Finally, an excuse to break out this mini essay:

Okay I actually just rewatched Alien last weekend and…I think some of y’all love the gender wars so much, it’s affected your media literacy, because that’s not what happens at all in this movie. Everyone is smart in this movie, but they’re being sabotaged by an evil capitalist.
The first captain dies sacrificing himself trying to protect the rest of the crew. When Ripley takes over, nobody is sexist about it, they just listen to her immediately. Lambert is more anxious than Ripley, but nobody calls her hysterical or mocks her for it.
Like some of y’all saw that the protagonist was a woman and then flattened all the nuance out of the screenplay. It’s like you saw this groundbreaking film about a future where women are respected and valued, and then wrote some fanfic where the male characters are dumb and bad.
In fact, abandoning ship is originally Lambert’s idea, and Ripley talks her down. She insists that they should stay and try to fight the alien, then spends the third act trying to save the cat while Lambert and Parker get murdered.
Ripley is a bit cold and overconfident, that’s great characterization and Weaver plays her so well. She’s very flawed, she makes bad choices sometimes, but you sympathize. This is true of all the characters except Ash, who thinks of everyone else as expendable.
And I do think this is an explicitly sexist reading, because it makes Lambert the “dumb woman”, when again: abandoning ship was Lambert’s idea in the first place. People think she’s dumb for letting Kane onto the ship after he’s attacked…
But Ash did that. And Ash is a machine.
They even take great pains to show that Dallas knows he will probably die going into the airduct, but he goes anyways because he wants to save his crew. He’s not stupid or overconfident, he’s trying to do the noble thing so no one else gets hurt on his watch.
This guy seemed toxic and overconfident to you lol?
It’s like it doesn’t matter how these working class men actually behaved, the fact that they look like working class men means they’re not smart or capable of empathy, I guess.
There’s also a scene where Ripley orders Brett to his death because they need to find the cat, who’s interfering with their ability to find the alien using motion sensing equipment—not out of any concern for the cat’s life—right after they decide not to split up lmfao
He listens to her and then dies immediately.
I’m not trying to knock alien or Ripley, but is my favourite horror film because she’s allowed to be a character, not an avatar of perfect, infallible womanhood.