Corrected entry: In the scene where Ripley is leaving in the escape ship, she's looking out the front window looking back at the ship as she's leaving. When she was prepping the escape ship moments before, the cockpit window is facing outward. If the ship took off nose-forward, she could not see the mother ship moving away through the front window as then she'd be going backwards. There is a small window in the back of the ship through the rear door, but it's far too small to be the same window she was looking out while leaving. Also, the front window has diagonal support struts to hold the windows in place, providing further evidence that the window she is looking through is actually the front of the ship.
Tailkinker
11th Feb 2013
Alien (1979)
5th Apr 2005
Alien (1979)
Corrected entry: When the face sucker alien jumped at Kane it only attached itself to the front of Kane's mask. It did not penetrate the mask. When they get Kane to the Nostromo, the face sucker alien is completely inside his mask and there is a big hole that it entered through. (00:36:20)
Correction: The face-hugger used an acidic excretion to burn its way through the helmet visor. The visor can be seen to be warped by the effect of the acid.
5th Apr 2005
Alien (1979)
Corrected entry: When the face sucker jumps at Kane, he only jumps onto Kane's helmet. This is best seen when in slo-mo on the DVD. Having it jump through his helmet, as we are led to believe, would have resulted in some glass breaking and facial lacerations to Kane and injury to the face sucker alien. (00:34:20)
Correction: The face-hugger emits a quantity of acid and burns its way through the helmet visor. The visor is visibly affected - the sides of the hole appear melted, not broken.
Then wouldn't Kane's face be melted?
It secretes enough acid to just melt the helmet and not damage the host.
6th Dec 2004
Alien (1979)
Corrected entry: The newborn alien that bursts from John Hurt's chest is next seen full-grown, munching on a crew member who is searching for Jones the cat. Assuming that it needs to kill to eat, how did the alien suddenly appear full-size without any nourishment?
Correction: In the script, the Alien was caught eating all the crew's food that it could find in one of the food lockers, so it does indeed eat. One of the crew shot their flamethrower into the locker and the Alien then broke through a vent and into the air ducts. Also, the time between Kane dying and Brett dying was at least several hours. In the cuts scenes you see them first searching for the small Alien directly after it emerged from Kane. They then had to put Kane's body in it's shroud; clean up the awful mess in the dining room' perform the funeral ceremony and finally make the cattle prods and motion-detector. All of that would take a fair amount of time. It's not like the Alien grew to full size in only 20 minutes.
Correction: There's one big false assumption there - that the creature kills to eat. The extended cut of the film shows that in at least two cases, members of the crew were taken alive to create new eggs, and in other cases, the bodies are left apparently uneaten. The aliens in the film series have always shown the ability to grow to full size extremely quickly; the mechanism is unknown but it doesn't involve eating other lifeforms as no alien has ever been shown to attack before reaching full growth. The most likely explanation is that the additional mass required is simply taken from whatever the alien finds around it (metal, rock, whatever) and is incorporated into the body structure in some unexplained manner (possibly involving the breakdown of such matter via the acidic blood and its reconstitution in a form that the alien can make use of by some organ within the alien body).
24th Oct 2004
Alien (1979)
Corrected entry: The escape shuttle used by Ripley and the cat is buffeted by a shock wave from the Nostromo's explosion, a shock wave that can't exist. In space, there is no medium through which a shock wave can propagate.
Correction: It's not a shockwave. She's just blown up a colossal ship behind her - what she's hit by is the vaporised remains of the ship, rushing outwards from the point of explosion.
You don't see or hear the remains of the refinery hitting the life craft AT ALL so this is an implausible explanation. AND the camera shows the refinery intact as the life craft is pulling away from it...where has the debris come from?
Correction: If sound can travel in space, shock waves can, too. This is standard skiffy film convention. It is not reality.
2nd Jul 2004
Alien (1979)
Corrected entry: At the beginning of the film when they come out of their hibernation chambers, they all get up and are walking fine and a couple of characters are clean shaven. Surly if they were in the hibernation thing for many years they would have grown excessively large beards and also would have been very unstable when walking. Just like in real life where astronauts find it difficult to walk on their return to earth.
Correction: The hibernation chambers, as the name implies, slows down the body's systems to an extremely low ebb - as we see at the beginning of the second film, Ripley, who has been in hibernation for 57 years, doesn't appear to have aged in the slightest. As such, no beard growth would have occurred. With regard to muscle wastage, the crew needs to operate the ship effectively within hours of awakening, which wouldn't be possible if they couldn't stand up. As such, we can assume that the hibernation chambers were capable, in some way, of preventing this from occurring.
When the crew are in hypersleep they are technically not alive, they are frozen and then monitored by mother because when Kane woke up and asked where they were Brett mentioned that they were going back to the old freezerinos meaning back to hypersleep.
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Correction: Ripley boards the Narcissus and starts the launch procedure. We see the shuttle being lowered from the belly of the Nostromo, then we see the forward braking thrusters fire [they visibly light up]. This was the effect of slowing the Narcissus relative to the Nostromo, shedding the velocity inherited from the parent vessel. As the Nostromo, which is still under full power, moves on ahead of the Narcissus, Ripley's able to watch it through the shuttle's forward windows. As you say, she could only watch the Nostromo's progress through the forward windows if she was flying backwards. Compared to the Nostromo, that's exactly what she IS doing.
Tailkinker ★