Corrected entry: If you damage a fusion reactor, it doesn't explode with a thermonuclear effect. It just shuts off.
Corrected entry: After they escape the planet, the nuke goes off, and they are back on the spaceship, where they should all be weightless, including the alien, and would be floating around on the ship, not walking around like they were on solid ground. This totally unscientific approach to the movie is annoying.
Correction: Well, you must just hate science fiction, then. Practically every sci-fi film set in space features a ship or station with artificial gravity. This is a fictional technology, as are faster-than-light drives, hibernation pods and androids made in human form, all of which feature in the Alien series of films, all of which are unscientific and all of which presumably annoy you as well. Unfortunately for your sense of scientific indignation, the use of a fictional technology in a science fiction film is not only not a mistake, it's practically a requirement.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Newt and Ripley are in the room with the face huggers, Ripley tries to escape by banging a chair against the glass window full force. However, it merely bounces off. But, when one of the marines dives at the window, it smashes. How is this possible?
Corrected entry: There is NO WAY that the entire crew of a Marine Transport is composed of two squads. When the Marines all go down to the surface, it's ALL the Marines, resulting in having to remote pilot the second landing craft down. As someone with over 20 years experience in the Military, I can safely say that this vessel would have a crew that would include -among others- a pilot, copilot, navigator, engineer, communications officer, medic, and several crew members to maintain the food and life support systems, various cargo loaders, drop ships, and weapons systems of the ship (which are visible in exterior shots). There is no way that a bunch of Privates would be qualified to do those tasks- their Military Occupation Specialties are 0300 series/combat related NOT support related. Those are apples and oranges.
Correction: This mistake makes several assumptions. The Sulaco demonstrably has enough automation to travel to LV-426 without a crew. So why crew her? The Corporation thinks that 2 squads are enough. 2 squads of Marines must have been enough to handle similar situations in the past. So why send a company or more? The Sulaco is entering a situation where there will be no hostile starships, so why man her weapons or provide a warship escort? Ferro, Gorman and Bishop provide the specialized skills deemed necessary for this mission. So why send more officers or techs? The company, always concerned about the bottom line, sent exactly what they thought was necessary and not a bit more.
Corrected entry: Ripley and Hick's lungs would have been severely burnt by the concentrated acid gas in the elevator while escaping to the second dropship. Their eyes and skin would also be affected. (01:47:40)
Correction: The gas isn't acid - it's the by-product of the liquid acid chemically reacting with Hick's armor. Acid-metal reactions produce water, metal salts, and gases, but not another acid.
Corrected entry: When Ripley walks into the lab where the face huggers are, she lays her pulse rifle on the bed that Newt is under. Later on she looks through the window and the rifle is now on the other side of the glass outside the lab.
Corrected entry: Hicks gave the tracker bracelet to Ripley, who in turn gave it to Newt when she put her to bed. There was no one else in the room and Ripley didn't tell anyone. So how come when they lose Newt at the end Hicks tells Ripley they can find her using the bracelet?
Correction: Hicks isn't blind...he saw it on her wrist.
And she likely told him offscreen.
Corrected entry: It would have been impossible for the aliens to produce such a large army because of a limited number of hosts that can produce them. There was no indigenous life on the planet so there should only be as many aliens as there was colonists on the planet, which is about 150. It doesn't matter how many eggs the queen lays, they must have hosts to produce the alien creatures.
Correction: 150 is an army compared to 9 marines. Also the families would have brought animals such as dogs and cats and livestock to eat. This would further increase their amount of hosts.
Agreed, 150 is more than enough to account for all the aliens we see in the movie. It's really a testament to the film's direction and editing that so many people get the impression that there must be thousands of aliens.
Corrected entry: The little girl Newt is taken and cocooned by the mother alien. Why, then is she rescued? All the other cocooned victims have been impregnated and are incubating baby aliens. Yet Ripley brings the child back in the almost certain likelihood that 24 hours after the credits have rolled, little Newt's stomach will explode.
Correction: On the chance the question is based around Ripley telling the marines they're unable to help their captured crewmates but then later deciding to rescue Newt regardless, she obviously has a personal bias having formed a motherly bond with the girl, and figures she is only risking her own life by going after her (and perhaps Hicks, but he's obviously agreed to the rescue) rather than the entire team's. As another user has stated, she is banking on reaching Newt before a facehugger can get to her.
Corrected entry: When Ripley and Hicks are discussing their defence plans after the first encounter, they decide to put one of the auto guns in each of three locations, leaving one left over. When we see the guns in place they have actually used two guns in each of two locations, that is, two pairs.
Correction: Ripley discusses 3 separate locations with Hicks, but their plan is to station two guns each at two points and seal off a third. I don't believe there to be any issues with this part of the film.
Corrected entry: If an alien creature comes from an implanted human, there would only be as many creatures as humans, but there are far too many aliens. Remember the tunnels with the automatic machine guns? Those guns, supposedly, killed hundreds of aliens.
Correction: The aliens were bred from the implanted inhabitants of the colony. There were plenty of them to supply the amount of aliens seen.
Correction: There's a lot of overkill from the sentry guns as they simply fire whenever they detect movement and are unable to account for size, etc. Note that the guns fire multiple rounds just to take out the single empty canister thrown in front of them for a test. So the sentry guns having fired hundreds of rounds doesn't mean they've taken out hundreds of aliens.
Corrected entry: At the end, when Ripley has her arm slung through that rung in the airlock and the queen alien is hanging from her foot AND the decompression that has everything in the cargo hold whipping by her head...she only loses a shoe as the queen is swept into space? By all rights, shouldn't only her arm be left dangling there? (02:11:25)
Correction: First, the amount of force needed to rip a person's arm out of its socket is incredibly strong. This wasn't an explosive decompression... the door opened gradually, so the force pulling her into space wasn't that violent. Many of the objects that get blown out are heavier, but they also have more surface area than a human. Much of the air went *around* Ripley. People don't have their heads ripped off while walking through hurricane-force winds capable of lifting rooves off houses and overturning airplanes.
Corrected entry: The counter on a fully-loaded pulse rifle reads 300 rounds. However, a magazine of the size shown could never contain 300 rounds of 10mm ammunition.
Correction: I don't know where anyone in the movie said that the counter reads 300 bullets, because it certainly wasn't ever said in this film. The counter on the Pulse Rifle only goes up to 99. This is shown when Ripley loads it at 2 different parts in the movie: when Hicks is showing her how to fire it, and when she is getting ready to go find Newt in the hive. There was never any indication that the Pulse Rifle clips hold 300 rounds.
Correction: You sure? Cause, to me, they seemed more like a power source for the smart guns and not the ammo.
The video here shows her loading a full magazine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY2wGD6-j0Y At the 59 second point, she loads the magazine and the round indicator shows 95, not 99 and definitely not 300. The round indicator only goes to 2 digits.
Corrected entry: During the escape of Ripley and the marines from Sub Level 3, an alien lands on the APC, and smashes the window trying to get to Ripley. She brakes, then drives over the alien. Not only does the alien's acid blood do nothing in this scene, the next shot of the APC has the window intact.
Correction: The alien that breaks the APC window has red blood, probably having just mauled one of the marines. The alien wouldn't have bled acid from breaking the window, throughout the movie the aliens had to be shot a lot of times or right in the head to actually bleed.
Correction: If the question is referring to the Alien's blood after it has been squashed by the vehicle, keep in mind that the acid blood may well have been responsible for the technical problems that eventually disable the APC just a few moments later.
Corrected entry: Given Bishop's crucial role in saving the day throughout Aliens, doesn't it seem odd that human marines are used at all in the future? He's smarter, tougher, has quicker reflexes and can be mass-produced, as Alien 3 will testify. And considering the corporate scam being played out, you'd think they'd be more careful than to send in soldiers when they could have simply made a dozen androids to assist Ripley - who could still play host to an alien foetus.
Correction: Humans beings are cheaper. The Company is very interested in the bottom line, and they just consider human beings to be more expendable than what is most likely a multi-billion dollar android.
Corrected entry: The ‘knife trick' scene was not in the original script. Lance Henriksen, who portrays Bishop, decided to add it in at the last moment. Henriksen did not tell Bill Paxton what he was going to do to him, so his terrified screams are real.
Correction: This is mostly incorrect. The knife trick was not in the original draft but was in the shooting script. However, in the shooting script Bishop does the knife trick with just his own hand, Hudson is not involved at all. It is doubtful that Bill Paxton would genuinely scream during the knife trick because he was in little danger. The trick only looks dangerous because James Cameron sped the video up to make it seem quick and dangerous (in the process creating an obvious error when you look at Apone's rapidly bobbing head). In the close up of Hudson screaming, Bishop is stabbing the table off screen so he was likely nowhere near actually hurting anyone.
Corrected entry: In the extended version especially, the fact that Ripley was lost in space for almost 60 years and at the exact time when she arrives on earth the colonists find the eggs and the company loses connection to them is an unbelievably huge coincidence. In the theatrical version the timing of the events remains a bit more unclear - the colonists may have died even years ago, at any time between those 57 years time period and the company noticed that after they found Ripley and decided to communicate with them to check. But in the extended version this possibility is killed as we see the colonists' situation, and one just has to believe the above described huge coincidence.
Correction: Coincidence? It's made very clear in the film that it's anything but. Once Ripley was found and told her story, Burke sent instructions to the colony ordering them to investigate the reported location of the derelict alien ship, leading directly to the infection of the colony and the death of all the colonists bar Newt. There's a pivotal scene where Ripley confronts Burke about it, angrily telling him that it was all his fault, something that he attempts to dismiss as "a bad call" on his part, shortly before he attempts to infect her and Newt by releasing the facehuggers. Rewatch the movie; the chain of events is made very clear. It's no coincidence.
Corrected entry: Not really a HUGE mistake, but when Ripley finds Newt in her hole the first time you can see lots of boxes laying round with rations or MRE's in them. But later when the female medic is checking her out she says she is suffering from "Borderline Malnutrition" How is that possible when she had so much left over food?
Correction: The term "malnutrition" does not necessarily mean that you have had too little food, it also includes the bad effects of an improper regular diet. MRE's are not designed to be eaten on a regular basis, but as emergency food when nothing else is available. Newt has eaten MRE's for a very long time, and is suffering from the ill effects from this (most likely constipation and lack of proper vitamins).
Not to mention people who have suffered severe trauma often lose appetite. Even though she has collected food she may not be eating as regularly as she should. With nobody around to counsel her or force her to eat she is probably not getting regular meals or resting as often as she should.
Corrected entry: When Ripley goes to save Newt, she uses a tracking device to find her. However the only data that tracking device gives her is how far away she is from the receiver. It doesn't give any clue as to direction. For all she knows the receiver can be 50 meters above her, 50 meters behind her, 50 meters ahead of her, below her, to her right, to her left, etc, or even any combination of them. Yet in the maze of levels, sub levels, stairs and corridors of the compound she is able to find the EXACT path to the receiver on her first attempt.
Correction: Ripley already knew which level the aliens took their victims when cocooning them as she had observed this from the monitors in the APC. That solves the up or down direction. When Ripley exited the elevator and started forward through the hallway the distance on the tracking device started counting down which meant she was going in the correct direction. If the numbers start getting larger, then she is obviously going the wrong way.
Corrected entry: When the marines first arrive, the dropship lands for a few seconds, long enough for the APC to drive off, and no alien jumps on. When Hicks calls Ferro down again, we can see that the dropship is back in the transport's hanger. How did the alien get on board?
Correction: They are not back on the Sulaco. Putting aside the tactical lunacy of having their only means of getting off the planet up in orbit, you actually see the dropship taking off from a landing field next to the colony - other than a metallic surface, it bears no resemblance to the Sulaco docking bay.
Correction: Actual fusion reactors don't exist, yet. Certainly not this size. You have no idea how this reactor works. It's not unlikely it uses fissile material to operate.
lionhead