40 Years Later, James Cameron's Alien Sequel Has The Best Line In The Franchise

James Cameron’s Aliens might be the single greatest action blockbuster ever made. It has the thrill of action spectacle, the escapism of otherworldly sci-fi imagery, and the emotional hook of a surrogate mother-daughter relationship. After Ridley Scott’s seminal original Alien film had revolutionized the horror genre, Cameron knew he couldn’t make a scarier horror movie, so he pivoted to making an all-out action-adventure epic, and ended up revolutionizing that genre.

Aliens is a masterclass in directing — the way Cameron builds tension in the scene where Ripley and Newt are trapped with a facehugger is on par with Hitchcock — but its script is also a masterclass in screenwriting. The introduction of Paul Reiser’s evil suit Carter Burke is about as close to a perfect character introduction as you can get: it’s brisk and succinct, it conveys all the information we need, and it tells us everything we need to know about his slimy personality.

It’s got some really great dialogue, too. There are so many good lines in Cameron’s script, from Private Vasquez’s retort to being asked if she’s ever been mistaken for a man (“No, have you?”) to Newt’s haunted, traumatized tidbit about the xenomorphs’ habits (“They mostly come out at night... mostly...”). Ripley’s line about “which species is worse,” comparing the xenomorphs’ bloodthirsty survival instincts to Burke’s callous corporate tactics, is a really pointed piece of social commentary wedged in the middle of a gun-toting soldiers-versus-aliens popcorn movie.

But the greatest line in Aliens, and the greatest line in the entire Alien saga, is Ripley’s quip directed at the xenomorph queen. As she approaches the queen in an exosuit, Ripley cries out, “Get away from her, you b***h!”

How Ripley's "Get Away From Her" Line In Aliens Became So Iconic

Although Avatar: Fire and Ash was met with a more mixed reaction than its predecessors, there’s been a lot of love for James Cameron this year. Since Aliens is celebrating its 40th anniversary and Terminator 2 is celebrating its 35th anniversary, the two finest films of Cameron’s career are back in the limelight. All these years later, “Get away from her, you b***h!” remains one of the most memorable moments from Aliens — the line was even reused (really awkwardly) in Alien: Romulus — but what makes it so iconic?

Part of it is the delivery; Oscar-nominated Sigourney Weaver’s impassioned reading of the line is just as iconic as the line itself. Part of it is the image it’s paired with; Cameron is still having fun with exosuits to this day, and in Aliens’ climactic sequence, it was a great way to level the playing field with the queen. But above all, I think audiences responded to the inherent humor of Ripley calling a giant, ravenous, extraterrestrial monster a “b***h.” It points to Ripley’s humanness; she might be at the edge of the universe, fighting an alien, but she’s also just a mom trying to protect her daughter from a mean, aggressive, volatile b***h.

Alien's "Get Away From Her" Scene Is The Best Representation Of Ripley

The “Get away from her, you b***h!” moment perfectly encapsulates Ripley as a character. You could point to her saving Jones the cat in the first Alien as being symbolic of her heroism, but Ripley wasn’t really rounded out into a fully fledged human being until Cameron wrote a more specific version of the character in Aliens.

All the Alien characters were written unisex in the original film, so they were all written as a blank slate. But in Aliens, Cameron took Ripley’s determination and compassion from the original film and made them a component of her maternal instincts as the mother of a daughter, and “Get away from her, you b***h!” is the best representation of that new version of Ripley: a badass MFer.