Aliens

Aliens (1986)

77 mistakes - chronological order

(21 votes)

Aliens mistake picture

Continuity mistake: After the Alien Queen is sucked out of the airlock, Ripley climbs back onto the platform and closes the doors. In a shot from above, her left leg has not yet crossed the mouth of the opening. Cut to a closer shot and half her body is already on the platform.

ployp

Other mistake: When Hudson is looking for bios on the screen, it shows them on level 3. But when Frost falls down the hole after being hit with a flamethrower, he falls down a number of levels.

Continuity mistake: When Ripley loads the magazine into the gun as she prepares to rescue Newt it says 95 rounds but when she is going down the elevator shaft it says 42 without her firing a shot.

jbrbbt

Revealing mistake: The "mission time" clocks on the video screens are very inconsistent most of the time they're seen. At several points they jump back and forth from 00:01:31 to 00:01:32 then back again even though all of them are supposed to be synchronized.

jbrbbt

Continuity mistake: When the team approaches the colony entrance to open the outer door, all the marines are inundated with pouring rain. Yet the moment they enter the compound and start searching, they are all dry.

Other mistake: They should have had much more than only twenty-six minutes to save Newt. Bishop said that the reactor would blow in four hours after seeing the emergency venting. He said it would take forty minutes to crawl down that pipe, an hour to patch into and align the antenna, thirty minutes to prep the ship, and fifty minutes flight time. 40+60+30+50=180 minutes, gives them an hour spare.

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Suggested correction: And how are you so sure everything went smoothly without problems? Any of those things could have taken longer, leaving only 26 minutes.

lionhead

Other mistake: The POV shot when the alien kills Burke is reused minutes later as the shot of the alien attacking Gorman and Vasquez as the grenade goes off.

Revealing mistake: When the swarm of aliens drops through the ceiling panels, you can tell that Ripley and the marines don't have magazines in their rifles. It's especially visible when Ripley looks up before Hicks raises the panel and sees the aliens.

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: What makes you think there is no magazine in those fake rifles? Ripley's gun has a magazine, visible as she is looking up. Her gun is the only one visible too.

lionhead

Visible crew/equipment: When Ripley is first shown in the loader after asking Apone if she can help, after the loaders claws grab the crate and she swings the crate around and asks "where you want it?" you can see tubes trailing off to the left of the loader that don't connect to anything in frame. The tubes are on the right side of the frame just under the crate in the loader's arms.

Continuity mistake: Hicks gives Ripley a wristwatch which is linked to his tracker. If you look at the watch, its face is mostly black with a tiny portion that is clear. However, when Newt has the watch and falls down the tunnel and is wandering around the pool of water before Hicks and Ripley find her, you can see that the watch face has no black - it has a full clear face and appears to be a standard digital watch of the 1980's era.

GalahadFairlight

Continuity mistake: When the crew is having breakfast the first time, at the end of the table is a non-moving kinetic orbit toy in 2 shots, then in the 3rd shot it's moving with no one touching it.

Bishop73

Continuity mistake: When Ripley is driving the APC, the passenger side front tire is on fire and engulfed in flames. When she runs over the alien with the same tire, the flames are completely gone. In the next shot and several shots after, the tire is completely engulfed in flames again.

anthony1579

Continuity mistake: As the ship carrying the marines to the planet where communication has been down for too long, the pilot of the ship says, "Where's the damn beacon? Oh, I see it." But when she says the last bit, there is no vision of the beacon; it only comes into sight a few seconds later.

kh1616

Continuity mistake: In the beginning, Ripley wakes up in a sweat, practically crying. She rings Burke on the visual phone and she has a droplet of sweat on her nostril, but it's there, then it isn't, then it, is; it comes and goes.

kh1616

Continuity mistake: In the beginning, when they find the colonists, they have IDs under their skins, but on the read-out there's only about 6 of them, when there should be about 100 of them. Later, on the read-out, we see the right amount of IDs.

kh1616

Visible crew/equipment: During the first attack scene in the hive, a marine gets killed and as he falls between the stairwells, his flamethrower goes off. Just as he falls down into the hold, you can see a crew member's foot moving backwards out of the shot.

thumper

Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Vasquez: No, have you?

More quotes from Aliens

Trivia: To make the Aliens' blood smoke and burn, the SFX department came up with an idea to put two separate chemicals side by side in bags inside the Alien puppets, on top of the explosives. When the two chemicals mixed together, it created a nasty, acidic burning affect.

More trivia for Aliens

Question: If the company knew about the Aliens from the start and coveted them as a bioweapon, why did it take 57 years and the reappearance of Ripley for someone from the company to make another effort to get one? In the intervening 57 years, wouldn't the company have sent someone out to the derelict spaceship wreckage?

Answer: The company doesn't wait 57 years, they built a colony on the planet over 20 years prior to finding Ripley. The company was apparently unaware of the exact location of the derelict spacecraft. After finding Ripley and obtaining information from her, Burke was able to send the Jorden family to the precise location of the derelict spacecraft.

Answer: For me anyway, the company doesn't seem to be as hostile as they do in Alien. Won't surprise me that in 57 years there has been a change in leadership and they are no longer interested in capturing the alien, Burke seems to operating on his own. Minor plot hole ultimately.

Sam Montgomery

I think the original answer is right and they simply didn't know where the crashed ship was located on the planet since the beacon was deactivated and all information was on the Nostromo and with Ripley. They built a colony there to find it eventually, just takes a long time. Until they got lucky and found Ripley. Burke is definitely not working on his own though, they still knew about the aliens and the original idea still remained, capture aliens and bring them back to study.

lionhead

Yes that's right, because when Ripley has a run in with Burke he says that this specimen is worth millions to the bio weapons division and if we bring it back we will be made for life.

More questions & answers from Aliens

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