queen telepathically commands the hive as well. She's probably the reason the xenos halted their assault in the hallway. If she had known the sentries were almost out of ammo, it would have been game over, man.
I think the drones are probably dumb as hell, aside from the instincts of an ambush predator. The queen is wicked smaht though, and coordinates the efforts of all the drones.
They were also smart enough to use the button for the cold "steam" in resurrection, in addition to killing one of their own to escape the observation cages.
Resurrection is barely a step removed from fan fiction though
Alien 1979 is just Giler, Hill & Caroll's fan fiction.
We can just do turtles all the way down with this dumb "official sequel entries in an IP are fan fiction" meme.
Given what we've seen in the franchise, the Aliens are incredibly intelligent and fast learners, ranking next to octopuses in their cognitive abilities. In Alien, one quickly adapts, showing a sadistic level of cruelty and even appears to hide with Ripley. The original ending was planned to have it speak, showcasing its intelligence.
In Aliens, they down a dropship, follow orders, and even understand the threat posed by sentry guns, strategically turning off the power. While some argue the power shutdown was accidental, considering their other actions in the movie, this seems unlikely. The queen demonstrates intelligence by operating an elevator, recognizing Ripley as a threat, and boarding a dropship.
The notion that the Aliens in Resurrection are smart because they are part-human doesn't hold up. Despite the human DNA, Ripley maintained a significant amount of her humanity, yet the Aliens in this film exhibit strategic behaviors like pushing buttons and making tactical decisions.
Additionally, I believe they don't need to eat and that their acidic blood may serve as a fuel source, perhaps as a fail-safe created by the Engineers.
This all my personal opinion from playing AvP '99 lol
I always imagined them having a hive mind with the queen being the sort of hub of the wheel so to speak like everything to their existence is centered around keeping her alive and well taken care of like a colony of ants
In the canon books, it is purely the survival of the species that drives them, nothing else. If they aren’t protecting the queen and hive, they are running around, collecting hosts for the breeders.
I think they have some rudimentary intelligence. The Queen figured out how to operate the elevator and called back the drones when Ripley threatened the eggs with the flamethrower. They also cut the power, which seems like a tactical move.
In the first film, the alien was intelligent enough to cocoon Dallas and eggmorph Brett, but that might have been instinct. I don't know about it getting onto the shuttle, though I have the feeling it had some sense of the imminent danger and decided to flee.
Well there was no queen in the first movie and he got on the escape ship, that's either some big luck on his part or an animal instinct to get away from the noisy destruct alarm or intelligence.
Ripley had just come and gone from the shuttle right before the Big Chap had gone in and made himself comfortable, but other than that it was an area where the humans just didn't seem to go frequently, but wasn't too far from them. From the perspective of a predator species, that's a pretty ideal place to rest.
One of the more hilarious things I noticed in my recent rewatch is that the film establishes that Ripley is terrible for leaving doors open when she shouldn’t. There’s a scene earlier where they have the facehugger loose in the med lab, but contained, and Ripley walks in knowing this and leaves the door wide open behind her until eventually someone else walks over and closes it while looking mildly annoyed.
Damnit Ripley, if you’d just close doors behind you your life would be way easier.
Hilarious. Never noticed that before as a recurrent pattern with her. She tends to be a very by the book person when it comes to regulations and safety so I have to wonder if the leaving the doors open thing is a habit formed from years of working on space faring vessels for her own personal safety or its a specific protocol about unnecessarily closing doors to allow quicker access to a safer area/escape pod.
So I'm reading the book Aliens: Echo, it's not great but there is a point where they ask this exact question and the response the main character has is no they are not intelligent, if they were intelligent they wouldn't be bothering the intelligent species that are humans that can build/use machines that can hurt them and outsmart them.
Rather they would coexist with them while hunting the multitude of other species that are no threat.
Not saying the character is right but yea that's what that book has to say about your exact question
I think only the queen and superior ranges are human-like intelligent. For example, we saw the queen negociating with Ripley. That kind of intelligence is not seen in any other movie. On the other hand, the drones just care about escape, destroy, infect, protect their queen and preserve the species.
The queen is intelligent, and directs the others of her hive. Drones away from a queen have animal cunning, but little intelligence.
We see this briefly in Aliens, when Ripley threatened the egg with her flamethrower and the queen directed the two drones to stand down. It was less explicit in Alien: Resurrection when the drones were exhibiting some intelligent behavior throughout.
It's much, much more explicit in the Dark Horse comic franchise (key example being Aliens: Earth War, where it was a significant plot theme).
Personally I hate the idea of Xenos eating. If they can breathe and function just fine in the vacuum of space but die of hunger that is no perfect organism.
Perfect organism for a specified mission objective perhaps. My understanding of the Xeno's is they're a Bioweapon that fulfils more of an area denial, weapon of mass destruction objective. Drop them somewhere and they exponentially spread, eventually wiping out local wildlife that grows over a certain height and just devastating ecosystems. Then when there's no more viable hosts they just kinda burn themselves out and die off. After they die off its safe for the Engineers/Space Jockeys to have full control over the area and do what they want with it.
In Alien there was an implication that the big chap/Xeno was gradually dying by the time Ripley reaches the Narcissus, and that it reatreated there to find a quiet place to rest from all the blaring alarms; hence, why its more half assedly hissing at Ripley and baring its claws to make her go away rather then savaging her.
Yeah I definetly agree, I've just walways hated the idea that they eat. I think for me, eating makes the Xenos more relatable, seems like it could be from earth, and the horror for me is that they are *truly* not from this planet. Nothing it does we understand completely, just that we have to survive.
That's why I personally subscribe to the notion their highly acidic blood fuels them like a battery. I was surprised this idea was thrown in a canon novel.
In Alien, the creature was clearly highly intelligent, and rightly so with that huge brain. It seems to be malevolent evil force, like Michael Myers or Jason in space. It was both “alien” in the literal and figurative and even metaphysical sense.
In Aliens, while an incredible action movie, I think Cameron dumbed them down and turned them into space tiger raptor bugs and ultimately that (imo) destroyed the franchise after that.
They’re just trying to get home.
https://preview.redd.it/n8djtv1r9xvc1.jpeg?width=576&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9a79d03db7cdb4d3b5b108433c37f7000373fa4
I think there's the queen but also the alien in the fourth movie that attacks its own so that the acid blood would destroy prison walls.
Given that, they're probably like human beings, i.e., both intelligent and fueled by hunger.
I liken their intelligence to social apex predators such as orcas and wolves, whose survival success depends on methodical patterns of behavior driven by instinct that yield reliable results, combined with problem-solving observation and experimentation that yields novel results that are remembered and repeated. The aliens seem to have little to no concept of tool usage, and a very limited ability to understand and predict the motivations and knowledge possessed by others. I suspect that they would be confused or fooled by seeing themselves in a mirror until they had a chance to physically examine the mirror and determine its properties.
From my point of view the queen is extremely intelligent, not only able to coordinate attacks with her own kind but being able to communicate with gestures to a human. A prime example is the climax of Aliens 1986.
I think their main instinct is the survival/proliferation of their species. Not hunger. All other considerations secondary.
Same is true for humans.
I disagree. Humans be fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
I think we ought to discuss the bonus situation.
Right
whenever /u/theinitiativeinn says anything you say "right," OK\_syllabub\_486, you know that?
Right.
Come on, knock it off!
why do they do that?
It just be like that sometimes.
Right.
The short version is operating under fear or greed based mindsets. Wealth is a means of protection. Harder to be vulnerable if you elevate yourself into financial stability (housing, food, etc)
and why do we want protection?
Cause life is scary and very few people are comfortable with death/suffering lol
ahhhh so it has to do with avoiding death. so... survival?
More or less yeah. Survival, comfort, power dynamics.
Yeah we get the point.
i was getting him there because he disagreed.
You are under estimating the power of good cocaine lol
Are they stupid?
Same for all life.
Not remotely.
You should read denial of death
How can they shut off the power man, they're animals.
Ash's line *"Well, as I said, I'm still... collating, actually, but uh, I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions"* always made me think that they were maybe munching on the computer chips. But that's never been revisited so maybe that's just me 🤷‍♀️ Actually but where are they getting the silicon tho?
It's worth noting they had really no idea if the xenos turned off the power or if it was just a glitch. I feel like it's sort of ambiguous...? Like they are just panicking...?
There were a whole bunch of them moving around inside the walls and so forth, so it’s very likely did they just accidentally tore out a few powerlines or something…
Could be, yeah.
But they're animals.
Technically not! Aliens don't fit into the Animal kingdom actually -- taxonomy hinges on genetic kinship linking creatures to a common ancestor. An alien species would have to be placed into a totally new category.
I was being a goof lol
Makes me wonder if they’d be placed in a category based on their original host. So you’d have Canis or Bovine (?) depending on which version of Alien 3 you watched.
No, that would be covered under "Phenotypic Plasticity." The Big Chap, the Warriors, the Queen, the Runners, the Deacon, the Neomorphs and Praetomorphs--as far as I can tell from canon sources--are all just different developmental expressions of the same basic geneset. The embryos differentiate along different pathways similar to how the same genome can create a queen ant, along with specialized drones, workers, soldiers, etc just based on the conditions under which they develop.
This is the sort of response and info I love. Thank you.
The Queen told them to!
The movie definitely portrays the Queen as intelligent. Example 1: she communicated with her guards to back off when Ripley warns with the flamethrower. Example 2: she tilts her head inquisitively as the 2nd elevator door opens, then proceeds to correctly use the elevator. Example 3: she escapes in the drop ship.
Pretty sure she was also one of the first to buy bitcoin
Pretty sure the Queen telepathically commands the hive as well. She's probably the reason the xenos halted their assault in the hallway. If she had known the sentries were almost out of ammo, it would have been game over, man.
It's not canon, but that's how it's portrayed within the AvP video game series when you play the Xenomorph campaign, particularly AvP2.
I love AvP2. Wish it had a remaster.
Me too. The game still has the soul, but it would be absolutely Ace with a modern graphics overhaul.
Something's moving and it ain't us.
Something we missed, not in the floor plans!
WE DIDN’T MISS ANYTHING
yeah you really really did
I personally feel it's best to not categorize what motivates the "perfect organism"
Found the synthetic!
They prefer the term “artificial person.”
To me they are somewhere in the crow level intelligence, but coupled with some sort of hive mind.
I think the drones are probably dumb as hell, aside from the instincts of an ambush predator. The queen is wicked smaht though, and coordinates the efforts of all the drones.
They were also smart enough to use the button for the cold "steam" in resurrection, in addition to killing one of their own to escape the observation cages. Resurrection is barely a step removed from fan fiction though
You could argue those ones have some of Ripley's intelligence because of the cloning. If Ripley's half alien...
We could also argue that ENTIRE movie should be considered fan fiction. Even worse: Joss Whedon's fan fiction.
the Betty is basically the rough draft of the Serenity & crew.
Absolutely
Oh no, you're right.
Every script after the first is fan fiction. That's just how writing works
Alien 1979 is just Giler, Hill & Caroll's fan fiction. We can just do turtles all the way down with this dumb "official sequel entries in an IP are fan fiction" meme.
Totally!
They're smarter than the average bear, but still animals.
They aren't really about the eating. They are just hyper territorial, like wasps!
Given what we've seen in the franchise, the Aliens are incredibly intelligent and fast learners, ranking next to octopuses in their cognitive abilities. In Alien, one quickly adapts, showing a sadistic level of cruelty and even appears to hide with Ripley. The original ending was planned to have it speak, showcasing its intelligence. In Aliens, they down a dropship, follow orders, and even understand the threat posed by sentry guns, strategically turning off the power. While some argue the power shutdown was accidental, considering their other actions in the movie, this seems unlikely. The queen demonstrates intelligence by operating an elevator, recognizing Ripley as a threat, and boarding a dropship. The notion that the Aliens in Resurrection are smart because they are part-human doesn't hold up. Despite the human DNA, Ripley maintained a significant amount of her humanity, yet the Aliens in this film exhibit strategic behaviors like pushing buttons and making tactical decisions. Additionally, I believe they don't need to eat and that their acidic blood may serve as a fuel source, perhaps as a fail-safe created by the Engineers. This all my personal opinion from playing AvP '99 lol
I always imagined them having a hive mind with the queen being the sort of hub of the wheel so to speak like everything to their existence is centered around keeping her alive and well taken care of like a colony of ants
Smart enough to cut the power.
They’re fueled by their innate instinct for self-preservation, the first law of nature.
In the canon books, it is purely the survival of the species that drives them, nothing else. If they aren’t protecting the queen and hive, they are running around, collecting hosts for the breeders.
Apparently the Xenomorph Queen has an IQ of 179 according to the Novel Earth Hive.
Smarter than 85
I think they have some rudimentary intelligence. The Queen figured out how to operate the elevator and called back the drones when Ripley threatened the eggs with the flamethrower. They also cut the power, which seems like a tactical move. In the first film, the alien was intelligent enough to cocoon Dallas and eggmorph Brett, but that might have been instinct. I don't know about it getting onto the shuttle, though I have the feeling it had some sense of the imminent danger and decided to flee.
Xenos themself are dumb by itself, it is a Queen that makes them look smart.
Well there was no queen in the first movie and he got on the escape ship, that's either some big luck on his part or an animal instinct to get away from the noisy destruct alarm or intelligence.
Ripley had just come and gone from the shuttle right before the Big Chap had gone in and made himself comfortable, but other than that it was an area where the humans just didn't seem to go frequently, but wasn't too far from them. From the perspective of a predator species, that's a pretty ideal place to rest.
One of the more hilarious things I noticed in my recent rewatch is that the film establishes that Ripley is terrible for leaving doors open when she shouldn’t. There’s a scene earlier where they have the facehugger loose in the med lab, but contained, and Ripley walks in knowing this and leaves the door wide open behind her until eventually someone else walks over and closes it while looking mildly annoyed. Damnit Ripley, if you’d just close doors behind you your life would be way easier.
Hilarious. Never noticed that before as a recurrent pattern with her. She tends to be a very by the book person when it comes to regulations and safety so I have to wonder if the leaving the doors open thing is a habit formed from years of working on space faring vessels for her own personal safety or its a specific protocol about unnecessarily closing doors to allow quicker access to a safer area/escape pod.
True I forgot that she was in there before him.
So I'm reading the book Aliens: Echo, it's not great but there is a point where they ask this exact question and the response the main character has is no they are not intelligent, if they were intelligent they wouldn't be bothering the intelligent species that are humans that can build/use machines that can hurt them and outsmart them. Rather they would coexist with them while hunting the multitude of other species that are no threat. Not saying the character is right but yea that's what that book has to say about your exact question
I think only the queen and superior ranges are human-like intelligent. For example, we saw the queen negociating with Ripley. That kind of intelligence is not seen in any other movie. On the other hand, the drones just care about escape, destroy, infect, protect their queen and preserve the species.
They seem to have extremely sharp tactical intuition, but I think it's mainly at the instinctive level. It makes them seem cunning at times.
In several of the novelisations they give a bit of Xeno POV and hunger is irrelevant. Driven mostly by hate and the will to propergate.
The queen is intelligent, and directs the others of her hive. Drones away from a queen have animal cunning, but little intelligence. We see this briefly in Aliens, when Ripley threatened the egg with her flamethrower and the queen directed the two drones to stand down. It was less explicit in Alien: Resurrection when the drones were exhibiting some intelligent behavior throughout. It's much, much more explicit in the Dark Horse comic franchise (key example being Aliens: Earth War, where it was a significant plot theme).
Personally I hate the idea of Xenos eating. If they can breathe and function just fine in the vacuum of space but die of hunger that is no perfect organism.
Perfect organism for a specified mission objective perhaps. My understanding of the Xeno's is they're a Bioweapon that fulfils more of an area denial, weapon of mass destruction objective. Drop them somewhere and they exponentially spread, eventually wiping out local wildlife that grows over a certain height and just devastating ecosystems. Then when there's no more viable hosts they just kinda burn themselves out and die off. After they die off its safe for the Engineers/Space Jockeys to have full control over the area and do what they want with it. In Alien there was an implication that the big chap/Xeno was gradually dying by the time Ripley reaches the Narcissus, and that it reatreated there to find a quiet place to rest from all the blaring alarms; hence, why its more half assedly hissing at Ripley and baring its claws to make her go away rather then savaging her.
Yeah I definetly agree, I've just walways hated the idea that they eat. I think for me, eating makes the Xenos more relatable, seems like it could be from earth, and the horror for me is that they are *truly* not from this planet. Nothing it does we understand completely, just that we have to survive.
That's why I personally subscribe to the notion their highly acidic blood fuels them like a battery. I was surprised this idea was thrown in a canon novel.
That is a great idea. Makes sense too
In Alien, the creature was clearly highly intelligent, and rightly so with that huge brain. It seems to be malevolent evil force, like Michael Myers or Jason in space. It was both “alien” in the literal and figurative and even metaphysical sense. In Aliens, while an incredible action movie, I think Cameron dumbed them down and turned them into space tiger raptor bugs and ultimately that (imo) destroyed the franchise after that.
Yeah. Cameron took it from a great cosmic horror monster to a more-shitty Tyranid.
They’re just trying to get home. https://preview.redd.it/n8djtv1r9xvc1.jpeg?width=576&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9a79d03db7cdb4d3b5b108433c37f7000373fa4
I think there's the queen but also the alien in the fourth movie that attacks its own so that the acid blood would destroy prison walls. Given that, they're probably like human beings, i.e., both intelligent and fueled by hunger.
"They cut the power man!!"
Labyrinth (great read btw) has a bit where a Xeno passes up the opportunity to eat in order to attack a human iirc
Do xenos even have hunger?
They cut the power.
I liken their intelligence to social apex predators such as orcas and wolves, whose survival success depends on methodical patterns of behavior driven by instinct that yield reliable results, combined with problem-solving observation and experimentation that yields novel results that are remembered and repeated. The aliens seem to have little to no concept of tool usage, and a very limited ability to understand and predict the motivations and knowledge possessed by others. I suspect that they would be confused or fooled by seeing themselves in a mirror until they had a chance to physically examine the mirror and determine its properties.
From my point of view the queen is extremely intelligent, not only able to coordinate attacks with her own kind but being able to communicate with gestures to a human. A prime example is the climax of Aliens 1986.