"Get Away From Her You Bitch!"

James Cameron's Aliens is one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. There's spaceships, kick ass Space Marines, Androids, acid blood killer Aliens, and of course the most bad ass of them all, Ripley. I find it very interesting that in a huge portion of James Cameron's films he has a strong female action heroine lead character. Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Conner in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Zoe Saldana in Avatar, and even Rose in Titanic makes it to the end after all of the male characters are killed off. It's interesting to see James Cameron use so many strong female leads in an industry that tends to look down on female action stars. In Aliens I don't see Ripley so much as an action hero, but more a kick ass mother. This is where I have a problem comparing Ripley, or Fembo, to Rambo because they are two different characters in my mind.

In the Director's Cut of Alien there is a scene that shows that because Ripley was in hyper sleep for 57 years her daughter that she was trying to get home to in Alien dies of old age. This sets up an important precedent for the rest of the film and why Ripley acts the way that she does. You have a mother who lost her whole world and she will never get it back because her daughter is dead. She missed all the years of being a mother and it hits her hard. She lives in a shitty space apartment, working a shitty job, and in my mind it looks as though she is just waiting to die. But of course things aren't that simple and Ripley in fact ends up back on planet LV-47 where she encounters the one thing that took away her whole world, the Xenomorph! So first we see a tale of a mother's revenge to get those who took everything from her. She doesn't necessarily take charge in doing so, but she sends the Marine's in to do the job. Then Newt comes into the equation.

When Ripley meets Newt for the first time she is dirty, terrified, and alone. Her mother and rest of her family had been killed off by the Xenomorphs much like Ripley's daughter was loosely because of cause and effect. Ripley goes after Newt and she hugs her until Newt stops struggling and accepts Ripley. A new mother daughter relationship is born! Ripley is now back in mother mode and she will do anything to protect Newt from being harmed like she couldn't do with her real daughter. Ripley is being a mother and mother's will do anything to protect their children like go into a Xenomorph hive den with loads of face huger eggs to rescue that said child from almost certain death. This is why I find the end fight with Queen Xenomorph to be so interesting. In class I listened to a lot of arguments between whether or not the Queen Xenomorph was actual being a mother or was it all just for plot sake. For me I absolutely feel that what Cameron was going for was to show that the Queen and Ripley were both similar beings, they were both mothers who didn't want to see harm come to their "children". That is why the Queen backs her soldiers off to let Ripley go because she didn't want to see her baby eggs get lit up like the 4th of July. I don't think it was a trap, I think it was just two mothers with a common interest. To protect their young. Of course that's not how it works out and Ripley torches the eggs which I'm not going to lie makes me feel bad for the Queen with her screeches of agony as she sees her offspring murdered right in front of her. But a mother's got to do what she needs to do to protect her young and in any world it always comes down to survival of the fittest.

Ripley does bring more to the table for mother's than most do so I can see where there is that correlation of being the action hero. Like the reading states, "Ripley had more in common with the usual male action her than the typical screaming woman was well noted by the press. in a feature article lauding Aliens as the summer's megahit, Time magazine reported that "in action pictures, women are supposed to swoon or retreat to a safe corner while the male lead protects them and defends Western Civilization as we know it. In Aliens, it is the guys who are all out of action at the climax and Ripley who is in a death duel with evil." (pg. 58) I do love that at the end of the film that it is just mother vs. mother. All the men are dead, hicks is passed out in the spaceship, and even Bishop gets torn apart. You don't see many female battles at the end of an action film and it is always refreshing to see when it happens and can be taken seriously.