Ellen Ripley

The Nostromo picks up a signal from a planetoid and the crew goes down to investigate. Inside a derelict ship, Kane is attacked by a creature that latches onto his face. Ripley, in charge on board, refuses to open the hatch because of quarantine, but science officer Ash lets the group in.

The creature drops off and dies, and Kane seems fine until, at dinner, a small creature bursts out of his chest and escapes into the ship. The alien grows and kills Brett, then Captain Dallas. Ripley takes command, queries the ship's computer and finds the company's secret order: bring the organism back, crew expendable. Ash attacks her and turns out to be an android.

With the ship overrun, Ripley, Parker and Lambert plan to escape on the shuttle Narcissus, but Parker and Lambert are killed. Ripley sets the Nostromo to self-destruct and runs for the Narcissus with Jonesy the cat. She gets clear seconds before the blast, then realizes the alien came along and is hiding in the walls.

Ripley suits up, opens the hatch and blows it out with the decompression. When the creature clings to the shuttle, she fires the engines and sends it into space. She records a final log entry and goes into hypersleep with Jonesy.

A salvage crew finds the Narcissus after 57 years. Ripley wakes up on a station orbiting Earth and, in the extended cut, learns her daughter Amanda died an old woman while she slept. At an inquiry, Weyland-Yutani doesn't buy her alien story, blames her for losing the ship and pulls her license.

She learns the planetoid, LV-426, is now home to a terraforming colony. When the colony goes silent, company man Carter Burke and Lieutenant Gorman ask her to go with the Colonial Marines as an advisor. Ripley agrees on one condition: the mission is to wipe the creatures out, not study them.

At the colony, the Marines find everything wrecked and a single survivor, a girl named Newt. The first push into the nest is a disaster, and Ripley takes the armored carrier to pull the soldiers out. She grows close to Corporal Hicks, learns to trust the android Bishop and finds out Burke sent the colonists to the eggs on purpose, hoping for a bioweapon.

When Newt is taken to the nest, Ripley goes back alone and armed to get her and comes face to face with the Queen. She torches the eggs and escapes with the girl. The Queen stows away on the dropship and tears Bishop in half, and Ripley fights her in a power loader until she blows her out the airlock. The four survivors go into hypersleep on the Sulaco.

A fire on the Sulaco ejects the escape pod, which crashes on Fiorina 161, an all-male prison colony. Ripley is the only survivor: Newt and Hicks died in the crash. She demands an autopsy on the girl to make sure there's no embryo, but an alien has already burst out of a prison dog and starts killing inmates.

Using what's left of Bishop and a medical scanner, Ripley learns she's carrying a Queen embryo. With the inmates, she lures the creature into the foundry and destroys it with molten lead and cold water. When Weyland-Yutani arrives to take her, she refuses surgery and throws herself into the furnace, holding the Queen as it bursts from her chest. Only the inmate Morse survives.

Two hundred years later, military scientists aboard the ship Auriga clone Ripley from blood samples to extract the Queen she was carrying. The eighth clone works: mixed with alien DNA, this Ripley has unusual strength, acid blood and a link to the creatures. She finds the seven earlier clones, deformed, and burns the lab.

The aliens break loose, and Ripley joins the mercenaries from the ship Betty, among them Call, who turns out to be an android. Call sets the Auriga on a crash course with Earth. The Queen gives birth to a hybrid with human traits that treats Ripley as its mother. On the Betty, she burns a hole in a window with her own blood and the hybrid is sucked out. Ripley, Call, Johner and Vriess reach Earth.

Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's script wrote the whole crew as unisex, and Ripley was at one point conceived as a man. Sigourney Weaver got a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Aliens, rare for a sci-fi action movie. The game Alien: Isolation (2014) stars Amanda, Ripley's daughter, and Weaver voices Ripley in one of its add-ons.