Some cool stuff you might (or might not) know about: Aliens (1986)

- Michael Bien replaced James Remar (The Warriors, Dexter) as Cpl. Hicks a few days into principal shooting.

-In the extended edition, Hudson brags to Ripley about the weapons they pack.  One of the weapons he mentions is a “phased plasma pulse rifle.”  This is a reference to James Camerons earlier film, “The Terminator,” where the title character asks for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range.”  The pulse rifles carried by the marines in this film are ballistic, not plasma.

-James Horner was given little time to compose the score for this film, so he was forced to cannibalize several previous scores he had written (including Star Trek 2 and 3) to produce music for Aliens.  Additionally, he scrapped a short movement written for the climax of the movie, and used it later in his score for “Die Hard.”

-After filming was complete, the set for the alien nest was kept intact and used in several other movies, including “Batman” (1989.)

-A line of dialogue during the Marines’ briefing was omitted where Ripley would have described the parasite face-huggers as a “walking sex organ,” to which Hudson would have responded by saying, “sounds like you, Hicks.”  I thought that would have been funny.

-When filming the scene with Newt in the duct. Carrie Henn kept deliberately blowing her scene so she could slide down the vent, which she later called a slide three stories tall. James Cameron finally dissuaded her by saying that if she completed the shot, she could play on it as much as she wanted. She did, and he kept his promise.

-The Marine’s ship, “Sulaco,“ was named after the town in Joseph Conrad’s book, “Nostomo,” which was the name of the ship in the original “Alien.”

-Bishop states that his programming prohibits him from harming or allowing harm to come to a human.  This is a direct reference to Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics that states "A robot may not injure a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

-Sigourney Weaver told James Cameron that she wanted to do three things in this film: Not fire a gun, make love to an alien, and die.  While these three things did not happen in this film, they all happened in Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.