1) Ellen Ripley – Alien
When Ellen Ripley woke from stasis, 35 years ago in Ridley Scott’s Alien, she simultaneously redefined a genre, and the perception of female characters in film. Suddenly, heroines could truly kick ass. Created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, she is widely regarded as the best female film character in history.
Armed with a Masters degree in Engineering, she joined the US Merchant Navy, travelled amid the stars, and defied corporate protocol to become a mother. She uncovered a dastardly conspiracy to create horrifying biological weapons, and returned to field of battle again and again – squaring up to one of the most terrifying creatures imaginable, and always coming out on top.
Each film gives Ripley a defining moment. In 1979’s Alien, she cites her responsibility for crew safety when refusing to open the hatch of the Nostromo when Kane (John Hurt) needs to return with an unknown biological entity on his face. In this single scene, Scott takes the long-established perception of female movie characters as emotionally weak, and turns it on its head.
In James Cameron’s Aliens, in 1986, Ripley faces off with a fellow Mom – the Xenomorph Queen. To escape, Ripley threatens the unhatched eggs of the Queen, then burns them anyway. Ripley then levels the playing field by climbing into a Powerloader and taking the Alien on, fist-to-fist. Her exclamation, “Get away from her you bitch!” was instantly iconic. Tender and loving with the child, she becomes a grizzly mother bear in a heartbeat – creating perhaps the clearest depiction of maternal instinct ever committed to film.
David Fincher’s Alien 3 in 1992 had Ripley sacrifice herself to save the universe once and for all, choosing what she perceives to be her final act – the destruction of the infant Xenomorph Queen that bursts from her chest as she dives into a furnace. That act is cruelly taken away from her in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection in 1997, when Ripley is cloned, and her Alien Queen is used to breed more Xenomorphs for nefarious purposes. Now connected to her nemesis on a genetic level, she lures the humanoid Alien that sees her as a mother into a trap, and destroys it in gruesome fashion.
In a world where female film characters in 2014 still routinely exist in a male-dominated world, Ripley has blazed her own trail since 1979. In her franchise – though her goal is to prevent Aliens killing everything in their path – she is one woman repeatedly battling the attempts of a male-run corporation to weaponise and enslave a female-dominated Alien race. She is the ultimate kick-ass action heroine, because she fights against female oppression on an intergalactic scale.
– Sarah Myles
