Aliens - PASS

*Spoilers ahoy. 

Any woman who calls her cat "little shithead" is all right by me. Ellen Ripley---just Ripley, really--is one of the greatest science fiction film heroines of our time, as well as practically the first one to appear on our theater screens. Aliens, the second film of "The Alien Trilogy," is a gory, horrific study on strong women in lots of trouble. It's also the best out of the series, picking up seven Academy Award nominations (including one for Sigourney Weaver's performance as Ripley) and packing quite the empowering emotional wallop for what could have been just another sequel to a hit horror film.

In a nutshell, the film takes off mostly from where the other left off---Ripley has been in hypersleep for something like fifty years and upon returning to the real world finds that her daughter has grown up and died without her, as well as the fact that no one seems to believe her tale about the systematic decimation of her crew from the first movie. Her license to pilot a ship is revoked, she's humiliated in front of a commissioner's panel, and is forced to take a normal 9-5 job at the loading dock. 

Fortunately? Unfortunately? A colony that settled on the planet where Ripley's ship picked up the first alien has gone off the wire, and Ripley is nabbed as a consult on the mission to check out what happened on the planet. She's sent to LV-something-or-other with a detail of several "Marines," and upon sweeping the colony find that all the colonists are dead (except for one--a little girl named Newt), and that there are about seven million of those nasty, acid-spewing aliens nesting all around them. The rest is acid spit and thermo-nuclear explosions. 

There are three female characters of note in Alien, the first one being Private Vasquez, one of only a couple of women on the Marine detail. Now, the Marines as a whole are remarkably stereotypical and annoying---Bill Paxton in particular, who does a great job of screaming the word "badass," as loud and as often as possible. But as they're picked off in bunches, Vasquez emerges as a heroine in her own right. Obviously regarded in her squad as one of the tougher dogs, Vasquez keeps a remarkably cool head as they explore the eerie colony and try to outlast the hive of aliens, not hesitating to tell her comrades, both male and female, to shut the hell up when necessary. She also gets the biggest gun. In her most memorable scene, Vasquez is escaping the hoard of aliens through a maze of air ducts with the few survivors ahead of her. One of the aliens leaps onto her through an air vent from above. After tangling with it for a moment, she actually holds the alien down with her foot and shoots it in the face with a handgun. Bill Paxton said it best: badass. 

Then there's Newt. Clever, little Newt--the one living survivor of the colony after its takeover by vicious aliens. Newt seems rather unremarkable: she's a scared, dirty child but a child who nonetheless managed to outlast the aliens making food and slaves of her home. Newt is obviously there for Ripley to find a sort of foster daughter within her, but the conversations the two have are sobering and emotional. These conversations are, in fact, what qualifies Aliens to pass the Bechdel test. In one scene, when Ripley puts Newt to bed, they talk about the terrible monsters haunting them and how Ripley will never abandon Newt. It's touching, and it's easy to see how Newt is simply an extension of Ripley's fears---of the alien, of being left alone. But they are connected by Ripley's overwhelming need to care for her, and she certainly does that, even journeying down to the depths of the alien hive to rescue her.

Ripley herself is, in short, a wonder. She's both the voice of reason and the hands of action in Aliens--she will do what she has to do to get the job done. It's never a question of whether Ripley can or can't do something; the fact is that she has to do it. What amazes me most about Ripley is how seriously the movie treats her. She has an actual character arc that examines the depths of fear and bravery. And no clunky, dumb, cliche action movie lines. Ripley doesn't run around screaming, "Let's torch these bitches!" a la her Marine companions. There's a certain subtlety to her character that is both absorbing and empowering. Even in her most fearful moments, she's in control of herself even if she can't be in control of the situation. She has sides of tenderness with Newt, of authority with the Marines and her comrades, and even earnest chemistry with a fellow man---the closest and most intimate they get is when they reveal to each other their first names as Ripley runs off to save Newt.

 

It's clear what her character intends: she's not Ellen Ripley, or even Ripley at all. She's just someone here to do her job, to do it as best she can and to prevent the deaths of many more civilians at the hands of the monstrous aliens. And it's this clinching realization that makes Aliens all the more empowering, and all the more worthy of a passing grade on the Bechdel test.