"Brandishing sophisticated weaponry and rescuing hostages in a style that leads Pauline Kael to label her “no more than a smart Rambo” (79), Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley champions a type of a feminist role in Alien (1979) (dir. Ridley Scott) and its film child Aliens (1986) (dir. James Cameron). Lawrence O’Toole croons that “Weaver brings wit, warmth, compassion, sweat and strength to her heroic role. Feminism has barely had it so good”, while David Ansen calls her “human macho” a “strong, unsentimental heroine” (64), and Rebecca Bell-Metereau celebrates Ripley as a “prototype for a new female lead…because she is not stunning, stunned, or simpering” (210) Single-handedly defeating alien creatures who threaten to destroy the human race, Ripley is intelligent, resourceful, independent, able to take command, and, in the greatest divergence from Hollywood’s typical depiction of “feminists,” not linked romantically to a man. “The closest thing that [Aliens] comes to romance” is Corporal Hicks showing Ripley how to operate an M41A pulse rifle (Kael 79). Ripley thus seems to epitomize, both for the films and their many viewers, the type of a new woman, one who not only holds her own in a man’s world, but is the only person to survive successfully in it."