Hey guys, I’m Kya, and I’m itching to go on a bug hunt.
Let's kill this fracker.
And so are you, judging from your response to our first ‘How to Kill’ poll.
Well, slow down, Space Marines,
Because I guarantee you’ve never tangled with anything as deadly as a Xenomorph.
These adorable little critters are the ultimate killing machine,
You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you?
a perfect organism whose structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
and I think they’re pretty darn cute!
But they’re still a long way from being domesticated,
and if you ever find yourself lost in space with no one to hear you,
Instead of screaming, just remember my guide on
How to Kill Xenomorphs.
Since their debut in 1979, we’ve seen dozens of different Xenomorph specimens,
which makes it hard to get clear data on their weaknesses.
Thanks to their unique life cycle, the Xenos adopt aspects from their host’s DNA,
meaning no two Aliens are exactly alike,
but most of the examples we’ve seen have a human mommy or daddy.
Let’s focus on the classic scenario, first:
You’re on a ship floating through the vast cosmos,
the rest of your crew has been cocooned or eaten alive,
and you’ve got a single, pissed-off Alien that wants to get you space pregnant.
A creature that gestates inside a living human host...
By now, you probably regret letting your buddy get so close to those creepy eggs,
But the damage is done.
I better start by telling you
What Not To Do
The Xenomorph’s most twisted adaptation is it’s sizzling acid blood,
This stuff melts through two decks of the Nostromo in seconds,
and Kane’s baby boy is filled with gallons of it.
Aw, God!
It’s like Parker says:
It’s a wonderful defense mechanism. You don't dare kill it.
Shooting it is too risky, and if you’re a fan of not having your face melt off,
you don’t want to get close enough for a melee attack.
We just got our asses kicked, pal!
Alien blood loses a lot of potency as the series goes on, though.
It still melts through skin and armor,
but nobody’s too concerned about the buckets and buckets from all the exploding Xenomorphs at Hadley’s Hope.
That shit should have boiled through the lunar surface.
I mean, I still wouldn’t advise shooting it point blank with a shotgun,
Eat this!
but it becomes less of a big deal as the series evolved.
One thing consistently does the trick, though:
When in doubt,
Blow It Out the Airlock
By now, you’ve undoubtedly panicked and hit the self-destruct button,
Ship will detonate in t-minus ten minutes
but word to the wise? That never works.
There’s almost always a straggler,
and you might get a lot more than you bargained for.
After the Nostromo explodes,
the Xenomorph hitches a ride on Ripley’s escape shuttle and breaks up her slumber party.
With nowhere else to run, she flings open the airlock and lets the vacuum of space do the rest.
Well, the vacuum of space and a harpoon.
And a giant rocket engine.
57 years later, Ripley faces off with an stowaway Queen on the Sulaco,
Come on!!!
kicks her ass with a cargo loader,
and sends her flying into the void.
Then, even after her death, Ripley’s clone uses the same trick on her messed up hybrid Alien baby.
It's the saddest thing I've ever seen.
That alien looked at her with saddest expression of betrayal.
The Newborn is strong enough to kill a Queen with its bare hands,
and it punches holes through human skulls like they’re Play-Doh,
but it’s still not strong enough to defeat rapid decompression.
Or the betrayal of its mother.
The clone Ripley uses her own acid blood to melt a teeny hole in the window,
which sucks the Newborn out in an disgustingly drawn-out death.
That’s three Aliens extinguished by releasing them into space
and we’re still not done, because the Xeno that doesn’t get squished by a crane in ‘Covenant,’
gets blasted out of a loading bay at the end.
By this point, it’s an accepted staple of the series,
but it’s not always the most practical method.
You could be, y’know, on the ground, for one.
And besides, the vacuum of space isn’t even enough to exterminate an Alien.
As far as we know, Xenomorphs don’t need to breathe.
That original 1979 Alien might still be just floating out in space alone,
with nobody around to horribly murder for millions of miles.
It’s possible the cold would get him first, though,
because Xenomorphs have shown vulnerability to
Extreme Temperatures
Flamethrowers are one of the series’ most iconic weapons,
they’re used throughout the movies,
but when it comes to full-grown Xenos,
They don’t really do much damage.
The big guys are too fast and durable,
but fire is a solid deterrent and excellent choice for roasting facehuggers and frying eggs.
In ‘Alien 3,’ Ripley and her sweaty prison friends dump gallons of molten lead over the four-legged Xenomorph that’s been terrorizing the colony.
and that just pisses it off.
But after a freezing cold shower from the fire sprinklers,
it explodes in an eruption of gore.
The extreme thermal shock shatters the Xeno in a million pieces,
kind of they way ice cubes crack when you pour warm water over them,
only with gallons of acid guts.
You need a working knowledge of thermodynamics just to take down a single Alien,
so god help you if you’re faced with a full-on infestation, right?
Well, not exactly.
Because the Xenos have a surprising
Weakness in Numbers
There seems to be a direct correlation between the number of Xenomorphs scampering about,
and how hard they are to kill.
In other words, a lone wolf Xeno is tougher than Jason Voorhees,
But the more there are,
the quicker they fall.
In the first ‘Alien,’ one unkillable monster chomps through a whole spaceship crew,
and in ‘Alien 3,’ a whole prison colony can’t stop a single rampaging Xenomorph.
But with the first sequel ‘Aliens,’
James Cameron had to up the action ante to set his work apart from Ridley Scott’s classic horror film,
I mean, the movie is literally its plural.
'Aliens.' 'Alien...' 'Aliens.'
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be the main course in a Xenomorph feeding frenzy,
not that they actually need to eat,
but the swarms of Xenos in ‘Aliens’ and later ‘Resurrection,’
not to mention the ‘AVP’ movies,
Seem a lot less durable than their solo cousins.
Move it!
The ones in ‘Resurrection’ are fouled-up clones, which could explain it,
and the ridge-headed Xenomorphs of ‘Aliens’ could be from a more expendable ‘Warrior’ subspecies,
as opposed to the powerful ‘drone’ that solo stalked the Nostromo.
Or maybe the humans just happen to be better equipped when we’ve seen them face the hive.
In ‘Aliens,’ we’re following a squad of highly-trained Space Marines,
not ‘70s space truckers.
Right.
And, like the grenade-launcher toting mercenaries in ‘Resurrection,’ they’ve got the finest in modern weaponry.
It’s true that handgun shots bounce right off Xenomorph armor,
but some explosive rounds from an M41A Pulse Rifle are more than enough to pop an Alien like a big angry zit.
With those kinds of toys, it might not seem like a fair fight,
but I’d still bet on the Aliens any day.
If you want a more equal opponent, you need to look to the stars,
because no one’s better at killing Xenomorphs than the
Predators
The two ‘AVP’ films might not be canon anymore,
And neither movie fully delivered on the awesome premise that was explored in comics and games for years,
but they offer their own weird origin for the Xenomorph species,
and yes, plenty of dead Aliens.
In ‘AVP,’ the Predators have been hunting Aliens on Earth for thousands of years,
they’re the ‘ultimate prey’ for their hunter culture.
So that means they’ve spent every waking moment training to kill Xenomorphs,
and have all sorts of blades, razor discs and shurikens perfect for piercing that thick exoskeleton.
Not to mention frickin’ lasers!
These movies are set in the 2000s,
and Aliens are just dropping left and right from regular-ass guns.
The Queen in the first movie just falls into the ocean,
But at least the Predalien needs a tactical nuclear strike to finish him off.
The Xenomorph is supposed to be a uniquely horrifying terror,
it’s supposed to be something strange and unfamiliar,
something Alien.
It works best as a single foil for a dwindling cast of dead meat,
but when you’re faced with so many, they kind of stop being special,
and the ‘AVP’ films dilute the threat down to one step above the Putty Patrol.
Granted, this stuff is pretty much non-canon now, so take it with a grain of salt.
But no matter what the origin of the Aliens are,
whether it’s Predators,
Space Jockeys,
or a a Michael Fassbender robot with too much time on his hands,
Whoever made the Xenomorphs, I’ll give ‘em one thing:
They made them pretty dang tough.