Ridley Scott is one of our greatest directors, and with the success of Gladiator II, he is still going strong well into his 80s. Scott has created countless masterpieces, but for many, it's 1979's Alien that will always be on top. Here he created a monster movie like none other, not only with one of the greatest jump scares thanks to that chestburster scene, but with one of film's greatest heroes. The American Film Institute ranks Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as the eighth-best hero of all-time, but as iconic as she is, the master of horror, Stephen King, had issues with her presentation. In his book Danse Macabre, King raves about Alien until he gets to the ending. According to him, that's where it all goes wrong.
'Alien' Created a Forever Memorable Hero in Ellen Ripley
In Alien, Ripley is one of only two women on the Nostromo spaceship. She's not the captain, but she is the smartest and bravest of the bunch. When Kane (John Hurt) is attacked by a facehugger, it's Ripley who doesn't want to let him back on board because he could be infected with something. It might sound cruel, but it made sense, and it turned out that Ripley was right. When a baby xenomorph later bursts out of Kane's chest, it rapidly grows and kills the crew, leaving Ripley as the last survivor.
Alien has an iconic ending. With Ripley having set to blow the Nostromo to bits, she escapes on a small shuttle that will take her and her orange tabby cat, Jones, home. As Ripley undresses and gets ready for her stasis sleep, she discovers that the xenomorph has got on board. It attacks, but Ripley is able to get inside a spacesuit and shoot the creature out of an airlock to its demise (at least so we thought). It's a finale that nearly didn't happen, as Scott was going to kill Ripley in his original ending.
Stephen King Didn't Like What 'Alien' Did to Ripley in the Final Act
In Stephen King's 1981 book, Danse Macabre, the author, who was already a well known name thanks to works like Carrie and Salem's Lot, wrote about the history of horror in literature and film. In one passage, he writes about how great Alien is, but he admitted that he was not a fan of the ending because of what Ridley Scott did to Ripley.
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In the end, Ripley can escape sooner, but she's unable to leave Jones behind, so she goes back for him, thus putting her life in danger. And once she's on board her escape shuttle and thinks the nightmare is over, she strips down to a small shirt and underwear. Stephen King wasn't a fan of either of these choices, calling them "extremely sexist". He compared a stripped-down Ripley to nothing more than another sexualized victim of Dracula. King also wrote that Ripley:
"steps out of character at the scriptwriters' whim by going after the ship's cat. Enabling the males in the audience, of course, to relax, roll their eyes at each other, and say either aloud or telepathically, 'Isn't that just like a woman?' It is a plot twist which depends upon a sexist idea for its believability, and we might well answer the question asked above by asking in turn, 'Isn't that just like a male chauvinist pig of a Hollywood scriptwriter?' This gratuitous little twist doesn't spoil the movie, but it's still sort of a bummer."
Stephen King Is off the Mark About Ripley's Portrayal
Image via 20th Century Fox With all due respect to Mr. King, he is wrong on both counts. Having Ripley go back for Jones doesn't turn her from being the smart hero into a predictable female character. It shows who Ripley is and what she's lost. All of her friends are dead, but a loyal cat is alone on the ship, and she can't stand to just leave it behind to die. She goes back for it because Jones is all she has left. To some, he might just be a cat, but to Ripley, Jones is hope.
There is also nothing sexist about Ripley stripping down to her underwear. Her character is not sexualized throughout the entire movie. When Ellen takes off her clothes at the end, it's not meant to be sexual or titillating. In an interview with Danny Peary in Films and Filming, Sigourney Weaver said:
"People have said, ‘Aw, how could you demean yourself by doing a striptease?’ And I say, ‘Are you kidding? After five days of blood and guts, and fear, and sweat and urine, do you think Ripley wouldn’t take off her clothes?’ It never occurred to me for a second that people would think my strip exploitive."
Alien is like a slasher film, with the hulking killer in a dark house hunting down its victims. And what's more vulnerable in a slasher than for the heroic, cat-saving final girl to think that the killer is dead and get ready for bed, only for the presumed-dead villain to jump out of the closet and attack?
Alien is available to watch on Hulu in the U.S.
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Alien
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
Runtime 117 minutes
Main Genre Sci-Fi
English (US) ·