What makes Ripley work?

She was depicted fairly realistically. She didn't go around beating up strapping guys twice her size. Instead, she beat the Alien using her wits.

she was a wonderful character.

Because she's a well-written and believable character, like an admirable woman you might know in real life. She is human and feels fear like the rest of us, but she's brave and keeps her wits about her when it counts.

By contrast, characters like Rey and Captain Marvel are so on the nose that it pulls you out of the story. They're so perfect and powerful that you cease to see them as people you can relate to and instead as agenda-driven statements shoehorned into the movie.

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Most of it is, as others have said, that she's just a great character. Those are rare - male or female - and we remember Ripley because she's great.

But I think some of it is that nobody bothers anybody else about Ripley. Nobody ran in with the Alien DVD and said, "You need to watch this, it's great because it stars a woman in the lead role!" They say, "You need to watch this, it's great because it's an amazing sci-fi/horror movie!"

I think it's off-putting when people are told they must like a certain movie because the lead is a woman. I think if the marketing and buzz around Captain Marvel had been different, if they'd just said, "Here's another Marvel superhero movie!" it would be a lot more popular. A lot of it has to be a pre-judgement on movies because of advertising and buzz, I think.

She was practical and had integrity, her survival seemed slightly more 'incidental' than because she possessed any great power (at least in the first movie), a lot like the final girls in the earliest slasher films before it became rote, where the menfolk (and the audience?) underestimated her/them. It's like how Ash always addresses Dallas and is dismissive of her authority, yet she was trying to do the right thing from the start.

It was all part of the agenda at the time when lots of films coming out represented a female emancipation. Todays films depicting women beating bigger guys is doing the same, by reflecting a different society, when such women are capable to do so, as witnessed in real life more and more, simply because male and female look and act different than 40 years ago with different characteristics and physical development, you got lots of women that look more male than some males that look more like women, that gender reversal was not as pronounced in the 70's, these days films all over the world merely reflect that in atistic ways which was about time. Of course in fantasy films they're allowed to exeggerate the same like Spagetti westerns did for example, even though all art is always grounded by observations of a real life, some of those characters in fantasy films work because audience is not supposed to relate to them, but to be inspired by them or aspire to be like them, they function as a symbolism rather than a personality, which I think was always the case with comic book characters anyway.

Im sure this is Trumps fault somehow.
Orange man bad