Corrected entry: When Ripley is in the atmosphere processor, trying to get away from the queen and gunning down drones, the camera keeps tracking the ammo counter, and it gets down to really low...about 9. She then shoots lots more rounds (if the previous speed that the counter goes down by is any comparison), far more than she had the ammo for.
Corrected entry: In the director's cut watch the temperature guages on the remote sentry controls, you only see the temperature change once, regardless of whether the guns were firing or not.
Correction: The temp guages change every time we see them when the guns either start or stop firing. It's only a small change in most cases, but it still changes.
Corrected entry: In the director's cut, the marines had salvaged four robot autocannons with motion-targeting systems, two of which are placed in the access tunnel to the power plant. Right before they close the hatch, Hudson and Vasquez throw in a waste bin to test them; it is shot to pieces. Later, however, these autocannons still have their full ammo load, as seen on the computer counters.
Correction: By the time that we actually see the ammo counters, we already hear the guns going off, so there's no real way of telling how much ammo was already spent, since we don't see the count down for those two guns start off at 400.
Corrected entry: Towards the end of the movie, Ripley calls down both elevators to escape the Queen. When they arrive, she gets into the one on the right, leaving the Queen to use the one on the left. When the lifts reach the top, Ripley comes out of the one on the left and the Queen comes out of the one on the right.
Corrected entry: When we are shown the screen of the marines names there is a curious omission. It lists the marines by rank first: Lt. Gorman, Sgt. Apone, Cpl.Hicks, Cpl. Ferro, Vasquez, Drake, Spunkmeyer, Cpl. Dietrich, Frost, Wierzbowski, and Crowe followed by the non-marines Bishop, Ripley and Burke. Where is Hudson?
Correction: The list wasn't finished. You can see that it's still loading up as the scene fades out. Its very possible that Hudson would've been next on the list, since he was not the only one missing on it.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the baby alien pops out of the woman's chest, she eventually dies but her head leans to her side instead of hanging forwards as it should do but then in the next shot of her, her head is hanging forwards. (01:09:35)
Correction: She rolled her head to the side as she died, and it slumped over when she was dead.
Corrected entry: Lt. Gorman is supposedly knocked unconcious when an overhead storage compartment in the APC comes loose and dumps a whole hord of boxes on him. I guess he's a pretty fragile guy because if you watch the scene in slo-mo the only part of his body that actually comes in contact with the boxes is his right arm. His head is never hit or even touched by them.
Correction: Gorman gets smacked right on the head when the boxes fall. Besides, for all we know those boxes could've weighed up to 100 pounds.
Corrected entry: When the marines and Ripley are inside the big car thing that they use on the planet, they are able to stand up quite comfortably. In that case, how are they taller than it when stood next to it on the outside?
Correction: The big car thing is called an APC. There is no point in the movie where anyone appears 'taller' than the APC itself. When the marines load up into it when they drop towards the planet, you see Apone slide the door open, and the APC is at the very least a foot and a half taller than him, probably more. When they get inside, they hunch over, and never once throughout the entire movie does any marine stand up comfortably in the APC, except for Vasquez, who is considerably smaller than everyone else.
Corrected entry: Did it really make sense for the Marines to try to search for the aliens with infrared viewers *after* setting everything in the area on fire with a flamethrower?
Correction: Of course it does - the fires are reasonably localised and given that, at that point, the marines have been unable to see the aliens directly, the next logical step is to try infra-red. The presence of the fires nearby might degrade the images to some extent, but that doesn't mean that it's an mistake to try.
Corrected entry: As somebody has correctly pointed out in another submission, the hangar in the main spaceship is decompressing when the doors are open, and the draft from the escaping air is what causes the mother alien to loose grip on Ripley. How come therefore, when the doors are closed again, Ripley and Newt are able to breathe in the hangar? If all of the air inside the hangar was just expelled out of the airlock door, how come the hangar has air pressure? Admittedly, the hangar is very big, but the door is like 7 or 8 metres across, and the wind blowing is strong enough to push out the alien, so the amount of air lost in the time it is open for is massive.
Correction: While a substantial amount of air has escaped, most external views give the impression that the Sulaco is a huge vessel with an enormous volume of air on board - there is no reason to assume that the hanger is totally isolated from the rest of the ship. As such, even considering the amount that escapes, there would still be a reasonable enough pressure in the hanger once the doors have been closed, enough to breathe, anyway. Also, the ship would undoubtedly carry air reserves, which ought to be automatically released in the event of a serious drop in air pressure.
Corrected entry: When Ripley and the mother Alien are fighting above the flood-gate, we can see that the light on the top of Ripley's robot is broken, but in the next scene this light is absolutely fine.
Correction: Only one side of the light's outer casing breaks. The other side is intact.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Bishop does the trick with the knife, as they are forcing Hudsons hand out onto the table you can see there are already several knife marks on the table. Take two - take three?
Correction: Everyone at the table urges Bishop to do the trick. Apparently, he has done it before for them, leaving previous knife marks on the table.
Corrected entry: In scene where Ripley first meets Bishop he says "It is against my programming to harm a human being or through a course of action allow a human being to be harmed." Funny how he says this after doing the knife trick on Hudson (a course of action that could have definitely caused harm to Hudson).
Corrected entry: In Alien we are told that the crew are 10 months from Earth when they find the Alien's planet. So how are the marines able to travel there in such short time in Aliens? I know Newt is one tough daughter-of-a-bitch but surely she couldn't survive for 10 months.
Correction: The Sulaco travels at an extremely fast speed, it took them about two weeks. Reading the Colonial Marines Technical Manual, I learned a whole lot of interesting useless stuff but basically they went from Gateway Station (Earth orbit) to LV-426 in two weeks.
Corrected entry: At the end, Ripley tells Newt "Close your eyes, baby." She also covers Newt's eyes with her hand. So, how could Newt see the dropship? She certainly can't hear it with all the explosions.
Correction: She turns away and looks behind Ripley. Ripley does cover her eyes, but when Newt pulls her face away and looks behind Ripley, her eyes aren't covered anymore, so she can see perfectly fine.
Corrected entry: When Ripley is rescued at the start of the film, they use a sophisticated robot to ascertain whether she's dangerous. Why don't they use the robot on the planet, when they know there's likely to be danger?
Correction: That's because the "Company" desperately wants to retrieve the "Alien" lifeform. As robots cannot be used for gestation purposes, the "Company" sends in humans. They also send in their own man, Burke, to do what he can to get at least one lifeform into cryosleep.
Corrected entry: When Vasquez says "I just need to know one thing, where they are" in the background of that shot, you can see Hicks (Michael Biehn) mouthing the words "Where they are"
Correction: Michael Biehn's character mouths the words "where they are" to show how well he knows this woman's attitude.
Corrected entry: In the previous movie, LV-426 had a ring system around it, yet in this movie, when the Sulaco enters orbit, the ring is no longer there.
Correction: LV-426 does not have a ring system. It is a moon of a much larger planet that does have a ring system. The planet and its rings can be seen low in the sky in "Alien".
Corrected entry: When they are all in the room in the beginning having a meeting with Ripley, pictures of the Nostromo crew are coming up in the background, but Kane never shows up, everyone else does.
Correction: He appears in a special edition - he doesn't appear because he cropped up in a later part of the briefing which got cut.
Corrected entry: When Ripley and Newt are waiting to be lifted off the planet, the lift goes down and then comes up again with an alien on it. So the alien must have worked the lift buttons, pressing the right floor number etc. Clever little bugger isn't it?
Correction: They're automatic - they go to the top level by default.
Correction: She goes down to 11 on the ammo counter, but this only refers to the rifle. She then fires several grenades and a flamethrower burst, both of which are different types of ammo. Finally, Ripley takes out a drone with the last of her bullets in two short bursts and is empty.
Phoenix