One of the sets for Aliens was later re-used as the Axis Chemical plant in Batman.

The name 'Sulaco' was taken from a novel by Joseph Conrad. The name of the novel? 'Nostromo' of course.

As Ripley is getting out of the atmosphere plant at the end of the film, there's a countdown. If you time it, you find that the plant blows up about a minute and a half ahead of schedule, a pleasant change from the usual direction artistic time works in the movies. [There was a deleted scene from Ripley's solo journey down into the hive where she finds Burke still alive, but knows he's been impregnated and is going to die. After a short conversation, he asks her for a grenade, which Ripley hands her, and as she walks away, Burke pushes the primer on the grenade and kills himself. This could allot for the extra 1-1/2 minutes that was "lost" from the countdown timelimit. The scene was filmed, but not implemented in any release of Aliens, extended or not. Check it out at the very bottom here: http://www.planetavp.com/al/Aliens/DeletedScenes/]

Oscar to the editor - when they are landing on LV-426, Acheron colony, the time is on the money - when Apone announces "10 seconds people, look sharp" it is ten seconds exactly - the entire time of landing is real time (yes, bored one night I used a stop watch).

When Michael Biehn finds Newt, she bites him on his hand. The same thing happens to him in 'Terminator' when he first meets Sarah Connor. It's the same hand he gets bitten on as well.

The woman that plays Vasquez is the same woman that plays John Conner's foster mother in Terminator II. It's amazing what they can do with makeup. James Cameron, like many directors, likes to use the same actors. Michael Beihn (Hicks) is sent back to save Sarah Conner in Terminator. Vasquez is also in Cameron's Titanic. She is the mother of the two kids in the belly of the ship telling them a bedtime story before they die. She did a pretty good Irish accent then as well.

Bishop's programming about "he is not allowed to harm, or by omission of action allowed to harm, a human being (paraphrased) is the same prime directive of the androids in Isaac Asimov's "Robot's of Dawn" series.

To make the Aliens' blood smoke and burn, the SFX department came up with an idea to put two separate chemicals side by side in bags inside the Alien puppets, on top of the explosives. When the two chemicals mixed together, it created a nasty, acidic burning affect.

Listen closely at the end of the closing credits, there's a interesting little sound effect after the music ends. If you compare it to the rest of the sound track you may recognize it as the sound of an alien egg opening up and releasing a face hugger. Considering the first few images we see in Alien 3 this could help to explain a few things...

Just an aside - if you look at a lot of the hardware used by the colonial marines it is the same hardware you see used by the humans in the film "Terminator" the first one, some of the guns, the flash lights (which are just roadside emergency lights, I have a few) and some of the armour.

With the exception of Hicks, who is given a first name in the script, the marines all have the same first initial as the actors who portray them (you can see the initials next to their surnames in the corner of their eye cameras). Note of course that 'Bill' (as in Paxton) is short for William. This includes Ferro, whose first initial is given as C (matching the actress Colette Hiller) - Vasquez appears to call Ferro 'mira' at one point when asking who Ripley is. 'Mira' is Spanish for 'look' - she is simply drawing Ferro's attention to Ripley.

The SFX department made the M-41a Pulse rifle out of a Thompson sub-machine gun with a Franchi-SPAS 12 shotgun stuck underneath, and was put into a fibreglass shell to make it look futuristic. Because they had to cut off the handle and a large portion of the barrel off of the SPAS 12, it could only carry a maximum of 3 shells.