The talented

Of course they don’t believe her. A salvage team finds her drifting through space in a shuttle, in hypersleep, along with a large ginger cat. They have been drifting through space for 57 years.

The woman and the cat show no ill effects from having been in stasis for so long, although the woman still has nightmares about what happened on the freighter Nostromo. She discovers that her 11-year-old daughter had died two years earlier, aged 66.

Appearing before a panel of inquiry from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the owners of the Nostromo, she testifies that the crew had received a transmission from a planet they thought was uninhabited. Some crew members tracked the signal to a derelict spacecraft, where they discovered the exploded carcass of some creature, and a chamber full of large eggs. An egg released a lizard-like creature that attached to a crewman’s face. Removal was difficult as the creature had corrosive acid for blood.

Later the creature detached itself and the crewman seemed all right until one day at breakfast when he began to choke. An alien creature burst out of his chest and ran into the ship. The crew attempted to capture it, only to find that it had become full-grown and extremely aggressive. Then the alien killed the crew members one by one.

Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley and the ship’s cat Jonesy are the only survivors of the Nostromo. She had activated the ship’s self-destruct sequence, then fled in the shuttle along with the cat. (Unfortunately the alien had also boarded the shuttle; Ripley managed to jettison it into space.)

The panel of inquiry rules that there is no evidence to support Ripley’s account. In fact the planet where she claims they encountered the alien is now inhabited. Humans have colonized and are now terraforming that planet. For questionable judgment in destroying a very expensive space vessel, Ripley is stripped of her flight license.

Without her license Ripley is reduced to operating loaders in the cargo docks. She still has nightmares. One day the representative from the corporation informs Ripley that they have lost contact with the colony on that planet. The corporation offers to reinstate Ripley if she will act as consultant to a team of marines. Despite her terrible misgivings she knows she has to do it.

Ripley finds herself on the warship Sulaco with a team of cocky marines who think their advanced weapons technology makes them superior to any enemy. It is interesting to note that Sulaco is the name of the mining town in Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo — it reminds us that colonialism and corporate greed are as much a villain in these tales as the acid-blooded alien.

Girl on girl action: Sigourney Weaver is Ellen Ripley in Aliens, a female role model for the ages.

Ripley makes herself useful by stowing the marines’ equipment using an exoskeleton loader, a mechanized suit that allows her to lift heavy objects.

To her distress there is an android on board the Sulaco. Fifty-seven years earlier, on the Nostromo, an android had betrayed the crew on the corporation’s orders: he had to bring back alien specimens for research, even if it meant killing the crew. (The creature could be key to very lucrative developments in biological warfare.) This android assures her that he would never harm humans, alluding to one of Isaac Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics.”

The heavily armed marines, with Ripley and the corporate stooge, land on the planet in a dropship. They find all the colonists in the station, dead or cocooned in an alien nest, begging to be killed. The only survivor is a little girl nicknamed Newt, who has evaded the creatures by hiding in the station’s network of air ducts. An alien attack, aggravated by grave tactical errors on the part of the inexperienced marine commanding officer, wipes out most of the marines. Worse, using the marines’ weapons in the nuclear-powered station could cause a thermonuclear explosion.

Ripley takes command of the personnel carrier from the ineffective officer and rescues the surviving marines. Their best course of action, she tells them, is to return to the Sulaco and blow up the station from space. The dropship comes to pick them up, but an alien infiltrates the dropship and kills the pilots. The dropship crashes into the station. A nuclear explosion is imminent.

The android Bishop proposes a solution: he will use the station’s satellite transmitter to remote-pilot the second dropship from the Sulaco to the planet’s surface. To get to the satellite he will have to crawl through the air ducts and hope he does not encounter the creatures. Meanwhile Ripley, Newt, the corporate stooge and the surviving marines barricade themselves in the medical labs to await the dropship. The marine Hicks, who is now in command, teaches Ripley how to fire the gun, which also has a grenade launcher and flamethrower. 

The corporate stooge attempts to use Ripley and Newt to incubate alien creatures for the return flight to earth. He is killed along with the marines when a horde of aliens attack. Newt falls into a chute and is lost. Bishop arrives in the dropship to pick up Ripley and the injured Hicks. But Ripley will not leave without Newt.

Ripley arms herself and goes down into the bowels of the station, where she sees the hive of the mother alien. She locates Newt, only to come face to face with the huge mother alien in her egg chamber. Ripley turns the flamethrower on the eggs. The mother alien is furious. Carrying Newt, Ripley rushes back to the dropship.

It’s not there. Once again she has been betrayed by an android. No, wait: it’s there, Bishop had lifted off because the surface has become unstable. Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Hicks escape to the Sulaco as the station explodes.

But the angry mother alien is not finished. Ripley is speaking to Bishop when the android starts frothing at the mouth and a tentacle bursts through his midsection. Human blood is red, alien blood is green acid, synthetic blood is white. The mother alien tears Bishop in half. Ripley runs into the cargo bay while Newt scuttles into a vent.

As the mother alien bears down on Newt the cargo bay door opens and Ripley appears in an exoskeleton loader. She then says the line that has been lasered into our consciousness: “Get away from her, you bitch!”

Let the record show that the most intense, visceral, ferocious battle in this science-fiction action movie is between two females, mothers defending their young.

After a vicious battle Ripley sends the mother alien hurtling into space. She collects Bishop’s parts — he is fortunately repairable — and puts him and Newt into hypersleep. Then she prepares for the long ride home. (We do not recognize the next two sequels as canonical.)

It’s not just the 25th anniversary of this paper, it’s also the 25th anniversary of Aliens. Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, was written and directed by James Cameron and starred Sigourney Weaver. Ellen Ripley: role model.