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. [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.]

The counter on a fully-loaded pulserifle reads 300 rounds. However, a magazine of the size shown could never contain 300 rounds of 10mm ammunition. [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.]

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? [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.]

In the scene where everyone decides to leave and nuke the site from orbit, where was Bishop? He was last seen in the Med Lab studying one of the face-huggers. Yet he was nowhere to be found when everyone decided to leave, when everyone was outside, or when the ship crashed. Then, he's suddenly back saying that he'd check on Lt. Gorman and continue his research back in the Med Lab. Come to think of it, where was Lt. Gorman in all of this too? He was last seen getting knocked out-cold. Nobody was carrying him or helping him in any of those same scenes. Were they just going to leave him and Bishop in the Med Lab while they nuked the site from orbit? [Bishop was indeed in the med-lab. Since the APC was wrecked, they had no method of getting back to the complex safely. They had to wait for the dropship to pick them up, and then fly them over to the main complex building to pick up Bishop. And also, Hicks and Hudson are carrying the injured Gorman. You can see him quite on the stretcher that they are both carrying.]

In the part of the film where Ripley and Gorman are inside the RV tank, and Ripley is trying to get the marines to get out of the bowls of the atmosphere processor before anymore get killed, she has the headset on, then in the next shot of her she doesn't, then she does, and then it gets ripped off by Gorman. [She never actually has the headset 'on' per se. She holds the ear pieces up to her one ear and speaks into the microphone. When Gorman appears to rip it off, you can see that it comes out of her one hand that she was holding it in.]

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. [As we find out later, it was Burke who set them up to be impregnated by the facehuggers. No doubt he crept in and removed the gun from the room while Ripley and Newt slept before releasing the facehuggers in to the room].

When Ripley goes to rescue Newt, she only uses the tracker bracelet to try and find her. Why didn't she also take along a motion sensor? It could have not only helped her find Newt quicker, but would have given her warning if there were any aliens closing in. [They only had two motion sensors on the planet. At the beginning of the final battle, Hudson has one, which was presumably lost with him, and Ripley has the other. She carries this for some time, but seems to drop it in the lift (she has it when they enter, she's lost it by the time they leave) either to help the injured Hicks, or possibly it's been damaged by acid from the alien who attacked them there. If there were no spares on the second dropship, and there's no indication that there were, then she simply doesn't have a motion sensor available to take with her.]

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? [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.]

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. [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.]

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. [Only one side of the light's outer casing breaks. The other side is intact.]

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? [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.]

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). [In the knife trick,Bishop covers Hudson's hand with his own hand. The other crewmembers called for him to do it meaning they had seen him do the same trick on other occasions. Hudson was in no danger.]

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. [Since Earth now has colonies all over the galaxy, they could have been sent from a colony quite close to the planet. It's been decades since Ripley & the original crew were there, it's entirely possible there are now colonies near the planet.] [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.]

When the Marines are underneath the "primary heat exchangers," Dietrich is grabbed from behind by an alien, and her flamethrower discharges, igniting Frost. He flies over a railing and down a shaft. If you watch the sequence, you will see that when Frost hears Dietrich scream, he turns to face her, raising his pistol. At this point, he is facing away from the shaft. Flames fill the frame as he is engulfed. In the very next shot, he is on fire, and is charging full speed toward the shaft. There wasn't enough time for him to turn around 180 degrees. [Watch closely. Frost turns around with his pistol, but as he sees the flames coming at him he begins turning away again, towards the shaft. The flames then hit him while he is in the process of turning.]

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. [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.]

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? [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.]

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? [Hicks isn't blind...he saw it on her wrist.]

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 indiginous 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. [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.]

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. [When Ripley rescues Newt, she isn't impregnated yet. When Ripley is saving Newt from the cocoon, an egg is opening just in front of Newt. If Ripley was 5 minutes later, Newt would of been impregnated, but Ripley came on time. Also, in Alien 3 we see that Newt hasn't been impregnated.]

After the Marines are attacked in the atmosphere processor and regroup in the APC, they surmise that Corporal Hicks is now in command. Wouldn't the pilot of the drop ship be next in line? Wouldn't she outrank Hicks even if she was only a warrant officer? [The pilot of the ship (Ferro) was also a Corporal, and Hicks being the highest ranking marine on the ground (with Gorman incapacitated), Hicks was next in the chain of command.]