By Erin Free
“I’m no Ripley,” actress Sigourney Weaver once said of her most famous on-screen creation. “I had doubts that I could play her as strongly as she had to be played, but it was fun exploring that side of myself. Women don’t get to do that very often.” Ellen Ripley – the human centre at the heart of the wildly diverse but consistently enthralling Alien franchise – is often referred to as one of the greatest female characters in the history of science fiction cinema. That, however, is actually something of an understatement. With all of her complexity, and her wide, swooping emotional trajectory, Ellen Ripley is one of the best female characters in the history of cinema, period. Very few actresses have been afforded the opportunity to play out a character’s growth and extreme shifts over a number of films, and Sigourney Weaver has risen to the challenge with extraordinary skill and bravery, making Ripley feel like real flesh and blood, despite the bizarre, off-world situations that she constantly finds herself trapped in. Though all of the Alien films are markedly different (“Because we always use a different director, each one stands on its own,” Weaver once said), Weaver is their unshakeable centre.
First introduced as a tough, resourceful spaceship crew member menaced by the titular outer space aggressor in Ridley Scott’s nail-grinding 1979 horror thriller Alien, Ripley grew into a heroic, protective mother figure (“Get away from her, you bitch,” was her unforgettable maternal battle cry when facing off against the Alien Queen) in James Cameron’s 1986 combat shock outer space war film Aliens, and then became a tortured, grief stricken burnout in David Fincher’s existential 1992 fright-fest, Alien 3. In Jean Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 freaked out curio, Alien: Resurrection, Ripley is revived 200 years after her death as a powerful human/Alien hybrid clone who must continue her war against the intergalactic beasts. Proud of her creation and deeply committed to the Alien films (“I’m always the last person they go to with a sequel, because I’m the most sceptical. I’m very proud of what we’ve done, and I don’t want to screw up our series”), Weaver has succeed in creating the most special effect – emotion and humanity – in a series filled to the brim with visual tricks and sci-fi/horror tropes. “I could definitely kick that alien’s ass again,” Weaver has said. “And while I can’t speak for 20th Century Fox, once you’re sixty-years-old, you’re not going to be starring in an action movie. It’s too bad that that’s the case. I would have liked to do one last story where we go back to the planet, where Ripley’s history is resolved. But I do feel like her story is unfinished.”
Though Sigourney Weaver might not be back as Ellen Ripley, the Alien series certainly lives on, thanks to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and the upcoming Alien: Covenant.
