There’s no rational way to deny that Alien was without any doubt the movie that sparked the interest in the dreaded xenomorphs and the emergence of a female character named Ellen Ripley, but when asked, the woman that made the role what it was, Sigourney Weaver, has a definite favorite in the franchise, and that’s the second movie, Aliens. What Ridley Scott gave to the fans was a new and chilling creature and a story that was enough to make people grip their seats in terror since the idea was that in the middle of open space, far from their own system, a group of miners discovered an alien ship that was sending out a distress beacon, and they found a little something extra as well. It became a kind of hellish race to see who would be the last one standing since the humans had never seen anything like the xenomorph before, and therefore had no way to understand how they should deal with it, nor how fast it would grow and what it would do to anyone that came after it. But while Ellen Ripley was the last person off of the Nostromo and therefore the survivor, her tale didn’t end there. When asked which movie she preferred, this is what Weaver had to say via MovieWeb:
“Oh, goodness, that’s difficult. The best-constructed story for the character to tell was in Aliens, just because Jim [Cameron] has such an amazing sense of structure of story. To take this character out of hyper-sleep, have no one believe her, have her be exiled into this limbo land where no one believes her and her family’s dead. The whole set-up for Ripley in Aliens and then what she ends up doing and what it, finding this new family by the end. The whole structure of that story, to me, was gold. I always felt that I could jump up and down on it. It was such a great, supportive, arc for the character. In that sense, the second one for Ripley is probably the most satisfying.”
When we look back at the Alien movies it’s pretty easy for a lot of fans to say which ones are better and which ones are a little shaky when it comes to their storylines. But the understanding is that Aliens and Alien will be near the top since both movies made it possible for Ellen Ripley to stand out in some way, and since she became the star of the movie it fits. Aliens is by far the best of the bunch since not only did it take the xenomorphs over the top and increase their numbers so dramatically, but it also introduced the queen, one of the most nightmarish creatures ever introduced to the movies. Also, Aliens introduced the next level of response against the xenomorphs since the idea would usually be that a Marine, armed with a weapon and at least some reasonable intel on what they were up against, would be able to take on anything. And a squad of them going after a xenomorph, forget about it. The only problem is that the Marines didn’t know what they were going up against, they couldn’t use their most powerful weapons when the time came, and they knew next to nothing about the terrain they were walking into, or the enemy they would face. It’s almost like James Cameron sat down and thought about all the different ways he could give the creatures the advantage while effectively hamstringing the Marines. It worked though since in the movie the Marines, unable to use their best weapons and stuck in enemy territory, were just as ineffective as Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo was against one of the xenomorphs.
Ripley also had a very different arc in Aliens than she did in Alien, as in the first movie she was just another worker that was trying to survive, and we didn’t get a lot of details about her. In Aliens she’d lost her daughter to old age since she was in cryostasis for so long, the world had moved on, and she was deemed as delusional for blowing up the Nostromo and its payload to get rid of the creature. She was, more or less, brought back to the world to be mocked and ridiculed, but upon joining in on the mission with the Marines, as she was convinced to offer her expertise in the matter of the xenomorphs, even if her words still weren’t being taken as gospel on the subject. She also had the chance to save a young girl that had been smart enough to evade the xenomorphs for a while, and she grew to be one of a part of the group of survivors that made it through the initial fight. In short, Ripley became a badass.
Follow Us
