i feel like the very dry, procedural emphasis in Alien is what makes the movie work so well but it’s also what always makes the xenomorph itself feel a little lackluster to me - like it’s the base level threat that causes all the other systems to start falling over under pressure (the ship computer and junky self destruct sequence, the robot acting weird, whose job was it to find the cat?? etc) but the tensest moments come from the failures of those systems, and once the alien itself reaches maturity i always have a hard time picturing it as anything beyond, like, basically an exceptionally large critter… like a more lethal version of the ball alien from Dark Star.
anyway obv not that the movie itself is bad but i do feel like The Thingy is weird and vague enough in terms of, how it works, how conscious is it etc that it has a bit more presence purely in Creature Feature terms, while Alien is more like an unusually small-scale disaster movie. i did kind of like how prometheus and uh the other one he did tried to re-inject some uncertainty about these things after the other sequels kind of formalised this very cut-and-dry life cycle.