When one thinks of the sci-fi horror genre, one of the most well-known movies that comes to mind is Ridley Scott’s Alien. Few fans will ever forget the scene where the alien bursts from the chest; it still gives me the creeps. The wonderful and unique female lead, Ellen Ripley, is the focus of this video rather than the movie franchise.
In the Alien film series, American actress Sigourney Weaver plays the fictional Ellen Louise Ripley, also referred to as Ripley. The role helped Weaver become well-known on a global basis, and it continues to be her most well-known one. Ripley should no longer be a stereotypically masculine action hero and should instead transform into a badass heroine, according to Ridley Scott, the filmmaker of Alien. This is Ellen Ripley’s tale!
Ellen was initially supposed to be a man
Back in 1979, when Alien was first released, men tended to play the majority of the leading roles in sci-fi films, and sci-fi horror films in particular. Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking film was written for a male, therefore it only made sense that the lead would be a guy as well. However, Scott made the decision to make a change, and as a result, Ellen Ripley became one of the most powerful women in this genre in history.
Early draughts of the Alien story claim that Ripley was first written as a male character, though not on design. Given that Sigourney Weaver was picked for the role, few people objected because the character appeals to all genders. The reason for this decision, which would go down in the annals of cinema, is a fascinating one. Actually, Martin Roby was given the initial designation of Ripley.
Even though most of the characters in the original Alien script were written so that they could be either male or female, Roby was always meant to be a man. Alan Ladd, Jr., CEO of 20th Century Fox, had the notion to make the heroine a woman because he wanted the film to stand apart from other recent releases. Walter Hill gave the name of the character in homage to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Ellen was the first name given to Hill by her mother.
Actually, a man or a woman could have played Ripley without losing anything, but Sigourney Weaver’s outstanding performance elevated Ripley to the status of a sci-fi horror icon, without specifically supporting feminist ideas or anything of the sort – she was a hero in her own right, regardless of gender. Both male and female admirers adore and value the character because of her genuine demeanour and charisma.
However, the fact that Scott chose a female lead for his film meant that there were significant intricacies that Weaver herself brought to the role. Our main character is placed in a risky scenario with just her experience and instincts to rely on. She is neither an expert nor a soldier, but she succeeds where others fail. The storyline of Ripley in Aliens demonstrates her fierce maternal instinct. It turns out that Ellen had lost her daughter during the events of the first film as shown in a deleted scene that has since been released.
Ripley grounds the movie in the backdrop of a testosterone-fuelled world of action and gore in Aliens, because she consistently makes the best moral and ethical choices. The theme that being a mother is about more than just blood is emphasised in Ripley’s story. But being a mother isn’t the only theme of Aliens. Aliens is a superb survival movie about enduring for one’s own welfare and the welfare of others – the advancement of mankind.
The overall Alien series is about the future and primarily emphasises parenting throughout. What is other instinct connected to nurturing and protecting a child more concerned with humanity’s future? She brought charisma and a completely different energy to the role, and at this point, the franchise cannot even be imagined without her presence. The choice to make the lead character a woman clearly worked out well!
The story arc that features the most significant female protagonist in cinematic history
It would be criminal to make a video on Ellen Ripley and not talk about the pivotal role she has played in the movies. But before that, a little about what we know about her early life, prior to the happenings of the movie.
On January 7, 2092, in the Olympia colony on Luna, Ellen Ripley was born. An XMB Virus outbreak on Earth’s moon on January 7, 2094, resulted in a sixteen-year quarantine of the colony. Ripley was raised in a lunar quarantine facility and eventually had to take an XMB virus test that came back negative.
At Zelazny, where she worked as co-pilot, Ripley served with the US Merchant Navy after earning a master’s degree in engineering at New York Aeronautics University. She finally fell in love with Alex, whom she later married, and while they were in transit between trips, they had their first kid.
Ripley permitted the pregnancy to progress despite the fact that it was against Weyland-Yutani policies, ultimately giving birth to her daughter Amanda. However, she did not get punished for this offence and in the company of her husband, a doctor, and a nurse, she gave birth to Amanda at home. Despite Alex’s pleadings, Ripley declined to take medicines to ease the agony of giving birth out of concern that her past usage of cryodrugs during lengthy space flights might cause unanticipated issues.
When Amanda was only three years old, Alex eventually left Ripley and lost touch with both his wife and daughter. Later, Ripley wedded Paul Carter, albeit their union was equally chaotic as her previous one. Carter and Amanda did not get along, and Amanda frequently fled the house.
By the 2120s, Ripley was working as a third-in-command and warrant officer aboard the commercial freighter USCSS Nostromo while residing in a small village on the coast of El Salvador. Ripley sought to renegotiate her contract with Weyland-Yutani prior to the ship’s tragic final journey in 2122, so that she might take a leave of absence and spend a bit more time with her daughter.
Coming to the events of the first movie, Alien, released in the year 1979, at the time of her introduction, Ripley was a warrant officer on board the Nostromo, a spacecraft travelling from Thedus to Earth. We meet this strong woman in a man’s world, handling herself with power and resilience. The crew, who had been put into stasis for the drawn-out trip home, is roused when the Nostromo picks up a communication from an unknown planetoid. After they have landed, an unidentified creature enters the ship and murders the crew – one by one.
Ripley, using her training, level head, guts and sheer force of will, outsmarted the Alien and managed to survive. Thus, only Ripley managed to flee from the Nostromo. However, she knew that she couldn’t just leave and intentionally blew up the Nostromo in order to destroy the creature. But before placing herself in sleep to travel back to Earth, she learns that the alien is also within the ship’s shuttle and fires it into space.
In the 1986 sequel Aliens, which takes place 57 years after the events of the first instalment, Ripley emerges from her slumber. She receives harsh criticism for her story and sworn testimony regarding the Alien, loses her space flying licence due to her “questionable judgement,” and learns that her daughter, Amanda, has passed away. In this film we see a broken and troubled Ripley who wanted nothing to do with aliens.
However, Ripley gathers herself when she is asked to travel to LV-426 alongside Colonial Marines aboard the Sulaco. This happened when communication with a colony on the planet, where her crew originally came across the alien eggs, was lost and they had to go and investigate.
They discover that the planet is inhabited by numerous aliens, who nearly all but decimate the marines. The android Bishop, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, and Newt, the only surviving colonist, help Ripley eventually leave the planet. The last remaining Alien Queen attacks them as soon as they return to the Sulaco, and Ripley eventually drives it into space. For the trip back to Earth, Ripley falls into a state of hypersleep along with the other three survivors.
The Sulaco fires an escape pod carrying the four survivors, which later crashes on Fiorina “Fury” 161, a derelict foundry facility and prison colony, in the third film, Alien 3, which was released in 1992. Only Ripley makes it out of the crash. She had no idea that there had been an alien egg on board. After hatching in the prison, the creature starts killing prisoners and guards, but oddly chooses not to kill her.
Ripley realises why she hadn’t been assaulted when she finds an Alien Queen embryo growing inside her after gathering the prisoners and preparing the defence against the monster. In this movie, Ripley memorably sacrifices herself by jumping into a massive furnace just as the alien Queen starts to erupt from her chest after killing the Alien by thermal shock.
Her strategy was to eradicate the last remnant of the aliens and stop the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from utilising it as a biological weapon. The Queen’s destiny is uncertain because, as was demonstrated previously in the movie, the aliens can endure being dipped in molten lead.
Now you must be wondering, how exactly did they bring Ripley Back after the gruesome death the poor woman died. Well, it is a science fiction film after all, the genre would be lost without a little bit of cloning action. Thus, in the fourth movie, Alien Resurrection, released in 1997, scientists surgically removed the Alien Queen embryo from Ellen Ripley’s corpse, 200 years after her passing.
Using host aliens who have been captured and handed over to them by a group of mercenaries, the United Systems Military aims to produce aliens to research on the starship USM Auriga – always a bad idea, but when does the military ever listen – their ambition clouding their common sense. Well, the expected happens and the Aliens get out of their enclosures and chaos ensues. Ripley and the commandos try to escape to the Betty to get away from the ravenous aliens.
In order to prevent the Auriga from making its emergency landing and releasing Xenomorphs on Earth, they must destroy it. When Ripley arrives at the alien nest, she sees the Queen giving birth to a Xenomorph with human characteristics called the Newborn. The hybrid Alien kills the Queen after realising that Ripley is its mother. The Betty is where Ripley eventually makes her getaway. But when she notices the Newborn aboard threatening the other survivors, she kills it with a lot of remorse.
In a huge explosion, the Auriga’s impact with Earth eliminates every last Xenomorph. Call and Ripley view Earth via the Betty’s windows while they converse, and Ripley replies, “I’m a stranger here myself,” when Call asks what she wants to do next. In a different conclusion of the movie, the Betty lands in the city of Paris which is in absolute ruins. This left space open for another Alien movie and fans eagerly waited for another instalment.
Weaver stated on February 25 that she would return to her role as Ripley in the movie after filmmaker Neill Blomkamp revealed on February 19, 2015 that his upcoming movie would be the fifth Alien movie. However, this never materialised and unfortunately, we don’t think it ever will, at this point. There is still more to know about Ripley, however, especially about the kind of woman she was.
According to Weyland-Yutani’s psychological assessment and index tests, Ripley had the potential to rank among the top officers in the entire service. They even went so far as to say that, according to their Torin brain-scan research, she had the potential to become an operating officer in the flagship fleet with a performance potential of 9.5. She would regrettably never have the opportunity due to her terrible encounter with the xenomorph threat on LV-426. It continues to be a heart-breaking chapter in her tumultuous past.
Strong-willed Ripley rarely showed emotion, but when she did, she handled it without letting it get in the way of her goal. In her early career, she demonstrated professionalism by being a rule-follower when necessary. This can be seen when Lambert and Dallas demanded that they and an infected Kane be allowed to board the ship despite a 24-hour quarantine, and she vehemently refused. In instances where the threat was not immediate, Ripley maintained her composure and concentration while making plans and carrying out directives to protect herself and her allies.
After being brought out of an unusually long hypersleep, the events on board the Nostromo severely traumatised Ripley. She experienced nightmares involving the creature and, while attempting to express her concerns to others, her anger got the better of her, resulting in her losing her pilot’s licence. She had little patience with the company going forward and their attempt to cover up what had happened, and she had no desire to interact with the aliens ever again. However, because of how much her trauma was affecting her life, she mustered the courage to confront them once more in an effort to put the events she witnessed aboard the Nostromo to rest.
Being the lead character, her presence held the plot together all through the four movies, yes, even when she was cloned and it wasn’t the OG Ripley who we saw on screen. Weaver embodied the character brilliantly, thus creating a depiction that will be raved about for years.
The lesser-known comic book storyline
After Aliens (the second movie released in 1986), Ellen Ripley’s portrayal continued in a series of Aliens comic books that Dark Horse Comics released from 1989 to 1990, reuniting her with Hicks and Newt. These comics follow Ripley, Hicks, and Newt as they venture to the Xenomorph home world to battle an infestation that has engulfed the entire Earth and attempt to defend it and humanity from the terrifying Xenomorph Queen Mother. Scary, right? The comics were pretty popular and succeeded in capturing the ominous and terrifying atmosphere that the films cleverly managed to portray.
However, after the 1992 premiere of Alien3, in which Ripley, Hicks, and Newt died, their appearance in the comics conflicted with the outcomes depicted in the Alien film series. As a result, the characters from comic books underwent changes, with the leading character in these later comics, Ripley, becoming a synthetic version of the actual Ripley.
This modification initially appeared in the novel Aliens: The Female War, which was released a year after Alien3 premiered, and is based on the comic book series Aliens: Female War. Similar to the change Ripley’s character underwent, Hicks also changed into David Wilks, and Newt’s character changed as well, becoming Billie. This twist was obviously introduced to keep pace with the film series and opened up a plethora of new ideas and plot points, which fans found quite interesting.
The personas in the comics’ following reprints were similarly changed to maintain continuity, now that comic Ripley was a synthetic version of OG Ripley. Confusion arose, though, because Ripley’s nature was left unaltered and she continued to appear in the comics as the same flawed human being she had been in the first publications. This was possibly due to the fact that turning her to a synthetic being would need a substantial expansion and/or modification of the comic, in addition to name changes – and the writers either did not want to do that, or simply were not prepared to do it.
Because of this, not even the comic book’s altered versions provide an explanation for how Ellen Ripley might have survived after Alien 3; only the novel has the additional information about her discovery that she is an android copy and her subsequent difficulties with this realisation.
Dark Horse started republishing the early Aliens comics’ original, unedited copies more recently, reintroducing the character of Ripley in these tales and reviving the comic series as alternate sequels to Aliens. If you are an Aliens fan and cannot get enough of Ripley slaying grotesque creatures and just being an in general boss lady, the comics are a fun universe for you to delve into.
She is also featured in some popular video games
Ripley is notably seen in two popular video games – Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). Exploring them chronologically, Aliens: Colonial Marines “Stasis Interrupted” DLC features two cameos from Ripley. This prequel campaign featured Ripley being impregnated by a face-hugger and a recreation of Alien 3’s last scene.
The video game also made it clear that Hicks actually lived through the events of Alien 3, because another Colonial Marines team found him. The body found in the stasis chamber that crashed was that of a different marine who had been struck by Hicks’ pod during a firefight and had perished when the EEV crashed. Hicks had to travel with the other Marines while Ripley, Bishop, and Newt’s pods were expelled.
She had a much larger and more iconic role in the 2014 video game, Alien: Isolation. For the first time in 17 years, Weaver returned to the part of Ripley in 2014 for a vocal cameo in the video game Alien: Isolation, which is centred on Amanda, Ripley’s daughter, and more substantially in its two DLCs, which are set around the events of the Alien movies.
This video game, which takes place 42 years before the events of Aliens and 15 years after the events of Alien, stars Amanda Ripley. When Ripley finds out that Amanda had grown up, gotten married, and passed away during her 57-year hibernation, she first meets her in the expanded version of Aliens.
In the game, Amanda looks into possible leads about her mother’s abduction and visits the Sevastopol space station in an effort to learn more. Near the game’s conclusion, Amanda finally discovers a voice message from her mother, voiced by the iconic Weaver, who added a private note to the Nostromo’s final log entry at the end of Alien, addressed to Amanda. In the message, Ripley explains the truth about the vanishing of the Nostromo, tells Amanda that she loves her, and expresses hope that she will listen to the message someday in the future.
The two DLCs for the game, which are based on the events of Alien, have Weaver and numerous other members of the original cast reprising their roles more fully. In order to play through two memorable moments from the movie, Ripley is joined by Brett played by Harry Dean Stanton, Dallas, played by Tom Skerritt, Parker played by Yaphet Kotto, Lambert, played by the evergreen Veronica Cartwright, and last but not least, Ash.
With the Nostromo Edition pre-purchase, players can play as one of the remaining crew members shortly after Brett’s demise in order to lure the Alien to the ship’s airlock using the “Crew Expendable” bonus content. Ripley starts the self-destruct sequence in “Last Survivor” before evacuating aboard the Narcissus.
Also, Andrea Deck provided Ripley’s voice in voiceovers for Ripley’s dying moments to her daughter in Alien: Isolation – The Digital Series. It was no surprise that a movie franchise hailing from the horror, sci-fi, and survival genres would be adapted into video games for fans to enjoy that experience first-hand. Playing as Ripley herself added thrill to the already exciting and terrifying premise.
How Ellen Ripley developed a steady fanbase
Because of her iconic performance as Ellen Ripley in the enduring Alien film series, Sigourney Weaver is considered the Queen of Science Fiction. Weaver’s portrayal of a typical person unexpectedly placed into a terrifying situation, where she must muster all of her courage to survive, struck the bulls-eye, winning her a legion of devoted followers from all over the world. If you ask me, Princess Leia and Ellen Ripley will continue to square off for the title of the most well-known female sci-fi character for years to come. The presence of Ripley as a lead in the sci-fi horror genre became a benchmark and has since influenced the presence of female characters in the genre.
The role of Ripley and Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of her has cemented their place in movie history. One of the most recognisable characters to ever appear in a movie is Ripley, who is frequently regarded as one of the best female heroines of all time. The character has also been praised for questioning gender norms in movies, especially those with science fiction, action, and horror themes. It is now bizarre to think that Meryl Streep, Katharine Ross, and Geneviève Bujold are some other actresses who were considered for the role of Ripley. You think of Ellen Ripley and the image of Sigourney Weaver immediately comes to mind. The role truly immortalised her as far as this genre of films is concerned, at the very least.
Over the years, Ellen Ripley has been included in many best character lists released by various entertainment ranking organisations. The American Film Institute ranked her to be the eighth best hero in American film history in their ranking list of the 100 greatest heroes and villains in the year 2003, and the following year, Entertainment Weekly ranked Ripley fifth on their list of The 20 All Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture, referring to her as one of the first female movie characters who isn’t defined by the men around her, or by her relationship with them.
She was the highest-ranked female character on the list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters compiled by Empire magazine in the same year, coming in at number nine. Clearly, people loved her character and a woman at the helm, being an absolute badass, taking on aliens and leading her people to safety, resonated with many.
Weaver’s depiction of the character has also drawn various favourable reviews, and it is still by far her most well-known played part to date. Accolades were showered on her. Weaver was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Leading Newcomer for her work in Alien.
Weaver received praise for her acting in the movie, but it was Aliens, the second movie, that helped her gain international fame. She was the second horror actress in history to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama and took home her first significant career honor, the Saturn Award for Best Actress.
Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley received yet another round of accolades and praise, despite the fact that Alien3 and Alien Resurrection received fewer favorable reviews than the franchise’s first two installments. For Alien Resurrection, she was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actress – Sci-Fi, as well as for her third and fourth Saturn Award nominations for Best Actress.
The character is truly iconic and will forever be remembered whenever alien movies are brought up. Weaver’s portrayal is also an integral part of the character’s success and all her fame is well deserved. Now that you know all about Ellen Ripley, who do you think is the most popular woman in sci-fi of all time? Ellen Ripley or Princess Leia? Tell us in the comments section below!