Favorite Characters: Ellen Ripley (Alien)

A favorite hero/punching bag for sci-fi/horror/action directors between the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Ellen Ripley is a stone.  Cold.  BAMF.  She’s thrown into several serious crucibles over the course of the tetrad, and though she can never be fully said to come out on top, she always comes out fighting (premise spoilers for the Alien franchise.)

We meet Ripley at the fairly unremarkable start of the day that will irreparably change and consume the rest of her life.  She’s one of the upper-ranking crew members on a deep-space freighter, and she and her shipmates are woken from their cryosleep early when the ship detects a distress call on a nearly planetoid.  Like the rest of the crew, she feels no reluctance about a small team going down to investigate.  A little out of the way, but nothing they can’t handle…

But that’s when everything punches sideways and the world slips off its axis.  One of her shipmates is attacked by a hatchling from an extraterrestrial egg, and despite her hardline against allowing a possible contagion/foreign body back onto the ship, she’s overridden, and what follows is a neverending stream of bewilderment, terror, grotesque violence, grief, and sick manipulation.  The alien proves formidable and nigh-unstoppable, and one by one, her shipmates are claimed by the monster.  But that’s only the beginning.  No matter how much time passes or how far Ripley goes, the aliens find their way back into her life, no one ever heeds her warnings until it’s too late, and the cost is always devastatingly high.

It’s even more horrible when you think about the implications of the cryosleep that bridges the gap between each film.  Even though the story spans decades and planets, Ripley is always on ice between installments.  That means, after her initial encounter with the alien, her life is quite literally a constant series of one alien encounter after another.  After all that intense danger and pressure, it’s a wonder she’s able to walk upright and form complete sentences, let alone kick ass and take names.

But Ripley just won’t go down.  No matter how battered, how beaten, no matter how much is taken from her, she keeps on going.  Death after death, peril after peril, through abject horror and the loss of pretty much everyone she’s ever cared about, Ripley continues to put one determined foot in front of the other.  And the thing is, yeah, she’s a licensed badass, but she’s not a straight-up action heroine, not exactly.  This isn’t a Black Widow situation.  While Ripley is highly-competent at her work, quick to consider the possible ramifications of any threat, and able to press on despite paralyzing fear, she’s not a natural guns-blazing type.  She escapes the first alien by the skin of her teeth through sheer ingenuity, and with every subsequent encounter, she hits the ground running, picking up the skills she needs to survive during the (insanely) brief reprieves between attacks.  Her best quality isn’t her marksmanship.  It’s not her resourcefulness, her bravery, or even her intelligence.  All those things are impressive, and they all work in conjunction to keep her alive, but when it really comes down to it, what I admire most about her is simply this:  Ripley just won’t quit.