Nostromo Xenomorph (Alien)
Posted by Darkness on May 1, 2023 (Updated: 06-Sep-2023)
The Xenomorph first appeared in the 1979 film Alien. Its nicknames are Kane’s Son and Giger’s Alien but companies have recently used the term Big Chap in merchandise to refer to it.
Appearance
Xenomorph in 1979’s Alien.
The head of the alien is stretched out backwards into a smooth dome. The creature doesn’t have eyes, ears or a nose. The mouth has fairly short, ‘shimmering’ teeth. The alien also, like all other xenomorphs, has an extra mouth inside its mouth. The xenomorph has an incredible production of saliva. The jaws are long and muscular. The alien’s body is humanoid-looking. It has a wide chest. The ribs are clearly visible. It also walks on two feet. This similarity to humans is due to the exchange of DNA between the host and the alien embryo. This means that the alien will be able to easily adapt to its prey by having some of the prey’s DNA.
The Xenomorph also has pipes on its back. The front limbs are used just like hands. The alien has 6 digits. 4 of them is paired, while digit 4 and 1 is single. Each of the 6 digits ends in a claw. The alien’s tail is long and slender. It is muscular and on the upside of it, the tail has spikes. On the end of the tail is a scorpion-like stinger.
Behaviour
The Nostromo Xenomorph was one of the few aliens encountered that was solitary and relied on ambushing its victims. While most of the crew of the Nostromo were killed by the alien instantly, Dallas was the only one who was kept alive and dragged back for cocooning.
One of the unique features of the Xenomorph that hasn’t ever been seen thereafter is the ability to create alien eggs. It is seen to take Brett and Dallas and cocoon them up on the wall and they are seen to be slowly turning into alien eggs. It is theorised that an alien can only do this as a last resort when there is no Queen nearby and a Super/Queen Facehugger can eventually be produced.
When the alien stowed away on the Narcissus, it’s believed that the alien had reached the end of its life cycle and was dying. It’s also worth noting that it is shown that the Xenomorph can survive in the depths of space, at least for a short time.
Story
The crew of the Nostromo are awoken from hypersleep in June 2122 due to a distress signal on a nearby planetoid (known later as LV-426). They investigate the signal and find a huge derelict spacecraft. In its cargo hold are hundreds of alien eggs. One of the crew, Kane, gets too close to one and a Facehugger attacks him. The other crew members bring him back to the dropship. Kane regains consciousness and a Chestburster bursts out of him and escapes. Brett, Ripley and Parker use a makeshift motion tracker and go in search of it.
By this point, the Chestburster has molted into an adult Xenomorph. Brett finds it while looking for a cat. The Xenomorph head-bites him and drags him off into the vents. Dallas then goes into the vents with a flamethrower while the rest of the crew guides him through the vents. The Xenomorph surprises him and drags him away. Later, Ripley, Parker and Lambert agree to escape in the shuttle. Parker and Lambert go to get some life support supplies but are ambushed by the creature.
Ripley manages to escape in the shuttle but the Xenomorph has stowed away in a narrow space. She uses gas to flush the alien out and then opens the airlock. The alien is almost blown out but holds and Ripley uses a grappling hook, forcing the alien out. Ripley fires the ship’s engines and blasts the alien away into space.
Behind-The-Scenes
H.R. Giger’s painting: Necronomicon IV
The script for Alien was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. O’Bannon created an opening where the crew of a mining ship was sent to investigate a strange signal on an alien planet. He eventually changed it to an alien creature but he couldn’t think of a way to get it onto the ship. Shusett came up with the idea of implanting an alien inside somebody and it bursting out of his chest.
O’Bannon’s original idea was that the alien would be part of an advanced civilization and a peaceful race, and as it matured through its adolescence, it would become extremely aggressive. There were still the individual stages of the life cycle – Egg, Facehugger, Chestburster, Adult Alien. The eggs would be housed in a lower chamber of a breeding temple and hosts would be led to them. It is the Chestburster stage that would have been mindlessly aggressive but is nurtured by the adult aliens until the Chestburster transforms and becomes more harmless.
The alien then becomes a mild, intelligent creature, capable of art and architecture and lives a life of 200 years. At some point, the milder adults are wiped out by an unknown event, leaving nobody to nurture the aggressive aliens. They would remain there for thousands, perhaps millions of years waiting for more hosts. The advanced civilization idea was dropped from the film and the pyramid and eggs were changed into the derelict spacecraft.
Before joining Alien, O’Bannon was working on Dune and met the Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger who had been hired for the project too. Giger showed O’Bannon his terrifying artwork which left him very disturbed. When O’Bannon joined Alien, he suggested to director Ridley Scott that Giger be brought on to design the monster. O’Bannon gave him a copy of Giger’s book Necronomicon and Scott chose one of Giger’s earlier paintings, Necronom IV, as the basis of the alien design, given its beauty and sexual overtones.
Behind-the-scenes shot of the Xenomorph showing the human skull in the dome.
The studio wasn’t keen on his artwork, saying it was too horrific for audiences but the producers at Brandywine pushed for him to be hired. Ridley Scott went to Zurich to meet H.R. Giger and hired him to work on everything related to the alien creature and the environment including the planet’s surface, the derelict spacecraft and each stage of the alien ‘life cycle’ from an alien egg to an adult alien.
Giger offered to create the alien from scratch but Ridley Scott said he should base it on Necronom IV as it would take too much time to start over from scratch. He decided to give the alien no eyes as he felt it would be more frightening if you didn’t know if the creature was looking at you. He also gave the creature an inner set of jaws which could extend rapidly.
The Xenomorph design is influenced by an aesthetic he created called biomechanical which is the fusion of organic and mechanical matter. Giger’s early sculpture was created using parts from an old Rolls Royce car, rib bones and the vertebrae from a snake, molded with plasticine. Originally, the alien was going to be translucent but the suits kept tearing so the idea was abandoned. However, the creature’s dome was left translucent. The alien’s animatronic head was designed and put together by special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi, using Giger’s designs as a guide.
Rambaldi made some small changes due to the mechanical parts that move the inner jaw and mouth and the head had over 900 moving parts. A human skull was used in the head which was hidden under the translucent cover. Lots of K-Y Jelly was used to creature the slimy effect and the alien’s constant drooling. The models had to be repainted every evening of the shoot because the slime used on-set removed the acrylic paint from their surfaces.
The alien is portrayed by 6ft 10 Bolaji Badejo in most scenes while stuntmen Eddie Powell and Roy Scammell portrayed it in the scene where it comes down from the ceiling and kills Brett. Bolaji Badejo was a Nigerian design student and was found in a bar by the casting team. Ridley Scott thought he was tall and thin enough to play the alien and his arms and legs were elongated to give the appearance that it is an actual creature and not a man in a suit. A full body plaster of Badejo was done in order to make a latex costume and he attended t’ai chi and mime classes to prepare for the role.
Merchandise
Over the years, various companies have released figures based on Big Chap. More recently, NECA released Aliens Series 2 (2013). A prototype Big Chap was released in Series 7 in 2016 and re-released in Alien 40th Anniversary Series 1 in 2020. For the 40th anniversary of Alien, Big Chap was released in 2019. Variants of the Big Chap were further released in Series 2, Series 3 and Series 4 of the 40th Anniversary sets. An 18″ Big Chap was first released in 2008, then in 2015, then again in 2019. In 2016, Kotobukiya released a 1/10 scale Big Chap in a standing position.
Gallery
