The Big Picture
- Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise is the most badass female hero in horror, surpassing the traditional final girl trope.
- Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley in Alien helped make her a cool and iconic character and broke the mold of female protagonists in horror.
- Ridley Scott initially wanted Ripley to die at the end of Alien, but keeping her alive was a good decision for the film and future sequels.
When looking at the female icons of horror, we usually think of the final girl, the young woman who survived the masked killer murdering all of her friends now finding the strength at the end to kill her aggressor. There’s Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween, of course, and Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare of Elm Street. A more recent example is Neve Campbell‘s Sidney Prescott in the Scream films. There is a female hero of horror more badass than any final girl, however. That woman is Sigourney Weaver‘s Ellen Ripley, the flamethrower holding, child saving warrior from the Alien franchise. Ellen Ripley is the epitome of late 70s and 1980s cinematic cool. She was a good person, but if evil creatures from outer space wanted to start some shit, she fought back and destroyed everything in her path. As loved as Ellen Ripley is though, not just as a female protagonist, but as one of film’s greatest heroes in general, her iconic status almost didn’t happen. In the early stages of Alien, director Ridley Scott decided he was going to kill her off in a shocking twist finale.
Alien (1979)
In deep space, the crew of the commercial starship Nostromo is awakened from their cryo-sleep capsules halfway through their journey home to investigate a distress call from an alien vessel. The terror begins when the crew encounters a nest of eggs inside the alien ship. An organism from inside an egg leaps out and attaches itself to one of the crew, causing him to fall into a coma.
- Release Date
- June 22, 1979
- Director
- Ridley Scott
- Cast
- Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto
- Runtime
- 117 minutes
‘Alien’s Ellen Ripley Is Horror’s Most Badass Female Hero
Alien came out in 1979, a year after John Carpenter‘s Halloween. While the films are vastly different in some ways, they are also very similar. You can almost look at Alien as Halloween in space, with a silent figure in the shadows picking off Ellen Ripley’s friends one by one until only she remains. No, there are no slasher tropes such as sex and drinking. The most slasher-like vulnerability is when the alien attacks at the moment Ripley has stripped down to her underwear.
Alien changed things for movies. There had been movies about extraterrestrial creatures before, but never where the creatures looked so real and scary. It might have been a man in a suit, but thanks to the H.R. Giger design, the creature in Alien looked like a foreign nightmare. The movie has a great, claustrophobic setting, as almost all of it takes place on board the Nostromo spaceship, and the monster is scary as hell, but none of that matters without characters to care about.
Alien is made up of a great cast, including the likes of Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, and Ian Holm, but it was the 28-year-old Sigourney Weaver who was the star. At the time, Weaver had done a few small roles and had a little part in Annie Hall, but Alien was her big break. The fact that most of the audience didn’t know who she was helped her character. We didn’t look at Ellen Ripley and see a movie star acting. We saw the portrayal, and a woman who was the protagonist, not as a forced idea, but a hero who just happened to be a woman. That made her so cool. She wasn’t a character who “kicked ass pretty well for a girl,” she simply kicked ass.
Ridley Scott Wanted To Kill Ellen Ripley at the End of ‘Alien’
As much of an alien-ass-kicking warrior as Ellen Ripley was in that first Alien movie, her status as a cinematic icon almost never happened. At the end of the film as it is now, Ripley is the only survivor in the last act, along with the ship’s cat, Jones. Ripley sets the Nostromo to blow up and escapes to a smaller shuttle. The Nostromo explodes, and the alien is dead. Movie over — or so it seems. But then, as Ripley is getting ready to go into hypersleep for the trip back to Earth, she notices that the creature has snuck onboard her vessel. She will have to fight again. Ripley manages to get an airlock open and the beast is sucked out, with Ellen shooting it in the chest with a harpoon, then frying it with the shuttle’s engines. The alien is dead this time and Ellen will live to fight another day. If Ridley Scott had been allowed the ending he wanted, however, she wouldn’t have made it to Aliens.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2017, Scott talked about his original ending idea that was never filmed. He felt that the idea of the Nostromo blowing up and Ripley getting on the shuttle was a flat ending. Instead, when Ripley discovered the alien onboard and hit the buttons to open the airlock, what played out next would have altered movie history. With the alien hanging onto the door, Scott said, “She harpoons it, it makes no difference. It comes forward and it slams through her mask and rips her head off.” Then Scott would have cut to the alien’s hand going to the controls, and mimicking Tom Skerritt’s voice perfectly, it would say, “I’m signing off.” Scott pitched this to the studio over the phone and said he could feel the tension. “The first executives arrived within 14 hours from Fox, threatening to fire me on the spot, so we didn’t do that.” Scott said it would have been a very Alfred Hitchcock-like ending, but that the decision to keep Ripley alive was a good one.
Talk about a twist! Picture yourself sitting through Alien, only for the hero you’ve been watching and rooting for this entire time to die at the very end. What had been a tense, yet fun movie suddenly would have become something very depressing and hard to rewatch.
A World Without Ellen Ripley Would Have Been Disappointing
Usually when you hear stories about movies being made and directors fighting with studio execs, it’s usually because the studio, completely misunderstanding the film, is wanting the director to do something that goes against the theme of the project, and now this passionate creator is having to fight for what he believes in against idiots in suits who don’t know anything. Ridley Scott is an all-time great director, with films like Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator, before returning to the xenomorph universe with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, but in this case at least, the studio was right, and the director was wrong. Sure, maybe they were thinking of sequels and the amount of money that would be lost, but still, killing off Ripley would have been a colossal mistake.
If Ripley had died at the end of Alien, then the whole film, if you could stomach watching it again, becomes all about the monster and not the hero. She’s just another victim who took longer to kill than the rest. There’s no happy ending, just depressing disappointment. Imagine if at the end of the first Halloween, after Laurie Strode went through so much, Michael Myers just stabbed her to death anyway. What would have been the point?
The Alien Sequel Emphasize Ellen Ripley’s Importance
It’s all the more important that Ellen Ripley lived because of those sequels the studio was envisioning. In 1986, James Cameron took over directing duties with Aliens, a film even bigger and better than the first. If Alien was a slow burn horror movie, Aliens was a big, blockbuster action film. With Ripley carrying her flamethrower and classic lines like, “Get away from her, you bitch!,” she was no longer just a horror icon but an action one as well. Suddenly Sigourney Weaver found herself an action star on par with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Women had their cinematic hero to look up to, one who didn’t cower and cry or wasn’t turned into a sex symbol.
Sequels to Alien could have been made without Ripley. Some other character just like her could have been written into a new movie, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Ripley was why we watched. Even if Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection didn’t work, they still had Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. It’s why we can still watch them, even with their flaws. Thankfully, for once, the twist was that the evil studio saved the film by saving the hero. Cinematic history would be a lot different if her character hadn’t continued on.
The character sadly didn’t continue after Alien: Resurrection. Though Weaver had hopes of returning as Ripley for a Neil Blomkamp directed sequel, when that was canceled, Weaver gave up, telling Total Film earlier this year that she was done playing Ripley. That doesn’t mean fans have been done with the xenomorphs though. There was the much anticipated Alien vs. Predator, now streaming on Hulu, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and then the shocking return of Ridley Scott in the director’s chair for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The Fede Álvarez directed Alien: Romulus is set for release in 2024. While we may be excited to see where the franchise goes next, it’ll never be the same without one Ellen Ripley.
Watch Alien now on Hulu in the U.S.
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