10 Greatest Unspoken Sci-Fi Movie Plot Points
1. Lambert Was Trans - Alien
Ridley Scott's Alien is a masterclass of subtlety and restraint, despite fundamentally being a movie about a ship full of space truckers who get picked off one-by-one by a phallus-shaped monster.
Though the film itself feeds us only morels of information about the Nostromo's crew members, James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens added some sneaky context to one departed individual in particular.
During Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) debriefing after being woken from stasis at the start of the sequel, the personnel files of her dead crewmates are projected on a screen behind her.
This includes a file for Nostromo navigator Joan Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), which states that she was born male but given sexual reassignment surgery to female at birth, and that she had "no indication of suppressed trauma related to gender alteration."
In the film's original theatrical bow and on earlier home video releases, it wasn't possible to read any of the text behind Ripley, but the DVD and Blu-rays of Aliens have included the crew's bios in their full HD glory, allowing fans to pore over them ad nauseum.
It's certainly a fascinating revelation, albeit also a troubling one given the lack of exact context for why society would give a child sex reassignment surgery at birth, evidently without their consent.