With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
By the late 1970s, American moviegoers were ready for a kickass female action lead. Second-wave feminism and the fall of Hollywood’s restrictive Hays Code had turned traditional female representation on its head. Sexy women-in-prison films paved the way for Pam Grier’s trailblazing turn as an indie Blaxplotation heroine, while the horror genre put women front and center as “final girls” and rape-revenge protagonists. After the late 1960s saw Lt. Uhura work from the bridge of the starship Enterprise, TV started serving up professional female action heroes in shows like Police Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie’s Angels. And in 1977, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia took the universe by storm as the success of Star Wars shifted culture forever.
A female-led action blockbuster seemed inevitable, it would just be a matter of who got there first. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a movie that took on all the influences of the previous decade of female representation and combined it into a competently professional, no-nonsense sci-fi leader who’s also a slightly sexualized final girl and a superhero to cats everywhere: Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien.
Though Ripley probably wouldn’t be remembered as a full-on action icon if it weren’t for her more souped-up role in the 1986 sequel Aliens, the first film was still revolutionary in its own right. As the story famously goes, all the characters in the original script were written to be gender neutral, though the filmmakers had settled on Ripley being played by a woman by the time casting began. Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren were considered for the part, but according to Weaver, she’s the only one who made it to a screen test. 20th Century Fox president Alan Ladd Jr. asked some of the studio’s female secretaries to weigh in, and they gave the 5’11” Yale-trained actress the stamp of approval. While Weaver had done Broadway, appeared in a handful of soap opera episodes, and played a small part in Annie Hall, Ripley was her first leading film role.
One of the things that makes Alien so compelling, however, is that it’s not really clear Ripley is the protagonist until late into its runtime. If anything, she’s the crewmember who makes the least impression as the opening act introduces the Nostromo, a commercial towing spaceship that’s rerouted from its original mission to investigate a transmission from a nearby planetoid. She gets an early hero moment when she tries to refuse to let an infected crewmate back onto the ship, but it doesn’t necessarily seem like the film is going to end with her and her alone.
In that way, Ripley shares a lot of DNA with the classic horror survivor: an everywoman who survives on instinct, observation, and a dash of luck. It was a trope that had come into fashion alongside the birth of the slasher movie in the early 1970s. And though writers Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon had pitched Alien as “Jaws in space,” the way the H.R. Giger-designed Xenomorph picks off crewmembers one by one gives the film the structure of a serial killer story. That puts Ripley in conversation with female horror movie survivors like Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Laurie Strode in Halloween.
The difference, of course, is that Ripley isn’t a scrappy teenager, but a trained professional who inherits a leadership role after her superiors are killed off. More than anything, that’s what made her such a groundbreaking addition to the sci-fi/horror/survival genre. (“Ash, when Dallas and Kane are off the ship, I’m senior officer,” Ripley coolly reminds her coworker.) While Princess Leia is a leader, she comes from the screwball tradition of sassy, fast-talking dames. And while Pam Grier’s characters were tough as nails, she tended to play sexy vigilantes who operated outside the law. Ripley, in contrast, is a no-nonsense pragmatist with chain-of-command authority. Part of the reason the film’s final strip-down scene feels a little jarring is because the rest of Alien had been so intentional about not presenting Ripley as eye candy, like so many earlier action-exploitation films and episodes of “jiggle TV” had done.
While O’Bannon’s script is filled with metaphorical fears about rape, pregnancy, and childbirth as explored through the lens of male characters, Ripley’s arc is much more literal. She has no problem drawing up plans, directing others, or taking decisive action when it comes to her and her crew’s survival—even if her male crewmates don’t always listen to her. In a decade where questions of female leadership rose to the foreground (Shirley Chisholm ran her pioneering campaign for president in 1972) and real-life women were fighting to be treated as equals, it was still groundbreaking in 1979 for Alien to deliver an action heroine whose gender almost felt incidental.
By the mid-1980s, however, culture had shifted. The revolutionary spirit of the 1970s had settled into conformism. The second-wave feminist movement had fractured and mainstream backlash to the radical changes of the past two decades began returning gender roles to a more traditional status quo. The new action movie fad became hyper-masculine heroes like Rambo and Conan The Barbarian. And the female action heroes who existed on the big screen tended to be spin-offs of successful male-driven properties, like Supergirl and Red Sonja.
James Cameron had a different idea for what an Alien sequel could offer. Hired as a writer based on the strength of his script for The Terminator and chosen to direct based on that film’s unexpected success in 1984, Cameron wanted to transform Ripley into a true action star. But he also wanted to make her a softer, more overtly feminine alternative to the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. In Aliens, Ripley wakes up 57 years in the future, joins a group of Marines on a mission to a Xenomorph-infested space colony, and finds herself deeply protective of a young survivor named Newt (Carrie Henn). She’s still cool, confident, and pragmatic, but this time her story is rooted in motherhood and emotional vulnerability. “I like to think the real message is love,” Weaver told Time.
The best way to understand how Alien and Aliens view its shared heroine is to look at the female characters she’s contrasted with. In Alien, Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is a panicked, overly emotional mess who echoes damsels in distress and the “scream queens” of the era. Part of the reason Ripley seems so competent is because she doesn’t freeze in the face of danger the way Lambert does. Similarly, Aliens gives us Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), a macho Marine who’s asked if she’s ever mistaken for a man. In contrast, Ripley is a badass who still retains her more empathetic touch. As with so many female leads in the history of the action genre, there’s a bit of a “not like other girls” sheen to how Ripley is presented.
Where Ripley was the surprise protagonist of Alien, she’s very much the focal point of Aliens. Once woken from her extended slumber, she struggles with PTSD while trying to find a place in her strange new time. After everything she’s been through, she’s more openly rebellious against the Weyland-Yutani company, more inclined to make her own decisions rather than simply follow orders, and quicker to form personal connections rather than remain professionally detached.
In the original film, the action mostly consists of survival-thriller scenes where Ripley is fighting to save herself. But in Aliens, she proactively fights to save other people—whether that means driving a tank into battle to rescue some trapped Marines or heading back into danger to save Newt. Where Alien emphasizes atmosphere, suspense, and surprise, Aliens is a more explosive character-driven saga about redemption and closure. As Kali White VanBaale writes, one of the most kickass moments in the film is when Ripley simply tells a male superior, “I’m happy to disappoint you.” To an 11-year-old in 1986, “[Hearing that line] spoken from a woman to a man was revelatory… Her moral compass would not be swayed, nor her will to get the hell out of there alive.”
It’s an idea Cameron would take to an even further extreme with Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But if Linda Hamilton gets the more impressive physical transformation, Weaver gets the better arc. T2 downplays Sarah to focus on the men/male robots in her life, but the men in Aliens all exist as supporting players in Ripley’s story. We understand that company man Carter J. Burke (Paul Reiser) is a sleaze because he tries to manipulate her. We know that Michael Biehn’s Corporal Hicks and Lance Henriksen’s android Bishop are good guys because they’re happy to defer to her Xenomorph expertise without letting their egos get in the way. (When Ripley says she can handle herself, Hicks simply smiles and says, “Yeah, I noticed.”) If anything, Ripley is the one who gets an ego check when it comes to trusting Bishop after her traumatizing experience with Ian Holm’s android Ash.
What stands out most about Aliens, however, is how sweet and caring Ripley is with Newt. Cameron filmed but ultimately cut a scene that revealed Ripley had a daughter who died during her 57-year cryosleep. (It’s been restored in the extended editions.) Yet the subtext lingers in the theatrical cut, in Ripley’s surrogate mother/daughter bond with a scared little girl living through the same nightmare Ripley herself barely survived. If the first film leaned into the horror of men experiencing forced “pregnancies,” Aliens is about the power of chosen motherhood. This time around, Ripley gets the metaphorical through-line—a mother vs. mother showdown in which she has to save Newt from an alien queen desperate to protect her own clutch of eggs. When Ripley “strips down” in the third act, it’s to throw on the harness for a giant machine gun. That’s before donning a mech suit and delivering her iconic kiss-off line, “Get away from her, you bitch!”
It was enough to earn Weaver a milestone Best Actress nomination at the Oscars—a first for a sci-fi film and a rarity for an action one too. That speaks to what makes the first two Alien films so seismic. They weren’t the first to depict strong female action heroines, but they were massive critical and commercial hits that made the concept more than a niche or a gimmick. Thanks to Alien and Aliens, the idea of a no-nonsense woman leading an action blockbuster started to feel normal, paving the way for future stories about tough professional women in movies and shows like Blue Steel, Silence Of The Lambs, Star Trek: Voyager, and G.I. Jane.
Weaver would return in two more divisive Alien sequels—1992’s Alien 3 and 1997’s Alien Resurrection—before hanging up her Reeboks for good. Perhaps part of the reason those films were more muddled and less essential is because, as female action heroes became more normalized in a post-Aliens world, there weren’t the same sort of glaringly overt cultural limitations for its sci-fi heroine to push back against. If Ripley is a reactionary force, no one could quite get a handle on what she should be reacting to in the “postfeminist” ’90s.
Indeed, for how trailblazing Ripley felt in the ’70s and ’80s, her impact has its limitations. There have been three Alien films and a new FX show since Weaver left the franchise. Yet they’ve all tried to honor Ripley’s legacy by simply casting another white brunette woman at their center, including Noomi Rapace, Katherine Waterston, Cailee Spaeny, and Sydney Chandler, not to mention Winona Ryder in Resurrection. (At least Alien Vs. Predator gave us a starring role for Sanaa Lathan.) To date, no Alien project has been spearheaded by a female creative (although Gale Anne Hurd did play a big role as the producer of Aliens) and none of them have had gender parity in their casts.
The idea of an “incidental” female lead now feels baked into the Alien franchise. The series has included a few gender-related moments that feel as bold as anything the first two films delivered—like the harrowing Xenomorph C-section in Prometheus—but as the franchise has become increasingly enamored with the android side of its world-building and the mythology of the Xenomorphs, it’s become less interested in doing anything particularly new or revolutionary with the female representation that once felt so intentional and central to the series. That sort of social commentary fell to characters like Furiosa and Katniss Everdeen in the 2010s.
Still, every kickass cinematic woman who arrived in a post-Alien world owes a debt of gratitude to Ripley, just as she owes a debt of gratitude to the female action heroes who came before her. She’s equal parts relatable and aspirational—not superpowered or specially trained, but always clever and capable, even when she’s terrified. The history of American action cinema would look a whole lot different without Ripley’s influence. As she might put it, “They can bill me.”
Next time: Quentin Tarantino delivered his “strong female character” magnum opus with Kill Bill.
