Hiiii spooky friends! I am starting Alien: Isolation tomorrow over on Twitch at 3: 00pmET if you wanna join. I’ll also be playing again on Thursday and then picking up with more next week! Come hang out :) https://www.twitch.tv/thecaitlinmarie

14:50 re: Ripley being in mom mode - in the extended cut we learn that Ripley had a daughter who was like 12 when she left on the mission, but grew old and died while Ripley was in cryo for 57 years.

Just so you know, Paul Reiser (Burke) brought his mother with him to the premiere, and she cheered when his character died lol.

The shot of Newt in the water with the alien rising up behind her is so fucking perfect. Like a hideoous blend of horror elements - a kid, in the dark, in the water, with a monster. It's a worst case scenario childhood nightmare.

"How did the cat live?" The same way Ripley did. In the cryopod.

The wordless standoff between Ripley and the Queen in the egg chamber is one of my favorite scenes in the movie. There's a tense unspoken understanding they seem to have with each other that if one of them makes a move that threatens their child(ren), she WILL kill the other. The first instance of anything close to communication between these two species is driven solely by fierce, unyielding maternal instinct. And I think that is so cool.

The cat didn’t need to eat..neither did Ripley. they were both in hyper sleep.

The entire "Cross my heart and hope to die" was essentially a religious oath. Cross my heart (sign of the cross) and hope to die (id I break this oath).

32:15 Actually Newt's actress kept messing up the take just so she could get another ride down that slope. At some point the director James Cameron realised that, and told her if she did it right she could ride down the slope as much as she wanted after, while the rest of the crew could move on to another shot. So yeah, it must have been pretty fun !

Ripley is among the Holy Trinity of badass female characters of the 1980s along with Sarah Connor and Princess Leia.

What makes Ellen Ripley a great heroine is the human element she brings to the table. She shows fear, she shows trauma, but when the situation calls for it, she will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Ripley is the epitome of the adage, "Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage means being afraid, but still doing what needs to be done."

FYI when you said her sliding down the vent looked kind of fun, the actress who played Newt kept  laughing/whooping on the way down and they had to promise to let her go again if she did it right hahaha

One thing that amuses me about this movie:

If there had been a crew on the Sulaco, none of this would have happened.

BUT… the lack of a crew just points out how terrible Weyland-Yutani (“The Company”) is. They made the ship automated to cut costs.

23:40 The sarcasm was sarcasming.

They did the spaceship with miniatures on cables shot with high speed cameras to give it scale. The movie was all puppets, miniatures, rear screen projection, every practical effect in the book stretching an extremely limited budget in 1985. Even the nuclear explosion was a moving sculpture made out of cotton balls with lights underneath.

The Alien Queen herself was the precursor to the massive T-Rex puppet in Jurassic Park, both made by the same VFX house!

The whole battle with the Alien queen still baffles me on a technical level. They used animatronics, miniatures, and full scale acting and blended it all together so well that even today I have a hard time finding any flaws. You can easily find movies made 20, 30 years after this movie that don't come even close to this.

They only had like 2-3 alien practical models, still insane how they still make you believe that there is a whole horde.

Oh and also in the audiobook there is the story about LV-426 and it also explains how the first people had their facehuggers cut off of  their face for research, those are most likely the ones we see in the jars.

Pretty sure Ripley was really the first strong female action lead; she is certainly the most iconic and enduring.  A lot of modern actresses probably owe their careers to Sigourney Weaver. ❤

This movie had Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton(RIP), the only 2 actors to be killed by an Alien, Predator, and Terminator.

Princess Leia, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. For anyone who ever says there are no well-rounded, complex and battle scarred badass women heroines.

Pretty sure the reason people were saying you should watch Aliens before playing Alien: Isolation is because in the Director's Cut of the film, there's mention of her daughter Amanda who died shortly before Ellen got rescued. It's why she connected so hard with Newt., and it's a really cool bit of extra motivation. Not to mention who the player character is for Alien: Isolation.