Moreover, with Aliens being a sequel, you knew that they wouldn't kill off Ripley (well, not James Cameron *g*), or the little girl (cute kids don't get killed in American action movies), the two characters one did identify with. On the Nostromo, no one was safe.

That's an excellent point. The viewer allows him/herself to give a damn about the characters who seem most likely to survive. And very little character development is 'wasted' on the cannon fodder. Although, to be fair, with a significantly larger cast, there isn't as much room for character development (not unless you want the movie to be about four hours long). It definitely means, though, that when a character who we don't know well dies, that there's a lot less of an impact.

(what is it with James Cameron and female characters who are total mama bears, anyway?)

He's really good at that, isn't he?*g* Mind you, given the overwhelming father-son obsession such a lot of other characters have, this is a blessed relief.

Bwahahaha! Yeah, movies are so often a vehicle for the directors to work out their daddy issues, aren't they? I remember going to this one action movie with my boyfriend at the time, in which the seminal event of the main character's life was the death of his father in an accident, and that was what drove his every subsequent action. But the thing was, it was obvious that his mother wasn't around either, and why she wasn't was never even *mentioned*. Was she dead? Were they estranged? No clue, as she was utterly irrelevant and invisible. Anyway, my BF leaned over at one particularly tedious moment of 'psychological insight' and said "Maybe if we donated the price of our tickets to a therapy fund for the director he'd stop making movies."

So, given that in many movies, especially action movies (which makes sense because those are supposed to appeal to a male demographic) women as mothers are either invisible or judged much more harshly than men as fathers, James Cameron's mama bear issues are considerably more palatable to me than issues which result in women either being erased from the movie or treated merely as trophies. At least I get to see strong female characters on the screen.

That said, I do think it's interesting that nearly all his strong heroines are motivated by love of a child, and that the tougher they are, the more sexless they are. It's like the toughness of these women has to be transmuted through something selfless and safe, like love of a child. Ripley isn't *quite* sexless, there's a mildly flirtatious vibe with Hicks in the gun scene, but she seems to view him far more as a potential surrogate daddy for Newt than as a romantic/sexual partner for herself. Her interactions with others are still all about Newt and what sexuality she does have is harnessed to her desire to be a good surrogate mommy. The same theme is seen even more explicitly in Terminator 2, where Sarah is extremely strong but interacts with others in a totally sexless way. We know she's had boyfriends because her son tells us so, but he portrays it as her shacking up with anybody she could learn from, so as to protect her son. When maternal sexuality *does* exist, it's presented as self-sacrificial, as another weapon in the maternal arsenal, rather than something positive (mind you, that could be a child's eye view, a child who's uncomfortable with the notion of his mother as a sexual being, but I doubt we're meant to take it that way. For one thing, everything else John says about his mother is true, and for another, Cameron's just not that subtle).

And of Cameron's triumvirate of strong women (Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Lindsey Brigman of The Abyss) the one who gets the least sympathetic treatment is Lindsey, who just happens to be the only one without a child or surrogate child. She's still heroic, but her behaviour is frequently coded as 'bitchy' rather than 'tough'. She doesn't have the but-it's-all-for-my-kid excuse for her strength.