Are Alien Xenomorphs the Perfect Monster?

So I’ve been watching all the Alien movies in anticipation of Alien: Romulus. Some I haven’t seen yet, some I’ve seen a few times. But watching them all together, I’m noticing a pattern or motif that keeps coming up.

The “company” (Weyland-Yutani) really wants this creature. They knew about it before anyone else in the universe did. They know where it is. They keep sending people out to get one and bring it back discretely (by which I mean setting them up to become infected).

Why do they want it so bad? Well, it’s not clear, but one thing they keep saying is that it’s perfect.

So my question is, what is it perfect for?

It’s good at killing things, that’s pretty clear. It’s a stealth hunter, fast and sharp, agile, strong, camouflaged. Not many weaknesses either–no eyes to poke, no airway to collapse, no heat to track. (Does it need to breathe? Eat? Sleep? Unconfirmed.) It can climb on ceilings. It’s got a blade on its tail. Its blood is partially weaponized, being extremely corrosive acid. And when they get together they work synergistically.

But the most special thing is that, when it implants into a host, the adult stage mixes its DNA with that host. This means it can adapt to its environment quite well (as one would assume that the host is already adapted as a result of it being here). So basically it’s good at killing things and making more of itself.

But for all its alleged perfection, it keeps losing to space truckers with lead pipes and rocks. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of intelligence or unfamiliarity with spaceships (an Alien doesn’t know what an airlock is). This does not bode well as a weapon of war, since it’s pretty easy to stop a single-minded beast. This is why Rhino is always a sub-boss in Spider-Man games, never a mastermind.

Second, what purpose is Weyland-Yutani going to set the Alien to? What is their goal? I mean, the story of trying to control nature and having it backfire in your face is as old as time. Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, Resident Evil, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Watchmen, Lilo & Stitch, various SyFy bad CGI monster movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 4, Fallout, Metroid, and any other mad scientist story, all the way down to the myth of Prometheus. But they were always trying to do something with the bioengineered beasts.

What is Weyland-Yutani using them for? Because, as far as I can see in the Alien universe, no wars need fighting. I don’t know if it’s necessarily peaceful (Aliens introduces the marines) but Earth appears not to be in conflict. It seems to be a class-divided dystopia, like Midgar in FFVII or Battle Angel: Alita or The Hunger Games. At the least, it’s partially (if not totally) controlled by corporations rather than countries, like Blade Runner or The Fifth Element or RoboCop. And corporations don’t go to war with each other (it’d be neat if they did, but that’s another movie). They engage in espionage and manipulation and white-collar crime, but not war.

So even if you could control an Alien, what are you going to do with it? There’s nowhere to use it. Seems like people are more interested in colonization and expansion. There doesn’t appear to be any opposing forces to worry about (Predators and Engineers notwithstanding). So what are you going to use an Alien for?

Third, why are you killing yourselves (and others, mostly others) trying to get it? Are you telling me this thing’s really better than rockets and bombs? Better than engineering a targeted virus or chemical weapons?

Let’s say they want to use this thing to make a planet suitable for colonization. So they plop an egg on the planet. The facehugger needs another lifeform to glom onto before it can start breeding baby Aliens, and it dies when it’s done implanting the embryo. That’s spending two lives to make one–in terms of pure evolution, not efficient. Plus that lifeform has to be of a decent size. A facehugger can’t implant onto a squirrel. There better be something human-sized on this planet, because that’s what the facehugger needs.

Then there’s a gestational period of variable length. The movies sure play fast and loose with this. It can take anywhere from seconds to hours, sometimes days. If the species is intelligent, it’s very likely someone can get the facehugger off the guy–turtles will help other turtles lying on their back. It might kill them, but at least there’s no Alien.

So then the host dies and an Alien emerges. It’s tiny at first, the size of a kitten, but very fast. So maybe it can get away and hide until it grows. (How the hell does it grow so damn fast without eating anything? Does it gain mass the same way as the Hulk?)

But this Alien shares DNA with its host, which means it shares all the strengths AND weaknesses of that host. In Alien³, it was a dog. In Prometheus/Covenant, it was an Engineer. In AvP, it was a Predator. If a facehugger gloms onto a blue whale, it’s not going to be able to attack anything on land.

(Side note: I just discovered that Wikipedia says: “In the Alien³ novelization, Ripley commented that this parasitoid would probably be able to use any host from as small as a cat to as large as an Asian elephant.” That should totally be the next movie. Forget space, forget humans, I want to see Alien versus other animals. I want to see a xenomorph shark, a xenomorph horse, a xenomorph bear, a xenomorph eagle…)

So now the Alien has taken consumed every living thing on the planet more advanced than a squirrel. And since they breed so fast, the planet is full of them. Billions on every landmass, writhing and squirming. How do you get them off? How do you clear them to make the planet habitable for humans again?

These things are not as perfect as they make them out to be. Not only because they’re dumb, but because their lifecycle is ridiculous. Maybe good ol’ W-Y doesn’t have any idea what to do with them. They just want the thing for sellability or research leading to sellability. They don’t care who purchases it, they’re going to offer it for sale and take whatever money they can get. Let them figure out what to do with it.

It’s a good thing that in the chronologically last movie (Alien: Resurrection) someone says Weyland-Yutani goes under, having been bought out by (checks notes)… Walmart.

EDIT: I finally saw Alien: Romulus and it answered a few questions, but not many. In it, W-Y wants Aliens so they can either mix their superior survival attributes (like strength and armored skin) with humans or its morphable DNA to give humans adaptations to severe habitats. This would be realistic, as there are not many Goldilocks planets out there, and environmental adaptability would be a boon for all the colonists. This thing can apparently survive in space–that’s not small potatoes.

But… is this the best solution? Does W-Y think humans are going to line up to get acid blood, a biomechanical mesoskeleton, and a second mouth? I haven’t seen genetic modification being a “thing” in the franchise. The big scientific breakthrough in this universe is space travel and lifelike androids. Is gene splicing going to be the next big thing?