Alien 3 (1992) - 7 questions

Question: Towards the end of the film after Ripley refuses to give herself up and tells "No" to Bishop and closes the gate, Bishop and the men in white go back down the stairs. As we cut to the long shot, we see one of the men in white running up to the metal fence and grabbing hold of it as though he is trying to climb over it carrying what appears to be a shoulder mounted camcorder. He is not part of the production crew because he is wearing the same costume as the other actors, but this is not dwelled upon so it seems like a pointless prop. Was this to add a similar feel to the previous films of recording footage on the planets?

Answer: While no details are given in the film, he's presumably present to document their interactions with Ripley for future reference - this is, after all, a very important moment for the company, where they believe that they may finally get their hands on the specimen that they've been waiting for for years.

Question: How did the ox (or dog) get the alien inside of it? Did it get facehugged or something? If so, how did the facehugger survive the escape pod and come to land?

Answer: The facehugger came down in the escape pod and survived the crash - as has been previously established, they're tough little critters. In the theatrical release, we see the dog standing in the escape pod while it's being moved, with the facehugger moving towards it. With the Ox, the 'hugger presumably left the pod and impregnated the first creature that it came across.

Question: I know that an regular alien comes from a face-hugger, but how do they make a queen alien?

Answer: There are a couple of methods according to the novelizations and movie supplements. None are "official", but they all make sense. 1. A queen can lay a "queen egg" if she needs to. 2. When enough drones are hatched, they will sense the need for a queen and one of them will spin a cocoon and transform into a queen over a few days. 3. When a hive reaches a certain size, a few aliens (they where called "nurses" in the books) would hatch and feed a substance into certain eggs causing the facehugger to carry a queen embryo. As the aliens are based on certain types of wasp, originally, these methods are all pretty logical.

Question: In the scene where Ripley is describing the new Alien, she says it 'moves different to the other ones'. I could never get a good enough look at the alien to understand what she meant. What did she mean and why does it move differently?

Answer: She means that the alien it moves on 4 legs, whereas the other aliens moved primarily on two legs. This alien came out of a dog in the theatrical version and from a cow in the Directors cut version, which can only move on 4 legs. This hints to the fact that the alien inherits the characteristics of its host.

Question: How did the alien egg get on board the Sulaco? I thought it was by the Queen but she did not have that organ that she was connected to when we first see her and so she couldn't reproduce eggs.

Answer: As we don't know the precise details of the Alien reproductive cycle, we don't know for a fact that the Queen would be unable to produce eggs without the sac seen in the film. The only other possibility is that somebody got the egg up there somehow. The only possible candidate would seem to be Bishop, who would have had to somehow have got the egg from somewhere, and flown it up to the Sulaco while Ripley was off rescuing Newt. There doesn't seem to have been time for this, so the only remaining option seems to be that they did indeed arrive with the Queen in some fashion, either laid while up there or, possibly more plausibly, rescued intact from the destruction caused by Ripley and carried somewhere on the Queen's body.

Question: I noticed Ripley has one normal eye and one red eye in the early parts of the movie, what type of injury is that generally indicative of and what causes it?

Answer: Busted blood vessel in the eye. It can be caused by several different things, stress, impact, etc. It's painless and heals in a couple of weeks.

Question: I've been told that the original script for Alien 3 was quite different then it turned out to be, but due to costs/times it was revamped. Is this true?

Answer: There are umpteen different scripts for Alien 3 available on the net, some of which are very different to what was eventually made - some of the early ones are set in a monastery, rather than the prison colony that was eventually used.