Rewatchables Reference

• Winner: The chest-burster dinner scene.
• Other nominees: crew waking up from hypersleep, the first meal together, the face-hugger attack on Kane, Dallas in the ventilation shafts, the Space Jockey set piece, Ash vs. Ripley, Harry Dean Stanton's death.

• Young Sigourney Weaver.
• Veronica Cartwright's 'what is happening' face – Bill's favorite. Also her best quality in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• The movie giving birth to the entire Aliens franchise – 'one of the first in the conversation of is the sequel better than the original.'
• The humor in the first hour, starting with Kane's first line being 'I feel dead.'
• The biblical allusions and deep mythology – Ash calling the alien 'Kane's son,' the creationism themes.
• Ash as an iteration on HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The Weyland-Yutani corporate presence – insinuated without ever being fully explained.
• The retro-futurism aesthetic and blue-collar worker characterization.

• The slow-motion crew waking up and the dissolve to Kane's face at the very beginning (CR).
• The Space Jockey 'Cecil B. DeMille shot' (Sean).
• The sleeping pod room – 'the all-white just feels very 70s version of what future is' (Bill).

• Thin category for this movie. Bill: 'I don't really have one.'
• Sean: Sigourney singing 'Oh Lucky Star' at the end.
• CR: Jerry Goldsmith's score is really good, but wished a character had listened to classical music on deck.

• Budget constraints limited some action scenes. The Ash latex head didn't look great but they couldn't reshoot it.
• Lambert and Parker's deaths happen in basically the same scene and 'it's not that good of a scene' (Bill).

• Smoking inside a spaceship.
• Nobody quarantines Kane after the face-hugger – he wakes from a coma and they let him eat dinner with the crew.
• The deleted Dallas/Brett cocoon scene being on YouTube – Bill hates that it 'makes me rethink what the movie was.'
• Ridley Scott's original planned ending where the alien rips Ripley's head off and presses buttons to fly the ship.

• Bill: 'Kill the fucking cat. Movie cats are the fucking worst.' Extended rant about how dogs are superior movie animals.
• Challenges anyone to name 3 fun movie cats. Best they come up with: the cat on Vito Corleone's lap and Mr. Bigglesworth.
• Sean defends the cat as thematic – both the cat and alien are predators, and saving Jonesy establishes Ripley as empathetic.

• Ridley Scott chose between Sigourney Weaver and Meryl Streep (Yale classmates) for Ripley. Streep was mourning John Cazale's death.
• Harrison Ford turned down the role of Captain Dallas. Sean thinks it would have been a better movie with Ford.
• Veronica Cartwright thought she was being cast as Ripley, showed up in London, and found out she was Lambert.
• A 6'10" Nigerian student named Bolaji Badejo played the alien – he was 'never heard from again.'

• Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) during the chest-burster scene.
• CR: 'Is it overacting when you get sprayed with a gallon of pig's blood? I don't know, but she fucking goes for it.'

Ian Holm (Ash). Tough category with only 7 characters who are all well-known actors.

• Yaphet Kotto. 'Yaphet is essentially the second lead of the movie in some ways' (CR).
• Bill notes 'maybe the award doesn't exist' with only 7 characters.

• James Caan as Captain Dallas instead of Tom Skerritt. 'It's better, right? It's a better movie' (Bill).
• Tom Berenger also discussed but deemed too young. 'Burt Reynolds is too big.'

• Sigourney Weaver's salary for Alien: Resurrection was more than the entire cost of Alien.
• Ron Cobb came up with the idea that the alien should bleed acid.
• Borrowed blue laser lights for the egg chamber from The Who, who were rehearsing next door at Shepperton Studios.
• The dead face-hugger was made from oysters, a sheep kidney, and fresh shellfish.
• Four different cats played Jonesy.
• Ash's android head was made of milk, caviar, pasta, and glass marbles.
• John Hurt stuck through a hole in the table linked to a mechanical torso filled with animal guts. Yaphet Kotto was 'fucked up by it for a couple hours.'
• Space suits had no oxygen – actors kept passing out. Ridley put his own kids in the suits and they passed out too.
• To get the cat to react to the alien, they put a German Shepherd behind a screen and removed it.
• Jim Cameron criticized the underwear scene: 'If I became a director, I would never make women shoot scenes like that again.'

• Sigourney Weaver: Aliens ('post-Ghostbusters then Aliens – it doesn't get bigger than that').
• John Hurt: The Elephant Man, coming off Alien.
• Harry Dean Stanton: 'Somewhere in the 80s' – Red Dawn, Pretty in Pink, Escape from New York. Sean: '25 consecutive years of sitting on Jack Nicholson's couch drinking Jim Beam.'
• Tom Skerritt: 'Top Gun'.
• Yaphet Kotto: Homicide: Life on the Street (Bill). Also 'Midnight Run'.
• Ridley Scott: 'Gladiator'.

• Not nearly scared enough about the alien on Kane's face. 'It still hasn't been explained to me why they brought a cat to outer space' (Bill).
• Hierarchical breakdown after they break quarantine – 'who's calling the shots here?' (CR).
• Not quarantining Kane – 'if this guy was infected with an alien creature on his face, you could not get me to sit in the same ship as him' (Sean).

• 'Almost an EGOT' – sequel (Aliens), prequel (Prometheus), prestige TV (Noah Hawley series), new movie (Fede Alvarez). 'Definitely not untouchable.'
• Bill jokes: 'Tyler Perry's Alien' for the stage play.

• Bill's list: Wayne Jenkins, Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, JT Walsh.
• CR does a Wayne Jenkins impression reacting to the Ash reveal: 'God damn, Ash! I didn't know you were a humanoid with fucking milk for blood!'

• Ridley Scott (CR). The actual 1979 Best Director nominees were Benton, Fosse, Coppola, Yates, and Molinaro.
• Bill: 'Alien wasn't getting nominated for Best Director, but in retrospect, it has to be one of the five.'

• Do Lambert and Kane have 'a little something going'? She looks at him 'very affectionately throughout the first part of the movie' (CR).
• Why does a commercial towing vehicle need a self-destruct mechanism?
• Bill: The sports would drive him crazy being asleep in a pod – 'I'm coming out of that pod and I'm like, who won the Super Bowl?'

• Dallas's Nostromo jacket (CR).
• The flamethrower, or Kane's 'game-worn, alien-worn mask' (Bill).
• The actual original xenomorph design – 'one of the coolest things that has ever been designed and put into a movie' (Sean).

'Leave the cat' (CR). 'Leave the pet' is always a good life lesson (Bill).

Aliens – no other answer (Bill). Sean wanted Prometheus. CR mentions Dark Star (Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter).

• Ridley Scott. 'This guy reads the script and he's like, OK, this is what it's going to look like... He operates the camera. He's a five-tool guy here' (CR).
• Sigourney Weaver as runner-up (Sean's pick).

• Craig had seen it before and calls it 'really one of my favorites, like all time.' Compares it to 2001 for how visually incredible it is.
• Bill agrees: 'I like when movies have to work within the confines of some restriction... this movie looks better than Marvel.'