Fight Night: Aliens Made Sigourney Weaver an Action Star

Conflict is the most basic building block of story, and a fight is the most simple conflict there is: Two people come to blows, and one must triumph over the other. Fight Night is a regular column in which Ken Lowe revisits some of cinema history’s most momentous, spectacular, and inventive fight scenes, from the brutally simple to the devilishly intricate. Check back here for more entries.

James Cameron is said to have pitched his sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror phenomenon Alien by walking up to a board with the word “Aliens” on it and then turning the “S” into a dollar sign. If that’s true, he made good on his proposal. Besides conquering the box office, the movie also dropped a million quotable lines and signaled the arrival of the gritty space marine to cinema.

You can argue that Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers codified the concept all the way back in 1959 in print, of course, but we must give Cameron his due: Warhammer 40,000 with its army of power-armored space marines, was first released in 1987, just a year after Aliens. The videogame StarCraft, which features among its militant factions an army of space marines and a hive of acid-spitting aliens of the dripping biological horror subtype, hit home PCs in 1998. When hack sci-fi writers want a grim and gritty post-Earth future, they’re plagiarizing Cameron’s Aliens (or these days, Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously subversive adaptation of Starship Troopers, which came out in 1997).

If Aliens were just “Alien$,” if it were just splattering a bunch of the nightmare creatures that showed up in Alien—just a bigger, gorier, louder movie—then it wouldn’t have had as much staying power. It is, to be clear, a bigger, gorier, louder horror movie, even when it’s also being a special effects-heavy action movie. But it’s also about things. And, as the best action movies always do, all those things that it’s about culminate in a final battle. I talked about how the lightsaber duel in The Empire Strikes Back was one example of how effects and art direction with the right emotional beat can turn a fight into a phenomenon. Ripley’s showdown with the alien queen is another example of a movie fight that becomes something unforgettable by virtue of its staging and effects.

The Film

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) awakens from cryo-sleep after the events of Alien, only to discover that she has been adrift in deep space for 57 years. The film’s director’s cut reveals that she had a daughter back home who died during this time. Ignored and abandoned by the company who sent her crew out to die in the first place, Ripley lands in a shit job, waking up each night screaming and drenched in sweat. The company has colonized the planet where she and her crew originally found the “xenomorph” that left her he sole survivor, and refuse to heed her warnings. When that colony inevitably goes dark, her corporate handler, Burke (Paul Reiser) comes to her asking her to join a detachment of marines as an advisor. She refuses at first, but realizes that the only way she can sleep soundly again is if she goes back to face her fears.

Ripley joins a crew of rough-and-ready marines. There are too many of them to namecheck here, partly because even though the majority get at best one or two moments of characterization, every second of it counts. We know inside of two or three minutes how these grunts relate to one another and their feckless CO, who among them is a malingerer or a straight arrow, and just how arrogant their whole operation is. Notable among the grunts are the cigar-chomping Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), the sympathetic Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), the un-serious and panicky Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), and the compact-but-mighty Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein). Also aboard is Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android in the vein of Ian Holm’s character in Alien—Ripley justifiably does not trust him, having already been betrayed by a synthetic once.

After discovering a sole survivor, the young girl Newt (Carrie Henn) and an otherwise abandoned colony, the marines prance directly into disaster. Through a combination of incompetent planning and unjustified bravado, they find themselves deep within a fusion reactor core, unable to fire their guns near critical safety systems, and in the middle of a nest of the creatures from Ripley’s nightmares. The beasties have cocooned a bunch of colonists to use for their horrifying chest-bursting gestation process, and the colony is already overrun with acid-dripping nightmare monsters. All but a handful of the marines are wiped out, their sole commissioned officer freezes up, and Ripley and the handful of survivors barely escape with their lives. With their shuttle destroyed, they’re trapped on the planet and surrounded by aliens.

The film’s second reel features the survivors desperately trying to set up for a siege while they await a rescue party, but they quickly discover that they’ve damaged the colony’s giant fusion reactor—it will become a mushroom cloud the size of Nebraska in four hours. Bishop crawls through danger to radio the marine’s orbiting ship to send down a shuttle (why didn’t they try this earlier?), but the clock is ticking. After a failed betrayal by Burke, who tries to get Ripley and Newt impregnated by the horrifying face-hugger aliens, the army of xenomorphs finds some way past the barricades and swarms the survivors, kicking off a final desperate chase to the finale.

Bishop comes through and gets a shuttle down, but in the rush to escape, Newt is snatched by the aliens and taken to be cocooned like everyone else. It’s here that I take some issue with the theatrical cut leaving out the detail that Ripley has lost her daughter—because it’s that motivation driving her to return to the alien hive deep within the reactor core, strapped like a one-woman army.

The Fight

If you were going to point to an example of a film sequel that’s an egregious example of “do the first movie but even more,” then Aliens would do the trick. But, if you were going to point to an example of a film sequel that is a smart and wonderful example of that same ethos, Aliens would also qualify, and it comes down to the creature Ripley encounters after she drags Newt out of the jaws of danger—the alien queen.

Cameron did not have to answer the question “what is laying these eggs?” We would probably assume it was just, you know, a female xenomorph, and that xenomorphs aspire to a nuclear family with a mommy, daddy, and 2.5 little baby xenomorphs. Answering that question would’ve been a bad idea, normally—it’s almost always better to leave things to the viewer’s imagination. But if you’re going to answer something like that, you may as well answer it with one of the most dreadful and upsetting creatures ever committed to film. The alien queen is a multi-limbed, dripping, hissing, malevolent horror, so much more than the sum of her skittering arachnoid legs and spear-tipped tail and slimy dagger teeth.

She’s never called a “queen” in the dialogue, either—audiences and reviewers simply knew to call her that because of her reveal. We see the field of eggs, then the slimy sac birthing another one of them. The camera crawls up the giant, translucent egg sac to the body of the queen herself, an even larger and spikier embellishment of H.R. Giger’s original design. The exoskeletal body, the crab/spider-like way she unfolds herself and moves, is a practical effect that should be hidden by more smoke and mirrors and lighting tricks. There’s certainly some obfuscation going on, but so much of the creature’s body and limbs are so visible, so functional, and so damn moist, that the viewer’s disbelief is completely suspended.

This moment communicates everything, perfectly and without words: We understand that this entity is a kind of malevolent mirror of motherhood. Ripley, now Newt’s surrogate mother, threatens the queen’s eggs, and the queen understands. For a moment, it looks like she will let Ripley go, that they have some détente rooted in something so deep that it crosses even the divide between their two species. But then one of the eggs starts hatching another face-hugger. Sigourney Weaver pulls a face—a look that is worth more than every one of the movie’s lines. It is stupid to stay here and risk getting turned into hydrogen vapor just to fight these things, but she also knows that it’s in these things’ nature to pursue and kill her no matter what. And she is also just a sleep-deprived mother who has absolutely had it.

Simon Atherton, armorer on the film, supervised creation of the movies guns. In behind-the-scenes featurettes, he talks about how his crew used camera rigs, motorcycle parts, and existing firearms to create the “smart-guns” that Drake and Vasquez are toting around, or the “pulse rifles” that are the standard armament of the marines. They’ve become iconic movie props, but they’re no more ornate and detailed than any piece of background dressing in this movie. As Ripley is putting Newt to bed in one scene, she pulls over a space heater that has Weyland-Yutani branding on it. Everything in this movie feels tactile, functional, not-so-gently-used, and as if it could just as easily jam or malfunction as work properly. The flamethrowers were actually functional, but tuned to be safe enough for the actors to handle on set.

I mention all this because it makes a difference when Ripley finally cuts loose. It does not look like an actor popping some blanks around. It looks like a woman screaming while she rains murder all over everything in sight. (In a behind the scenes interview, Weaver confessed to feeling ambiguous about being in such a militaristic movie, and Goldstein said handling the firearms was actually one of the more frightening parts of her role as Vasquez).

Ripley wipes out a whole nascent generation of alien bugs, then barely makes it to an evac courtesy of Bishop and Hicks, the sole surviving marine. They outrun the blast and get back up to the ship. It looks like they’ve made it. Ripley is even cool with Bishop, high fives all around!

It’s a fakeout, though, like all the best horror movies. The alien queen has hitched a ride inside the shuttle’s landing gear and is incredibly pissed. The bell sounds for Round 2. Newt is hiding inside vents, menaced by the alien queen, when Ripley emerges from a cargo bay inside a robotic exosuit—the one the movie handily established is used for transporting heavy loads and that Ripley knows how to operate because she’s a dock worker.

Weaver delivers the line of her career…

… and the two throw hands. The power loader, like all the movie’s guns and other vehicles, feels completely real and functional, plausibly designed for its in-world purpose. It’s cumbersome and slow, but clearly weighs—and can lift—tons. The alien queen is by contrast swift, made of wriggly limbs and murder, has a scorpion tail that the movie just established can rip an android in half, and a smaller nastier mouth inside its already very nasty regular mouth. Both of these giant practical effects are serving as the focus of the fight scene, and are completely believable in the moment. At the center of it is Weaver’s roaring, sweating, desperate performance.

Ripley is poised to just suplex the queen into an airlock, but is dragged down with her. As in the previous film, the only way to be entirely sure you’re rid of a xenomorph is to just blow it out into space. She does what she has to do, barely surviving the ordeal yet again.

The Fallout

Aliens grossed enough to build its own terraforming fusion reactor, and the grizzled space marine deadpanning their way through a bleak future of feudal colonial capitalism became its own pop culture shorthand for “this ain’t Star Trek.” It’s that fight between Ripley and the alien queen that’s stayed with me the longest, though. Cameron obviously loves his mama bear heroines—Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 was his other prominent contribution to action cinema’s lady-led canon. I’ve seen plenty of movies that feature a mother giving in to heedless homicidal fury by a child’s endangerment. Cameron could’ve just made the last action sequence a run-and-gun with another dozen or so aliens getting splattered and squished, and the movie still would’ve been memorable. But it’s the creation of the alien queen, what she represents, and how deftly Cameron manages the reveal—how he then makes this utterly in-human monster’s rage actually seem sympathetic to the audience that’s been rooting for Ripley the whole time—all of that is what sticks with me after all those bullets and bombs have finally gone silent.

Join us next time as dueling slasher franchise titans lock horns in the gaudy, super early-2000s cheesiness of Freddy vs. Jason.

Kenneth Lowe mostly comes out at night… mostly. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and buy his fantasy novel here.