Ellen Ripley, the mother of science fiction heroines

This is Part 3 in an ongoing series about notable heroines in science fiction media. You can read the first post right here.

Jumping ahead by quite a few years from the last post, the next heroine I am focusing on is science fiction’s original final girl, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Specifically, I am looking at Ripley in James Cameron’s 1986 action film sequel, Aliens.

As a brief refresher, Ridley Scott’s original film Alien, saw a rogue alien, called a Xenomorph, wreck havoc on the crew of the research vessel Nostromo. Ripley is the only survivor, after narrowly escaping an encounter with the Xenomorph and shooting it out the airlock of her escape pod. The beginning of Aliens picks up with Ripley’s escape pod being discovered 57 years in the future, with Ripley asleep inside it looking like an interstellar Sleeping Beauty.

At the beginning of Aliens, Ripley is dealing with the shock of having been asleep for nearly 60 years and inadvertently costing the Weyland-Yutani Corporation millions of dollars in damage by destroying the Nostromo. Burke, a shill from the company, convinces her to come back to LV-427, the planet where the Xenomorph came from to try and assist a colony that has taken up residence there, along with a group of space marines. Despite her recurring nightmares about the Xenomorph bursting out of her chest, she agrees. Though she isn’t initially accepted, one marine refers to her as “princess,” she eventually proves her worth by operating a power loader. When they land on LV-427 it is clear that the Xenomorph’s have taken over, as they slowly pick off members of the space marines. Unlike the original film, Ripley and the space marines fight back with all the firepower they can.

This is where Ripley truly shines as a sci-fi heroine. She proves herself to the space marines and then proves she can handle a gun. As critic Pauline Kael put it in her review “she’s more intense; an angry high strung loner, she has been through too much horror to have any patience with small talk.” Being a survivor has changed Ripley. She knows she can handle herself, even when those around her continue to doubt her abilities. The other women in the company of space marines are highly capable, but are devoid of any sexual characteristics. Vasquez has closely cropped hair and is asked by Hudson if she has ever been mistake for a man. She uses a giant flamethrower as her weapon of choice and is usually the first one into the fray to fight. For lack of a better term, she fights like a man. What’s more interesting is that Ripley herself isn’t really sexualized either. In Alien, the only time Ripley is seen in any form of undress, it isn’t “sexy.” She is merely discarding jump suit she was wearing when she escaped the Nostromo because she finally feels safe in her escape, only to be confronted with one last battle against the Xenomorph. As David Foster Wallace puts it in a footnote of his essay F/X Porn. She’s a “tough, competent female protagonist whose toughness and competence in no way diminish her femininity.” In the end she’s just a strong woman who can handle herself, but isn’t less of a woman for it.

Another interesting facet to Ripley that comes across in Aliens is a certain maternal instinct. In the film, Ripley and company find only one survivor among the wreckage of the colony, a young girl named Newt. As a result, Ripley develops a motherly relationship with Newt, taking responsibility for her safety against the horde of Xenomorphs. At the same time, that horde is controlled by a queen, with whom Ripley faces off at the end of the film, after the queen gets a hold of Newt . In an article from the Guardian, critic David McIntee makes the case that it almost even makes Ripley a villain, as Ripley kills all of the queen’s babies with a flamethrower. He ultimately settles on the idea that it “shows a certain level of kinship. They are both mothers, after all.” Looking at it from this angle makes the final power loader confrontation that much more suspenseful and satisfying. You care about Newt in the same way Ripley does, but you also understand why the Xenomorph queen is fighting back. It also makes the fact that Newt doesn’t survive the gray area between Aliens and Alien 3 that much harder to take.

Though Cameron often gets a lot of the credit for having a feminist hero in his film, it is clear that some influence came from his collaborator Gale Ann Hurd, with whom he made 1984’s The Terminator, another film that will be covered soon in this series. Hurd wrote the Terminator and served as a producer on Aliens. The fact that the Terminator has a similarly competent mother as its protagonist, makes me think Hurd had some influence on the character, along with Sigourney Weaver who has expertly played Ripley in four different films. Later on in F/X Porn, Wallace laments the fact that she didn’t receive more attention for her performance in Aliens. “No male lead in the history of U.S. action films even approaches Weaver’s second Ripley for emotional depth and sheer balls.” As a result of playing Ripley, Sigourney Weaver became a known quantity in Hollywood for playing strong women.

To wrap up, Ellen Ripley was an anomaly of a science fiction heroine when showed in Ridley Scott’s film. Cameron gave her more depth, exploring the maternal side of her character without ever compromising her competence. Ripley became a sort of gold standard among sci-fi heroines who followed. All were measured against her, in the same way women in films about journalism are measured against Rosalind Russell’s Hildy in His Girl Friday. She’s the natural response to those who were annoyed that Princess Leia wasn’t given more to do in Star Wars, and showed that women could be more than just sexpots in horror films. She is also the go to comparison whenever a new sci-fi heroine comes on the scene. Aisha Harris notes this in her Slate piece discussing Ripley’s influence on Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. She eventually concludes that despite their differing situations and depictions of feminism, “Ripley inevitably paved the way for Furiosa,” as both characters defy gender norms associated with action heroes. Ripley is the real deal, and she changed things for heroines in sci-fi.

Next time I am taking a brief aside into Metroid, a video game series heavily influenced Aliens that secretly had one of the first female video game heroes with Samus Aran. After that, I go back a few years and pick up with Sarah Connor, James Cameron’s other contribution to science fiction heroines in the Terminator.