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?
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: 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 the Alien bursts in through the window of the APC after rescuing the marines it clearly sprays red blood when it smashes the window, even though the Alien has yellowish acidic blood.
Correction: It's not red blood - the broken glass is reflecting red light from somewhere.
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.
Corrected entry: The guns fire 10mm caseless. Each magazine holds 95 rounds (according to the poorly placed counter). A springloaded magazine can only push bullets in one direction, so at most you can have two rounds alternated vertically in a compressed zig-zag pattern. You can't have five rounds side by side in a magazine, as there would be no way of moving them horizontally into the chamber as well as vertically through the length of the magazine. This means that a 100 round magazine would either have to be a drum or cylinder shape like that on a Thompson submachinengun or it would be at least sixty centimetres long.
Correction: Nowhere in the movie it is established springloaded magazines are used, and as it takes place in the future, who knows what they came up with.
Corrected entry: The crew finds half a dozen face huggers in the med lab, and two of them are still alive. One tries to attach to Burke when he gets too close to the glass case. If a face hugger was able to break the much tougher glass of Kane's space suit's helmet in the first film and attach to him, why wouldn't it be able to break through this less durable glass in this film to get on Burke?
Correction: The creature doesn't break the glass to Kane's helmet, it melts its way in with acid. Presumably the liquid in the container neutralizes the acid somehow. Also, we have no idea what either the helmet glass or the container are actually made of. The container is made of a material strong enough to withstand the strength of the facehugger.
A laboratory jar that is made of material stronger than that of the faceplate of a space helmet that is designed to withstand a pressure differential like that between atmospheric pressure and a vacuum. Yes, that's going to happen.
This is both a futuristic movie and there is a 57 year gap between movies. And it isn't a "laboratory jar", it's some sort of made up stasis device. It is completely plausible that a stasis device would be more durable than a helmet made nearly 60 years prior. But the point is moot because the alien in the first film never breaks the helmet, it melts it.
Even the strongest acid cannot corrode a glass beaker, but it could easily corrode other transparent materials. It isn't a matter of how "strong" it is, it's a matter of chemistry. We don't know what the faceplates of the space suits are made of, but current day ones are made of polycarbonate plastics.
Correction: Probably because the facehugger doesn't have anything to hold on to and break the glass.
Corrected entry: The marines are not allowed to fire in the reactor (which later explodes from damage caused by the APC with a 30 megaton blast), however it is described as a FUSION reactor. Fusion reactors do not cause nuclear explosions if they overheat. They can't. They just turn off.
Correction: Fusion reactors can be cooled by liquid hydrogen. If the coolant pipes are hit the highly flammable and explosive hydrogen will be released, along with radioactive tritium (no explosive value but contamination). Remember, these things are huge so we are talking about large amounts.
Corrected entry: Whilst the phrase 'Fire in the hole' may have changed in the future, it is unlikely it would have two separate meanings. For example, the first is when the APC catches fire, (as in fire in the APC) and the second is when Vasquez throws the cannister in front of the sentry guns (the more traditional meaning-i.e. throwing a grenade). Both these phrases have nothing to do with each other, but are still used in exactly the same way.
Correction: The simple act of shouting "FIRE" will get people's attention, while the knowledge of fire is one of danger. Adding the phrase "IN THE HOLE" is a message that immediately tells our brain "A place is involved". Thus "Fire in the hole" is a easy verbal short hand for "There is a dangerous situation that you need to be away so look at the direction I am pointing in, running from or looking at" which would be a bit difficult to should out quickly.
Correction: Hudson didn't say 'Fire in the hole' he said 'Fire in the hull' as in the hull of the APC.
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.
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