Hmmm... I'd like some mystery restored to the Xenomorph. I'm tired of the whole "what we saw in Aliens in the be-all-end-all of the creature - dark horse comics say so!" mentality. The alien has been different in every single movie so far; 'Alien', the big chap reproduced via eggmorphing, 'Aliens' introduced a queen scenario, 'Alien 3' introduced the whole taking in traits of a different host, super facehugger etc... but majority seem obsessed with the notion that the life cycle is done and dusted.
I like the unpredictability of the creature, so long as it isn't lazy writing; Ridley Scott is wrong when he keeps saying "the beast is cooked" - there's so much more that you can do with it with imagination, besides just creating pseudo-Xenomorph that never live up to the aesthetic or design of the original.
I was SO down for Tristan Jones' proposed comic book sequel to Isolation that would have made the queen in 'Aliens' a unique manifestation to that particular environment that then went on to spawn its own lineage of that cycle from there (the idea that a regular Xenomorph became the queen but from it, we now have queen chestbursters and superfacehuggers as per Alien 3).
Whilst my complete and utter distaste for the (thankfully non-canon) AvP movies goes without saying, if I could give *one* tiny bit of praise for the second movie, it was the life cycle presented by the predalien that required zero explaination... it just manually lays embryos in hosts without a hugger and spawns multiple offspring. There were no ovomorphs in the hive. Imagine if you will that that had been in a canon alien movie (not as presented)- what would that eggless hive have entailed..would a queen born from a human host in that linage reproduce that way? Could drones birthed from human hosts that way also have that ability as opposed to eggmorphing? In that way, one alien hive completely differs to one seen at Hadley's Hope... I like this level of chaos, it's completely unpredictable- like how unpredictable the pathogen was in 'Prometheus' - the alien ultimately reproduces by whatever means, adapting to the environment and situation it's presented with. I want more of this, so long as it's done tastefully. It wouldn't take away from anything already established as everything we had seen this far ultimately originated in the derelict, so is from a single source.
