Corrected entry: Something to note as the flesh alien is being sucked out of the Betty. In the previous films, the drones were designated as Xenophobes or Xenomorphs (skeleton on the outside), very similar to insects. When the flesh alien dies, the last thing we see is a nearly human SKULL.
Corrected entry: When climbing above the nesting grounds, one of the guys gets a dead, very heavy alien on his shoe. To save the crippled guys life and keep him climbing, he unhooks from the crippled guy and falls to his death. He didn't have to die, though. He could have just pushed it off with his other foot.
Correction: Christie was very badly injured from the acid that hit him. He was barely conscious and simply couldn't move his foot to get rid of the alien. It wasn't a certainty it would work either, Christie simply thought of the fastest and surest way for Vriess to be saved.
I always got the impression Christie was paralyzed from the waist down after he gets hit with the acid. It's a fitting way for him to die, because he saves Vriess who is also paralyzed in the same way.
How would he get paralyzed from the acid? It hit his face.
Went into his brain. I can't see him being too tired to move his leg but not too tired to un-snap his harness. Either way, it's a very poorly explained scene. Not saying I'm right and you're wrong, it's just the way I always read the scene when I watched the movie.
Right, right. I get where you are coming from. But let's be realistic, if the acid had gone in his brain he'd be dead. He just didn't have the strength left, not tired, just in and out of conscious. And again, it would have taken too long to try and get the alien off.
Corrected entry: The Auriga is a science vessel, but it is under military jurisdiction, run by soldiers specifically to control the aliens in the event of a breakout. When the aliens get loose, why do all the soldiers evacuate instead of fighting the aliens? As military personnel, they would have contingency plans in place for this sort of occurrence - US military strategists are ridiculously overprepared with worst-case scenarios that often have heavy costs involved, but mean that the military will never be so paralyzed that it just runs away. The Auriga should have a plan to fortify a single location or at least blow up the ship in the event of a mass breakout. (00:38:40)
Correction: The commanding officer sounded the evacuation alarm. The soldiers were simply following orders. Perhaps after doing the damage assessment (which we do not see but you do see that at least 8 decks had been eaten through from the acid), he determined that he could not contain the threat fast enough so ordered the evacuation instead. Perhaps also he was planning on blowing up the ship afterwards, but died before he could give the order to do so.
Corrected entry: Ripley should have the scar on her chest, but since Call's visit, it is not visible anymore.
Correction: It could have healed over time. Ripley is a genetically created clone and is able to withstand huge amounts of pain and heal herself afterwards - Call stabs Ripley in the hand and she heals her hand immediately.
Corrected entry: As shown in Aliens, the alien drones are never far from their queen, so they can protect her. Since the Newborn was so hostile to the queen when it was born, why weren't the drones all over it within seconds, tearing it to pieces? (00:29:50)
Corrected entry: The scientists claim they procured blood samples on the Prison colony that allowed them to recreate Ripley. If you used blood to clone Ripley, then you'd get a clone of Ripley without a chest-burster inside her. The chestburster doesn't alter DNA.
Correction: 1) I don't recall any DNA blood tests being given in any of the previous movies, so you don't really know if the chest burster does or does not alter the DNA in any way. 2) In an inscet colony, any egg laid has the potential to be a queen. When a new queen is needed, certain eggs are treated differently to produce a queen instead of a worker. Since Ripley was implanted by a queen, maybe the intent was to produce another queen and who knows what happens to a person's DNA implanted with a queen.
Corrected entry: In the cafeteria scene, Wren refers to "the company" as "Weyland-Utanic" when the correct name is "Weyland Yutani", as seen and stated in the previous alien films.
Correction: Having listened to the scene, it sounds like he says the name correctly. Even if he doesn't quite get it right, considering that Weyland Yutani has apparently been dead and gone for a considerable number of years, it's not unreasonable that he might get the name slightly wrong.
Corrected entry: Why did the two aliens gang up and kill the third one to escape the holding cell? Later in the movie, it is established that these mutated aliens can apparently regurgitate their own acid blood as a weapon, so slaughtering the other alien wasn't really necessary; they all could've just vomited some acid on the glass or the floor and gotten free without dwindling their numbers.
Correction: It took a lot of acid blood to burn a hole in the floor, and vomitting produces little amounts - just enough to hurt an enemy. It's not really a mistake - the aliens did it the faster and more reliable way.
Corrected entry: For some strange reason, in every close up shot of the actors there is a white ring around the pupil of the eyes. My guess is the camera reflection. It noticablely stays in the same position whenever they duck their heads down. (01:18:00)
Correction: This is a deliberate, and relatively common, effect created by the lighting. It involves shooting the relevant shots through a ring of lights to give the 'hoop' of illumination in the eyes of the actors, as mentioned in the DVD commentary of the film.
Corrected entry: When the female scientist is showing Ripley pictures to see if she could identify them, there is a bad editing mistake. When the scientist shows Ripley the glove, she seems to silently mouth the words "Close....glove." This occurs before Ripley identifies the picture as "Hand", to which the scientist actually says "Close...glove." It seems that the shot was recycled and very poorly edited.
Correction: She isn't mouthing the words close... glove. She is mouthing Glove to hint to Ripley what to say.
Corrected entry: Supposedly, the new Queen removed from Ripley is the only vector for recreating the Alien line: Perez is told that the Queen will begin producing eggs in a few days. But at the end of the movie, we find that the Queen is now using a reproductive system based on humans, giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs. If the scientists could salvage eggs from another site, why would they bother cloning Ripley?
Correction: In the script for the film it is revealed that the Alien Queen was able to produce eggs AND give birth to live young, as a result of the cloning process. The eggs the Queen produced for the first batch of hosts probably were created and stored before the hosts arrived. The reference to laying eggs was probably for the second batch of eggs to be laid, as the scientists planned to make as many aliens as possible, and were waiting on other batches of human cargo to arrive for them to impregnate.
Corrected entry: Why do the scientists bother to kidnap 12 humans to host the aliens? It seems it was quite difficult to obtain the human hosts in secrecy. In Alien 3 the Xenomorph grows inside a dog (or an ox in the directors cut version), and in the first movie it has grown inside an unidentified alien species. Surely it can not only grow inside humans. Scientists more than 300 years from now who are able to clone adult individuals would have thought of this. They could just have used monkeys, cows, pigs...
Corrected entry: When the crew of the Betty gets through the kitchen and into the egg trap, the eggs begin making monster sounds when they open, such as growls and groans. The eggs aren't alive, and in all previous movies the facehuggers never made any sounds.
Correction: The eggs slurp and the facehuggers hiss a little bit. This is consistent with the previous films.
Corrected entry: When Gediman is rambling about the queen's new 'perfect mutation', he fails to realize how imperfect it actually is when compared to its normal state. Instead of cranking out hundreds of eggs in a short amount of time which can lead to a huge army being built in a matter of months, now the queen has to spend countless hours straining and suffering while trying to force out an awkward, bumbling monster that attacks her on sight. Hardly a situation that I would describe as 'perfect'.
Correction: Gediman obviously does not consider the relatively low birth-rate to be important, the mutation is perfect by his personal criteria. Others may disagree with his opinion, but it is (at most) an error on the part of the character, not a movie mistake.
Corrected entry: When the crew first meets Purvis, the guy with the alien inside him, Ripley explains to what the thing is. If you look over her left shoulder during this you can see a crew member moving around and eventually ducking behind a counter.
Correction: That's not a crewmember - it's Johner (Ron Perlman)
Corrected entry: When the hybrid Ripley finds the lab with all the failed 'Ripley/Alien' mutants, the grossly mutated Ripley she finds strapped to the table pleads with her: "kill me", etc. Now, if the scientists had to teach the hybrid Ripley to talk after they got the alien specimen they wanted, why would they also teach the reject to talk, especially to beg for her own death? I don't think the idea about residual memory holds true in this case; because then wouldn't the hybrid Ripley have the power of speech without the instruction of the scientists?
Correction: Ripley didn't really need the scientists help to learn how to talk, she regains all her speech abilities beyond what they retaught her. Presumably, the weeks or months old reject would have remembered basic language skills.
Corrected entry: If the newborn has acid for blood, (as it presumably does) wouldn't it make the hole in the window bigger as it was sucked through?
Correction: The newborn may not have had acid blood at all. Even if it did, if you look closely, there is some skin being sucked out of the hole that protects the edges of the hole from the blood.
Corrected entry: When the flesh alien is born, it manages to kill the queen with a single swipe which knocks its jaw off, but in Aliens the queen was able to take a huge pounding from a Cargo lifter and not look hurt.
Correction: The newborn is extremely strong, probably stronger than the cargo lifter. This is shown when he effortlessly closes the door on the Betty. With strength like that, it would have no trouble killing the queen.
Corrected entry: When Ripley asks how they made her, they tell her that they used blood samples from where she died. In the last Alien movie (Alien 3) she clearly fell backwards into a vent of molten lead, leaving no blood behind.
Correction: In the previous movie, when she reaches the prision the doctor does some tests, one of which involves taking a blood sample.
Corrected entry: During the entire battle scene on the ladder, DeStephano is nowhere to be seen. Considering the fact that he has a gun, he could have helped out when the alien was attacking Christie, but instead he curiously disappears from the scene, until Call opens the door, and he is at the top of the ladder. (01:09:10 - 01:13:10)
Correction: He is not a nice person. He is more interested in getting away than in helping.
That'd be Ren you're referring to not DeStefeno. The original post is correct the correction beneath is wrong.
Correction: He didn't disappear from the scene. He went up earlier than Johner and he is just on the other side of the ladder so he can't get a shot. Johner however is on the same side as Christie and Vriess so he helps them out instead.
Correction: An animal with its skeleton on the outside is actually called an arthropod. A Xenophobe is the fear of strangers or foreigners and a xenomorph is a species where the young do not resemble the adult form (e.g. caterpillar and butterfly, or face-huggers and insect-like drones).