FILM · 1997 · USA
Alien: Resurrection
34 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (34)
- #001
Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted to include a scene in which a mosquito bites Ripley and then dissolves in smoke because of her acidic blood. He ultimately abandoned the idea after the SFX team told him how much it would cost.
- #002
The full-size Newborn animatronic puppet was originally filmed with genitalia that were a mix of male and female organs. At the studio's orders, they had to be removed digitally.
- #003
The opening shot (at about 3 minutes) in which Ripley is shown as a young girl was based on photographs Sigourney Weaver had given the special effects team when she was a child.
- #004
While pre-production was underway, the original Alien Queen could not be found, and the molds used to create the original were too damaged to be used. By chance, the original full-size puppet was found in the personal collection of an avid Alien (1979) fan.
- #005
Ron Perlman performed most of his own stunts, particularly the scene in which he hangs upside down by his legs from a ladder while firing two guns at an alien. The next day, when he went to take a shower, he realized he had badly injured the backs of his knees doing it.
- #006
Actor Ron Perlman nearly drowned while filming the underwater scene. At one point, as he tried to surface, he struck his head on a sprinkler in the ceiling, which knocked him unconscious. He was rescued by nearby crew members.
- #007
The studio wanted to cut the scene (at about 1 hour 23 minutes) preceding Ripley's encounter with the Alien Queen because of its sexual nature. When Sigourney Weaver threatened not to promote the film if the scene was cut, they decided to keep it.
- #008
The underwater scene marked Winona Ryder's first time going underwater since a near-drowning incident when she was 12 years old. The actress had a full anxiety attack on the first day of filming on the underwater set.
- #009
Sigourney Weaver was paid 11 million dollars, the entire budget of Alien (1979).
- #010
Sigourney Weaver signed on to the film largely because of one scene in particular (at about the 53rd minute): when Ripley 8 encounters her previous seven aborted genetic incarnations.
- #011
The names of the androids in the Alien films follow a pattern: Ash (A) in Alien (1979); Bishop (B) in Aliens (1986) and Alien³ (1992); Call (C) in this film; and David (D) in Prometheus (2012).
- #012
Milk had to be added to the underwater set because the water was too transparent to be convincing.
- #013
At about 13 minutes (extended version only), when Number 8 mentions the company, she is told that the Weyland-Yutani corporation has been bought by Wal-Mart.
- #014
At about 6 minutes (extended version only), in a scene that was filmed and deleted but reinstated in the Special Edition, when the cloned Alien Queen's chestburster is surgically removed from Ripley's chest, Ripley wakes up and breaks the surgeon's arm as he is about to stitch her up.
- #015
The film's original idea was to clone Newt (the little girl from Aliens (1986)) rather than Ripley. Because she was to have significant power and fighting skills, Joss Whedon, who had experience writing an action series featuring a young heroine with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), was hired. Whedon wrote a 30-page story treatment, but the studio was worried that fans would not accept an Alien film without the character Ellen Ripley. When Sigourney Weaver agreed to reprise her role for 11 million dollars, Whedon's initial story was scrapped and he rewrote it focusing on a cloned Ripley.
- #016
At about 1 hour 26 minutes, to achieve the shot in which the camera travels through Leland Orser and sees the alien fetus about to be born, Orser put the camera down his throat and then pulled it out. The footage was later reversed.
- #017
Although the cast appear to spend much of their time walking up and down endless spaceship corridors, only two were actually built for the film.
- #018
The underwater sequence was filmed on a soundstage specially built on the 20th Century Fox lot that was converted into a permanent water tank. Filling it with water took nearly a week.
- #019
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet spoke almost no English during filming and always had translators on set. By the time the DVD Special Edition was released in 2003, he had learned enough English to record a director's commentary.
- #020
Cinematographer Darius Khondji added silver to the printing process to increase contrast. As a result, dark colors became richer and everything else was given a metallic tone. He also used an electric blue tint for the underwater scene. The shots added to the Special Edition did not go through this process, so they are easily noticeable.
- #021
The cloned Queen's head was actually the same head used to portray the Acheron Queen in Aliens (1986), acquired from collector Bob Burns and repainted with a new, shimmering, pearlescent paint scheme in brown and green tones. Original molds for the creature's arms, legs and tail were obtained from a replica company in Colorado, but the molds for the Queen's body turned out to have been irreparably destroyed in the decade since Aliens was made. This was not a major problem, however, since for most of the Queen's screen time in the fourth film her torso and abdomen would be strangely swollen as a result of the new live-birth reproductive mutation.
- #022
H. R. Giger, the designer of the original Alien, was pleased with Resurrection and described it as an "excellent film", but was disappointed that he was not credited in the film.
- #023
Winona Ryder was a big fan of Alien (1979) and therefore took the chance to appear alongside her idol Sigourney Weaver.
- #024
Jean-Pierre Jeunet had planned to hire original creature designer H. R. Giger, but this was vetoed by 20th Century Fox after Giger sued them over the lack of credit for Alien³ (1992). Jeunet then bought Giger's books and hung pages from them on the walls of the production design offices for inspiration. Giger was openly displeased that he was (once again) not credited for his Alien designs and sent Fox a letter of protest.
- #025
All of the spaceships in the film were miniatures, because the visual effects supervisors believed CGI was not yet effective enough to create realistic spaceships.
- #026
This is the only Alien film not shot in the United Kingdom. The film was shot at the 20th Century Fox studios in Los Angeles, California. One of the reasons was that co-producer Sigourney Weaver did not want to travel.
- #027
(At about 55 minutes) To play Ripley 7, Sigourney Weaver put her head through a hole in the floor so that it could be seamlessly fitted into the strange body the makeup department had created for her.
- #028
The $50–60 million budget was much lower than the director and writers had initially envisioned. As a result, the scale of the sets was reduced and a more claustrophobic shooting approach was adopted, with very close shots of the characters' faces.
- #029
(At about 55 minutes) When Ripley discovers all her other "failed" alien/hybrid clones, she finds one still alive that begs her to kill it out of mercy; Ripley does so with a flamethrower. This idea was taken from a scene cut from Alien (1979), in which Ripley finds Dallas and he asks her to kill him out of mercy; Ripley similarly does so with a flame weapon.
- #030
The film is set in the year 2379.
- #031
The production had difficulty finding enough studio space, because major productions such as Titanic (1997), Starship Troopers (1997) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) occupied most of the available studio space in Hollywood.
- #032
In the first draft of the script, an unnamed soldier was to be sucked through a small hole in a window after corrosive alien blood burned the hole open. In a later version of the script, General Perez (Dan Hedaya) was written to die this way. The special effects company Amalgamated Dynamics worked on the effect for several weeks, but when director Jean-Pierre Jeunet saw the test footage he felt it was too spectacular a death for such a minor character. The idea was used for the Newborn's death when the original climax on Earth was rewritten to take place on Betty. Perez's final death scene (being bitten from behind the head and observing a piece of his own brain) was one of Jeunet's favorite scenes, and although the studio wanted to cut it, it was kept in the film after test audiences reacted quite positively.
- #033
(At about 1 hour 40 minutes) In her first scenes with the Newborn, Sigourney Weaver takes care not to look into its eyes. This was a lesson she learned while making Gorillas in the Mist (1988) about not making first eye contact with a potentially dangerous animal.
- #034
For the underwater scene, each actor was assigned a diver with a backup oxygen supply. At one point Leland Orser's diver had left the water to take a bathroom break. When Orser began to run out of breath, it nearly turned into a disaster. Fortunately, Ron Perlman's diver was able to reach him in time to help.
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