I had a totally different take on the Ripley vs. Queen Alien battle.
>> Ripley managed to avoid all of those traps, and while the movie
>> does have Ripley fighting another female (thus reducing the
>> end battle to a "cat fight") over a child (appealing to the idea of
>> "maternal instincts" causing her ruthlessness), she's still a better
>> feminist role model than most movie women at the time.
I don't think the end battle was written or portrayed as a cat fight:
each female feels she must destroy the other to ensure her and her
species' continued existence. The story isn't about war as we have
fought it for millennia: the fight to control land, fuel, wealth, and so
on. The story is about the right to procreate at the expense of other
life and the right to destroy other life to ensure the continued
existence of one's own. I think for the story to work, to get to us the
way it does, it has to touch our most primal, instinctual nature. The
plot may be very human-centric in its view of procreation, but, hey, it
was made for a human audience!
And since when did maternal instincts become not feminist?
I was also disappointed with the third movie, but only because I could
see so much potential just sitting there, nestled in the dialogue,
ignored in favor of MTV-like cinematography. The movie starts out with
this great question: if one too many male chromosomes makes a guy too
violent, predatory for peaceable society, then is he also incapable of
sacrificing for and protecting the society that outcast him? Are we,
both male and female, limited by our biology? It could have been cool,
but it fell flat.
-LeAnne
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:31 PDT