The design of the Alien had been different in every movie, and the only time it did not get a complete redesign from scratch and was actually cast from the original was in Aliens, although feet and hands were. I did an article on how little difference there is on JamesCameronOnline about 15 years ago, but since then lots of better reference photos surfaced, and some good quality pics of the actual props, and I also think the article could use more elaboration, and since it isn't easy to alter the old JamesCameronOnline articles, I figured I may just do an updated version here and include Alien 3's Runner as well. It's just more interesting to compare the Aliens from the first two movies, because they're so alike, it's more fun to pick the nuance differences, while any Alien design made later was redesigned from scratch.
Aliens' Warrior is the most alike the original, and Giger's design was changed the least (out of all existing movies) - the body is completely untouched, and the identical ribs of the Warriors's head were already there on the original Alien (the head was also cast off the original), just covered by a dome that was supposed to be transparent, but the idea is barely visible onscreen.
Below, a recent photo of one of the original screen used heads from 1979 Alien, sans the dome, on display in Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles
And here you can see one of very few frames in the movie revealing ridged head with a mohawk-like row of bones.
Pictured below, the Alien without and with the cowl, which covered fantastic ribbed design underneath. Source: Alien Quadrilogy DVD set
Here's H.R.Giger working on the head sans the cowl, with airbrushed ribs and spine-like mohawk (Source: Alien Quadrilogy DVD set)
The thing was, the Warrior's body and head was Giger's design, cast directly from the original, with eyes and nose sockets covered on the skull face. The Winston Studios team was excited to receive and study the original costume, and they were a bit surprised that Giger used the actual plumbing supplies in its construction. Aliens' Alien Warriors were also the last biomechanical Aliens as well, as all the biomechanicality has been stripped from the Alien design in Alien 3. For those who aren't into it all for decades, what is biomechanicality? H.R. Giger's artwork was pretty much dark and grey depictions of rotting corpses fused with industrial machinery parts and both male and female private parts. The original Alien had all of those signature elements. It was a charred skeleton permeated by electrical and plumbing parts like cables, tubes, screws and predominantly flexible ribbed tubes. Many parts still had serial number on them when the suit was studied years later for the sequel. It also had male and female parts sculpted in its crotch and abdomen. So Giger's Biomechanicality was a fusion of a skeleton or decaying body with mechanical parts.
"We kept the design more or less the same what H.R. Giger designed for the one alien that they had in 'Alien', the full sized adult version, of which we had many" - James Cameron (Don Shay int. 1986)
They're (aliens) mainly a reprise of Mr. Giger's design" - James Cameron, lofficcier.com
"It's evident that the makers of the sequel had a great respect for the original Alien which Winston himself remembers as "the best horror movie of the decade". For this reason, the design concepts for the facehugger, the chestburster and the warrior aliens remain relatively unchanged" - Galactic Journal magazine #21 1986
So let's start with the head while we're at it. The head was cast from the original, so it's identical. The eye sockets and nose hole were covered
The noticeable difference is of course, no cowl. But why there was no cowl for the sequel? For some reason, a little assumption from someone who didn't work on the Aliens themselves (Alec Gillis, at the time new employee of Winston Studios) got the most traction online and is cited as the reason - and that being that Cameron didn't want to risk the cowl breaking. First of all, for anyone who knows James Cameron, knows this man is an inventor who designs first then helps to invent techniques to get it. It's not someone who would completely alter the design for technical reasons - after all, the Alien suits were made of different material to allow the same design but more mobility. Second, even if you don't know that about James Cameron, you'd realize it makes no sense - the original costume had mass of problems - the performers were passing out in it, it restricted the movements terribly (which actually the movie benefitted from as they had to invent slow but eerie movements to make up for the fact you couldn't do much in the suit), it kept breaking and ripping, the tail kept falling off, but there was never a problem with a cracking cowl.
The actual reason, confirmed by Jim Cameron and people who worked on the Aliens and did the costumes and sculpted the heads, is that Cameron really liked the designs underneath the cowl once he saw them in person and didn't want to cover them
James Cameron: "The Alien head in the first film was very smooth. The top of the head was very smooth. Underneath it had a skull shape and a ribbed design and originally it was designed to see that through that kind of transparent surface in the Giger design. I thought that what was underneath the surface was more interesting than the final look" - (Aliens Collector's Edition Commentary)
James Cameron: "“We planned to [have a domed head] with ours and to that end Stan Winston had Tom Woodruff sculpt up a ribbed, bone-like understructure that would fit underneath and be slightly visible through the cowl. When it was finished, they gave it a real nice paint job, and then I took a look at it and I said, ‘Hey, this looks much more interesting the way it is.’ So we ditched the cowl and decided that this was just another generation of Aliens – slightly mutated.'”(Winston Effect Book)
Shane Mahan (one of the original Winston Studios artists, also sculptor of the Terminator endoskull and the Alien Queen head): We tried to recreate the original Giger look and we were so proud of it, we were like 'yeah that looks so clear and cool', he's (Cameron) like 'Take that off' (Superior Firepower Documentary)
Here's a comparison between the cable operated Alien head from 1979 without the cowl on and the Alien Warrior head from 1986's Aliens. Note the same bony mohawk, and the identical ribs. The difference here again is in the material not the design - the original had the ridges airbrushed, while Cameron's had them sculpted.
Note the "donuts"between the ridges. Again, airbrushed in the original, three-dimensional in the second.
The inferred explanation in the movie is that the Aliens lose their ridges with age, as those aliens were around longer than the original. Not only that, but the chestburster in Aliens clearly has a smooth had, so logical extrapolation form that is that if the young larvas are shown with smooth head and the adults that are around for weeks don't have the cowl, it either falls off or molts into the head.
One small alteration to a little piece is that a metal plumbing diverter that is connected to other metal parts is made out of bone in Warriors, rather than being an actual plumbing connection.
Staying on the head, let's look at those small tweaks to the face, which is a slightly more skeletal look and more details on the chin.
Interestingly enough, the detail added can be seen in at least two of Giger's paintings, Necronom II and an actual painting of the Alien monster from 1976
Moving on to the neck. Now the neck is one of those things that were indeed redesigned in order to get one step away from the man-in-the-suit look. "Then there were the fully grown warrior aliens that Winston wanted to move away from "the man in a costume" look of the original" - Cinescape magazine
The original neck was human shaped with some of the grill design on them. The neck of the Warriors changes the shape to something inhuman, and uses grilled patterns to fit the designs
The way the neck connected to the jaw of the original Alien kind of made it look like the original had a bit of a toad neck because the jaw line was getting lost in it, if you look back at the screenshot at the top. It was streamlined for the Warriors.
Now the body comparison of the Alien from both films. Since it was cast off the original, it's identical, to the last detail. The material used is different, but the design and every part is identical. All the parts and screws and plumbing parts, it's all there, Giger's masterpiece in all its glory. I love that design. Below, the Alien and Aliens costumes as they appear today - the '79 costume is in H.R.Giger's Museum, and the '86 Warrior suit has been sold by the largest dealer of movie memorabilia, Propstore
And this is how the suits looked originally during production. On the left, Bolaji Badejo, one of the actors who portrayed the original Alien, to the right, Alien Warrior suits.
Notice that everything is like made of bone on both design, and the torso sort of looks like skeletal life vest made out of bone. Note the incredible biomech details on the chest - the ribbed tubing going halfway down, the metal pieces.
The one small alterations is in the puppets. Since they were 8 feet tall, it looked disproportional with that number of ribs so two extra pairs are added to the puppets
But my favorite area is the abdomen. That area is the quintessential Giger work - There's an area in the crotch that you could call a stylized vagina, but there's also a big stylized penis on the abdomen, and it's all in Giger's trademark style, all augmented with his biomechanicality - plumbing parts, caps, tubing. Again, no changes here.
The back is untouched as well. The only different thing is the placement of the back pipes. They were much lower on the original Alien, further away from the "fishtail". Also note the addition of bones to the back of the neck of the Warriors.
Going down to the feet, we stumble upon one of only three redesigns (First one already covered is the neck). Feet also fell into the category of body parts that give away the man-in-a-suit look, but this is one redesign which I'm not that crazy about because the original feet were graceful, female. It was art. The Warrior feet are simply monster feet
Now let's look at the arms. With arms it's tricky because puppets have different arms than the suits. The suits
Now, the puppets had different forearms, much more creature like and so skinny it would be impossible for a human hand to fit in, so puppets made it possible to create those inhuman arms. They're very skinny and still have those vents-like designs on them, and I do believe it aided very much in getting away from the "man in a suit" look, since it broke up the human proportions. They tried to elongate the arms as much as possible in the original, this is taking the step further.
The elbow appendage is another element that either changed or didn't, depending whether it's a puppet or not. In puppets, the spiky protrusion is pretty much unchanged. You can barely see it in the photo above and compare it with the original below. But in another bid to break away from the main-in-the-suit look, the appendages, which would naturally grown in time, are much bigger and turn into blades.
The hands themselves are that third element that got a complete redesign. With Winston and his team trying to get away from a suit look as much as possible by changing little things but retaining the original design as much as possible, the hands as they were in the original would not stand. I must say myself, if there is one thing I'm not crazy about the original Alien, it's the hands. The design is fantastic, but the execution not so much. They always looked like rubber gloves to me. At the same time, I wouldn't change a thing in the original Alien design. After all, Giger's art was augmenting human figures with all those dark and biomechanical features, so human-like hands and feet are definitely not out of place here. But, I don't think they would work for other movies
Stan Winston designed brand new hands for Alien Warriors based on a painting by Giger from 1978 called Alien Monster (sketch of which you can see in Winston Effect book). The two thumbs were suppose to remain but was then dropped (in the original it was done only to somehow break that glove look of the hands), but the idea of fused fingers remained.
And the last thing is the tail, which also had not been altered in any way.
However, the placement of the tail did change. The original Alien had a very unusual placement of the tail - it didn't protrude from a tail bone, but from his anus. It was most likely done that way so that the tail would just hang freely as oppose to have a bend on the top that would keep breaking. They did have an awful lot of issues with the tail. Aliens places the tail in slightly more animalistic fashion, slightly higher.
Not only that, but the original Alien had bottocks which kind of looked like big metal diaper, most likely to house the tail attachment mechanism. That part of the design remained in the Warrior puppets, although the bottocks were more streamlined so they wouldn't have that diaper look
Again, comparing the Alien and Aliens designs is fun because they're so alike that the fun lays in finding actual differences. If you ask me, which design do I prefer I'd say this question is not valid - each design worked perfectly for each movie, and in this case I'm having a cake and I'm eating it too. I love Giger's work and designs, and I absolutely love what he designed under the dome, so I wouldn't want it covered up but at the same time I love the smooth dome look as it's creepy. So luckily, there are two versions which I can enjoy. That's why I could never decide on which I like better. Unfortunately, 1986 was the last time Giger's original Alien was presented with few alterations, and starting with 1992's Alien 3 it would be redesigned from scratch and the only time that design would return (although made more organic looking) would have been in 2024. But, in here, Alien Trilogy, our safe zone for those who thought the saga ended perfectly with David Fincher's film, no other movie exist. Next one up, the design of the Alien Part II: Alien 3
Shout out to Alien Explorations and Monsterlegacy blogs. Original comparison between Alien Drone and Warrior was published at JamesCameronOnline.com HERE
Go back to http://jamescamerononline.com/ALIENTRILOGY.htm
