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.

Alien: Resurrection (1997, R)

*Disclaimer: Two points to disclaim here. First is the whole Joss Whedon of it all – while none of the allegations against him so far get into the type of sexual harassment/assault alleged against creeps like, say, Harvey Weinstein or Bryan Singer, the allegations at the very least paint a picture of a toxic guy who’s created incredibly-hostile environments on assorted sets of his, especially for women. Second, the film is yet another to feature an able-bodied actor (in this case, Dominique Pinon) playing a character with a disability.*

 

I don’t know what happened; I could’ve sworn I’d posted all my reviews for the main four Alien movies, but somehow, this one got lost in the couch cushions.  Here it is, better late than never.

In an incredibly backwards way, this was actually the first Alien film I ever saw, back when I was first working my way through Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s filmography.  At the time, I could confidently state that it was the worst of his movies, and after seeing the other three in the tetralogy, I felt pretty solidly that it was the worst Alien movie, too (granted, I’m not overly fond of Alien³, either, but I think this one is worse.)  Shame, because there are a lot of good people involved/elements that ought to work in its favor, but for me, it just doesn’t (spoilers.)

200 years after the events of Alien³, Ripley lives again!  Sort of.  She’s part Ripley clone, part human/alien hybrid, brought to life by military scientists who – what else? – think they can use the aliens to their advantage.  New!Ripley was in fact made as an incubator, and the fact that she survives extracting the alien and has super-strength/other alien-borrowed powers is just a bonus for them.  A rough-around-the-edges spaceship crew doing jobs for hire happens to be on the military space base right around the time the newly-matured aliens bust out and start laying waste to everything in their paths.  Cue the blood bath as the crew and New!Ripley try to make it off the base alive.

Like I said, good pedigree here.  In addition to Jeunet’s direction, we have a script by Joss Whedon and a cast that, besides the obvious Sigourney Weaver goodness, includes Little Women/Girl, Interrupted-era Winona Ryder, Brad Dourif, Dan Hedaya, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan, and good ol’ Jeunt mainstay Dominique Pinon (in the only performance I’ve seen him give in English.)  Bonus – we also get Raymond Cruz, a.k.a. Tuco from the first two seasons of Breaking Bad.  All the actors are fine, and the aliens are their alien selves, but it never quite comes together.

In my view, there are two issues at work here.  First, Jeunet and Whedon are two creators with very singular visions, and I feel like the direction and the screenplay may be at odds.  What we have is a film that looks like (a very dark) Jeunet (think Delicatessen without the whimsy,) sounds like Whedon (the crew of the Betty are like a proto-Serenity crew,) but doesn’t really feel like either.  For what it’s worth, I know that Whedon is deeply dissatisfied with the film, claiming in essence that Jeunet didn’t significantly change the script but that he directed it “all wrong”  (I also know Jeunet spoke very little English at the time and made the whole movie through interpreters, which may have been a factor.)  It seems to me like we had two very decisive cooks doing entirely their own thing in a kitchen they were meant to be sharing.

The other big issue, unfortunately, involves the central premise:  I hate the notion of the reconstituted Ripley/alien hybrid.  In keeping with the theme of test-driving Firefly ideas, she’s a lot like River.  New!Ripley is super smart, super strong, emotionally-distant and off-putting, and “jut knows things” she shouldn’t.  Not that any of those things are inherently wrong or that “emotionally-damaged science experiment with superhuman abilities” isn’t a character type that can work (I think it works beautifully with River, but that’s in part because we get 14 episodes and a movie in which to understand her and what she’s been through,) but it doesn’t work for Ripley.  To me, Ripley is a fantastic hero because of how human she is.  In Alien, she’s not some superwoman; she’s just a talented astronaut desperately trying to keep herself and the rest of the crew alive.  In Aliens, she’s shell-shocked and disoriented, and she tries to keep the soldiers from getting themselves killed with an “are you kidding me – this again?” air.  In Alien³, she’s broken but still dragging herself across the finish line on bloody knuckles, just ready to end it.  In Alien: Resurrection?  She’s not a person anymore.  She’s an idea, a concept, a kick-ass action shot with none of the truth that fueled her awesomeness in the earlier films.  And I can’t get behind that.

Warnings

Extreme alien violence/gore, language, and drinking.

Alien3 (1992, R)

Each movie in the original Alien tetrad is such a reflection of who made it.  Ridley Scott’s Alien is a visually-stunning, claustrophobic horror movie.  James Cameron’s Aliens is an impressive action-hero horror movie.  Alien:  Resurrection is a Joss Whedon space-opera horror movie with Jean-Pierre Jeunet production design.  And Alien³?  In the hands of David Fincher, it’s an unrelentingly-dark, dystopian-feeling horror movie (some spoilers for this movie as well as Aliens.)

After the events of Aliens, a catastrophic failure on Ripley’s ship leads to her crashing on a prison planet, killing Hicks and Newt in the process.  Surrounded by murderers and rapists in a filthy, dimly-lit, lice-infested facility, Ripley fears that all that is the least of her problems; she’s convinced that an alien somehow got onboard the ship and made planetfall with her.  It isn’t long before her fears prove well-founded, and with the Company fast-approaching, hungry to bag their prize at last, the only hope for humanity is for Ripley to get the prisoners to band together and help her destroy the alien before the Company gets their hands on it.

Okay, so it’s not all bad.  The prison creates an eerie, gritty backdrop for our story, and some of the individual prisoners are interesting.  Pride of place, unsurprisingly, goes to Ripley’s early ally Clemens (played by Charles Dance, a.k.a. Tywin Lannister,) but I also like Charles S. Dutton’s morally-fluid Dillon and former Doctor Paul McGann’s troubled Golic.  Sigourney Weaver knocks it clean out of the park with Ripley, who’s been battered and beaten almost to oblivion but sure as hell isn’t going down without a fight.

But it’s just so dark.  I know it’s an Alien movie and everything, but let’s be real.  The film almost seems to take a perverse pleasure in stripping every good thing from Ripley’s life.  Granted, Aliens begins with Ripley waking up to learn that a malfunction kept her in cryosleep half a century too long and her daughter died of old age waiting for her return, and the film then proceeds to lay waste to nearly every character in the movie with extreme prejudice, but even though victory there is very hard-won, there are shreds of hope, too.  There’s Hicks and Newt, and while neither was them was ever going to have an easy time of it in another Alien movie, to kill them in the prologue seems unnecessarily cruel.  Bishop, too, proves to be hopelessly beyond repair, and after Ripley briefly gets him working in her quest to find out what went wrong on the ship, he begs her to deactivate him.  Even Clemens, who’s positioned as the one possible bit of softness in the harsh place where Ripley now finds herself, is killed in front of her before the big action even really kicks off.

Just loss piling on loss, building up to the scene in which Ripley realizes the most horrible truth of all.  I like a good emotional gutpunch in my cinema as much as anyone, but this is just too much.  It’s a glut of darkness, emotional torture porn under the guise of being “hard-hitting.”  Ripley may have been through a lot – too much to expect any one person to actually withstand – but this takes it way too far.  You don’t do Ripley like that.

Warnings

Graphic violence, sexual content (including attempted rape,) and language.

Aliens (1986, R)

I go back and forth on whether or not I prefer Alien or Aliens.  One major factor of the quadrilogy is that each movie is heavily shaped by its particular creative team and each one is very much its own monster.  To get really obnoxious about it, I might say that Alien is a better “film,” while Aliens is a better “movie.”  Alien is a stunningly-directed and -designed creature feature and Aliens is a slickly-made, mammoth sci-fi blockbuster.  Each is a really great picture in its own right, and in the end, I’d say it largely comes down to what you look for in a horrifying alien movie (premise spoilers.)

After the events of the first film, Ripley’s ship (and malfunctioning sleep pod) is recovered, decades too late.  As she struggles to debrief from her devastating last mission and grapple with the fact that she spent more than half a century in cryostasis, her worst fears are realized:  LV-426, the moon where her crew first encountered the alien, is now the site of a human colony, and the Company has just lost contact with the settlement.  While Ripley wants nothing more than to put the whole nightmare behind her, she cannot stand by while an interplanetary marine unit goes to the colony to investigate.  She’s the only person who’s seen an alien up close and lived to tell about it, and she knows her knowledge is indispensable, if only they’ll listen to her.

Ripley has clearly taken a level in badass between films – she packs a serious punch in this movie – and there are times when she feels a little Trademark Action Hero, but I still recognize her as a new version of the tough, intelligent, terrified woman she was in Alien.  At this point, I can mostly see her newfound Big Damn Hero-ness as a reflection of what she’s just been through.  Ripley has been destroyed.  Even after surviving a horrifically-traumatizing disaster, she comes home to find that home moved on from her long ago.  She has nothing left, she can’t sleep without dreaming that a monster is going to claw its way out of her chest, and now she’s lost her one stabilizing force – she can no longer tell herself, “At least it’s finally over.”  If I’d lived through all that and I somehow wasn’t permanently curled up in the fetal position, I’d work to make myself as formidable as possible, too.  Ripley isn’t a born badass, but she’s a survivor, and when the nightmare scenario calls for it, she makes herself into the person she needs to be to make that happen.

This movie is a lot commercial than Alien.  Under the guidance of James Cameron, it’s big and impressive with emotional beats that, while obvious, still hit the mark.  Personally, I think it ups the ante too much from the first film – after all the devastation caused by a single alien on a claustrophobic space freighter in Alien, we don’t really need the tons and tons of aliens here.  The movie doesn’t have Alien’s amazingly-cool visuals (I mean, it has the aliens, obviously,) but its story is more clearly-drawn with blockbuster setpieces and well-worn but effective benchmark moments.   The space marines/potential alien fodder have broadly-drawn but distinct personalities, making it easier for me to keep track of them in a meaningful way.  Vasquez and her heavy firepower is an obvious crowdpleaser (and I appreciate that we don’t have a “queen bee” situation wherein Ripley is the only tough woman in the film,) and I also really like Bishop, the on-board android/synthetic lifeform.

Warnings

Tons of alien violence and some swearing.