The director\u2019s more-is-more approach to the 1986 sequel gave us seat-edge action and an indelible performance from a rule-breaking Sigourney Weaver<\/p>\n
James Cameron loves tough female characters. That seems like a given now, after three Avatars and two particularly muscular arms belonging to Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Even the lushly romantic Titanic is about a supportive, sweet-natured boyfriend lending his love the extra smidge of strength she needs to live a rich and iconoclastic life without him, until she\u2019s freely chucking diamonds into the sea at 100 years of age. But in Cameron\u2019s 1984 de facto feature debut The Terminator (after a Piranha sequel that he attempted to disown), T2\u2019s Hamilton is stalked and appropriately terrified by Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2019s slasher-like killer robot. She\u2019s a great character who gets majorly pumped up for the sequel in 1991. By then, Cameron had plenty of practice: he had already written and directed Aliens, maybe the best pumped-up sequel ever made, which turns 40 this week.<\/p>\n
Ellen Ripley, introduced as the warrant officer onboard the ship Nostromo in Ridley Scott\u2019s 1979 sci-fi horror picture Alien, is already a great character by the end of that film. But while the anecdote about James Cameron pitching a sequel by appending a dollar-sign to Alien\u2019s title, concisely showing what a simple pluralization could do, has perhaps overtaken the buffing up of Ellen Ripley in the most-circulated lore about this movie, she\u2019s really the first subject of Cameron\u2019s great plussing. Without betraying the simplicity and resilience of her character in the first film, Cameron reintroduced Ripley as a survivor, landing on Earth almost 60 years after the events of the earlier film. (In a deleted scene restored in the film\u2019s longer special edition, Ripley even learns that her daughter has died in the interim \u2013 as an adult, given that Ripley was in cryosleep for decades.)<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/389b9aebb71b3c870937a4b82e649e6214bc3414\/0_357_1187_949\/master\/1187.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ad6ea4c1eba654d5fc5689f2e03bfa2d\" "\\"\u2018Maybe")
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