I’m Sorry, But It’s Not an Alien Movie Without Ripley

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: 20th Century Studios

There’s a scene in the new Alien movie where someone shows the heroine, played by Cailee Spaeny, how to handle a pulse rifle. “It’s the one the colonial marines use,” the teacher tells his student, as if the way the moment is shot and blocked weren’t enough to, well, trigger the desired rush of fond memories in the audience. Like so much else in Alien: Romulus, it’s an explicit callback — namely, to an iconic interaction in the first of the Alien sequels, James Cameron’s exhilarating Aliens. Of course, that rifle is also a torch Romulus passes to Spaeny. We’re meant to look at her and see Ellen Ripley, the resourceful, increasingly wearied survivor Sigourney Weaver played in four sci-fi thrillers set beyond the stars.

Spaeny’s Rain Carradine is far from the first Ripley proxy we’ve met over the years. Since Weaver waved good-bye to Alien with 1997’s unjustly maligned Resurrection, the series has mutated into new shapes, turning to Predators, prequels, and now a back-to-basics legacy sequel. What most of these movies have in common, beyond some version of the Xenomorph, is the presence of a headstrong heroine who looks, dresses, or behaves like the franchise’s first. Lining up spiritual successors only betrays a hard truth: Ripley has always been as vital to the power of Alien as the alien itself — and the movies since her departure have all suffered from her absence.

By now, Ripley’s reputation as one of the great action heroes in all of cinema is very much secure. Is there a more rousing, fist-pump-worthy moment in movies than when Weaver steps into frame, her body encased within a massive metal power loader, to bellow “Get away from her, you bitch!” at the queen of the monsters? That said, what’s always elevated the character above the glib killing machines of contemporaneous Hollywood thrill rides is the aching humanity Weaver brought to the role. In an age of herculean commandos of the Sly and Arnold variety, Ripley was vulnerable and relatable — an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, evading extraterrestrial doom by virtue of her smarts and courage.

The first Alien positions Ripley as a kind of self-made protagonist. She rises to the occasion of the Nostromo’s misfortune, emerging organically from a crew of cargo grunts. We’re given no special clue at the start of the movie that she’s the main character. Tom Skerritt got top billing over a 20-something, newcomer Weaver. And director Ridley Scott and his screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, pull what you could call a reverse Psycho: While that Alfred Hitchcock classic boldly knocked off its ostensible heroine about a third of the way through, Alien slowly whittles down its ensemble until the only person remaining is Lieutenant Ripley. A hero is made, not born.

Ripley didn’t really become a bullet-firing badass until the sequel, in which James Cameron gave the character a militaristic makeover akin to the one he’d grant his own Terminator protagonist, Sarah Connor, in T2 five years later. Except that Aliens somehow both hardens and softens Ripley: For all the events of the first movie that made her battle ready — a long-hauler gone full soldier — she also drops the professional steeliness when interacting with the lone survivor of a terraforming colony, the adolescent Newt. Those two sides of her combine at the explosive climax, when she becomes a force of maternal ferocity, waging war on the hive to protect a surrogate daughter.

Scott has claimed that Ripley was originally written as a male character — that, in fact, the whole crew of the Nostromo was coded as “unisex.” But her gender has never been incidental. The Alien series derives constant conflict from dropping this strong woman into hypermasculine spaces, where she’s sometimes as othered as the Xenomorph: by crewmates who undermine her, by marines who underestimate her, by convicts and pirates who sexualize her. Ripley proves herself to all of them, rallying each ragtag, makeshift platoon against a common enemy. And what is that enemy but the universe’s ultimate sexual predator, forcing itself upon its hosts? (The great, eternally underrated Alien 3 really hammers home that disturbing subtext, entwining the fates of the alien and Ripley via the cruelest of twists.)

Weaver gave the Alien series an emotional dimension beyond its cold-blooded thrills. She kept Ripley grounded and real, even in Resurrection, when she’s reborn as something more than a person, her identity genetically spliced with the monster that’s hounded her for years. The character’s bravery seems to emerge from her fear and sorrow, as though she were willing herself into the struggle anew with each sequel. Her multifaceted sensitivity makes her a perfect contrast to both the lethal Xenomorph — “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality,” as the villainous Ash puts it in Alien — and the uncaring capitalistic bigwigs of Weyland-Yutani. With Ripley at the forefront, the Alien movies become parables of working-class perseverance, in which an exploited laborer leads the fight against a greedy corporation that sees every crew as expendable.

Given the rooting interest the character provided, it’s no great surprise that the series has strived to fill her shoes. So why have all of these next-gen Ripleys looked like pale imitations? It could be that none of the films since the first four have invested as heavily in the human side of the equation. Alien vs. Predator, the noncanonical crossover that pitted two 20th Century Fox monsters against each other, disposes of its supporting cast so quickly and unceremoniously that there’s little opportunity for Sanaa Lathan’s lone survivor to distinguish herself among them. It’s as if the last hour of Aliens followed a character we barely knew; she looks cool wielding a severed alien arm but has less personality than the silent Predators.

Scott, likewise, packs his divisive prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, with a bunch of disposable and largely unsympathetic numbskulls. His fascination clearly lies more with the ambivalent synthetics played by Michael Fassbender than with the consecutive heroines played, respectively, by Noomi Rapace and Katherine Waterston. (These nominal, back-to-back, Ripley-coded protagonists seem as ultimately perfunctory as the Xenomorph action awkwardly smuggled into Scott’s baroque origin stories.) Romulus, too, seems much more interested in its android character (David Jonsson) than his human “sister,” for all the expressiveness Spaeny brings to the part.

None of these nü-Ripleys are as sharply defined as the real deal, and so they don’t command our empathy in the same way. More detrimentally, they’re competing with an audience’s affection for Weaver’s iconic performance. The series just keeps courting that unflattering comparison. When, for example, Waterston shows up in Covenant in a white tank top, short hair, and a firearm slung over one shoulder, it’s a clear nod to Ripley’s look in Aliens — another counterproductive echo, just like the rifle scene in Romulus. Weaver has moved on from Alien, but the franchise hasn’t moved on from her. And so a lot of overqualified actors keep getting stuck pantomiming her presence, deliberately evoking Ripley while reminding us what the series lost when its star finally put the feverish space chases behind her.

Of course, it’s possible these replacement heroines would make a greater impression and emerge from the shadow of Ripley if every one of them weren’t one and done, limited to a movie that attempts to pack Ripley’s full Alien-to-Aliens transformation into just two hours. You watch the late Alien movies and gain a new appreciation for the arc of the earlier ones — a saga of hardship and survival Weaver was allowed to play out across four chapters. “You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else,” Ripley says to the Xenomorph in Alien 3, lending their space-crossing tango of death a new intimacy. The monster doesn’t change, but Ripley does. She was the evolving soul of this deathless series. Without her, we’re just watching variations on the same old creature feature: a lot of sound and fury, muted by the vast vacuum of space but still signifying nothing.