Analysis of Myth

Identify gross constituent units in the story below.   Try to organize them into horizontal and vertical columns like those Lévi-Strauss made for the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Study of Myth."   Are there mediators in this myth?  What do they mediate?  Are they successful?

Aliens

In the summer of 1986, Aliens, the long-awaited sequel to the popular sci-fi horror movie, Alien, arrived in theaters to once again frighten and excite hundreds of thousands of movie viewers.

    The movie begins as a lone spacecraft incubating a woman named Ripley, who is the only survivor of the alien of the previous movie, and her cat, Jonesy, floats through space.  Another group of humans accidentally find the spacecraft and return Ripley to Earth, where doctors revive her and Jonesy after their 57 years of space sleep.  Ripley then informs the company she works for how she and her crew had landed on an unexplored planet and picked up an alien.   It had gestated inside one of her crew members to create a monster that hunted and killed each crew member but her.  She survived by blowing up the ship and escaping in the emergency pod.   However, the company does not believe her story because the planet has recently been inhabited by colonists, who are running machines that make the air breathable by humans.  The company fires Ripley, and she begins working as a cargo hauler, operating large robots that move the cargo.  However, every night she has nightmares about gestating an alien.  Eventually the company sends a representative, Burke, and Lt. Gorman of the Colonial Marine Corps to persuade Ripley to accompany a unit of marines to the alien planet because the company has lost contact with their colony.  They offer her a return to flight officer status, but she only accepts when Burke tells her that they are not going to study the aliens, but kill them.

    The marines, Burke, and Ripley travel to the planet via space sleep, which keeps humans in a state of suspended animation during travel.  As they wake up, the marines emerge from their womb-like beds.  They complain about their jobs and become suspicious of Ripley, the outsider.  The marines include 20 men and 3 women.   The primary characters are Vasquez, a tough-acting Latina, Hudson, a smart-ass man, and Hicks, a quiet, cautious man.  During breakfast on the ship, the marines joke about the mission and notice how the new lieutenant (Gorman) seems too proud to eat with the rest of the marines.  He sits instead at another table with Ripley, Burke, and Bishop, an android.  Ripley, upon meeting Bishop, objects to the presence of the android, because the android on her last mission tried to kill her and her crew.   After breakfast, the lieutenant briefs the marines on their mission.  Ripley starts to give an account of her experiences with the alien, but Vasquez cuts her off by insisting that she only needs to know where the aliens are to kill them.  The rest of the marines appear to be just as ignorant and dismissive of the briefing, except Hicks, who listens to everyone.  Ripley finally earns respect from the marines when she operates one of the robot fork lifts during mission preparation, and the unit leaves on a shuttle to the planet.

    On the "drop down" to the planet the marines are disgusted to hear that it is only Lt. Gorman's second mission.  To the rest of the group, the mission seems so simple that they joke about it and the rest of their experiences.  Once on the planet, the unit finds that all the colonists are missing and that the aliens are the reason.  While searching the area, the marines find a little girl, who tries to hide from them until Ripley chases after and catches her.  The marines try to interrogate the girl, but she does not say anything except to Ripley, who washes the girl's face and gives her hot chocolate.  The marines, considering the girl a lost cause, start searching the colony computer for answers as to what happened.  The girl, Newt, tells Ripley that the aliens killed everyone, and she has been hiding in vents in the complex.   The computer then tells the marines that the colonists are all in the reactor part of the complex.  Everyone suits up and the group drives a tank to the site.  The marines start a search, with the lieutenant commanding from inside the tank, able to see what is happening through camera and audio equipment carried by the marines.  The group finds the colonists dead.  They had been cocooned and used for gestation of the aliens.   They witness an alien burst out of a colonist's body.  All of a sudden, the aliens attack the marines.  Everyone becomes confused as some marines are killed and the others are cut off from the lieutenant.  Vasquez takes charge and starts fighting and killing aliens.  What is left of the group follow suit, deciding to retreat to the tank.   Meanwhile in the tank, the lieutenant does not know what to do, so Ripley drives the tank against the lieutenant's orders to get the troops.

    The remaining three marines, Vasquez, Hudson, and Hicks, fight their way back to the tank, and the group escapes from the complex.  Since the lieutenant was knocked unconscious during the escape, Hicks takes command.  Despite Burke's argument, Hicks takes Ripley's advice to take off from the planet, nuke the planet, and wait until a rescue team can come.  Vasquez and Hudson are now quiet and take orders from Ripley and Hicks, who make a plan to barricade a section of the complex and wait for rescue.  As they prepare to hole up, Ripley tucks Newt into bed and tries to comfort her, though neither of them feels much better.  Ripley then confronts Burke, who she learns sent the colonists to investigate the aliens and who has tried to get Ripley's help to bring back specimens for the company's bioweapons division.  She refuses and tells Burke that she will ruin him for his actions when they get back to Earth.  Meanwhile, a mechanical problem arises: the fighting in the reactor earlier produced a leak that will cause the reactor to detonate in four hours.  After an argument over a solution, Bishop volunteers to leave the complex to align an antenna to send another aircraft from the ship hovering above the planet.  After he leaves, Ripley checks on Newt and takes a nap with her.  When she wakes up, she notices that Burke has released two specimens in the room to impregnate her and Newt.  Ripley sets off an alarm, the remaining marines save Ripley and Newt, and the members of the group decide to execute Burke.

    However, they are stopped when machines warn them that the aliens have gotten through the barricade.  Burke runs into another room and blocks it off to save himself, but an alien waiting in the room kills him.  Ripley asks Newt how they can escape, and Newt shows the group to the air vents and leads them to the air strip where Bishop is landing the aircraft.  Hudson is killed by an alien along the way, and Vasquez and Lt. Gorman, who are trapped by aliens in the vents, blow up a grenade, killing themselves and the aliens around them. In the shock from the blast Newt falls down an adjoining vent to an alien who takes her to be cocooned.  Ripley leads Hicks, who is injured, to the waiting aircraft, and informs Bishop that she is going back for Newt.

    Ripley then prepares herself by loading up with ammunition and explosives, and, carrying a locator to find Newt, heads into the reactor.  She finds Newt and takes her out of the cocoon, but as they try to escape, they come upon the alien mother, who is laying eggs.  She is immobile, being attached to a large egg-laying mechanism, and she seems to allow Ripley to pass as long as she does not destroy any eggs.  Ripley and Newt start to leave, but an alien starts to come after them, so Ripley destroys all the eggs and runs away carrying Newt.  The alien mother rips herself away from her birthing mechanism, and pursues Ripley and Newt to the ship, where Ripley, Newt, Bishop, and Hicks take off as the reactor blows up.  When they land on the ship, Ripley has a new respect for Bishop.  However, though they think they are safe, the alien mother comes out of the ship and rips Bishop in half.  She then goes after Newt, but Ripley draws her attention so Newt can hide.  Ripley then gets into the robot forklift and wrestles with the alien mother.  The fight ends as Ripley flushes the alien mother into space.  In the last scene of the movie Ripley, who has fixed Bishop and attended to Hicks' injuries, tucks Newt into bed and wishes everyone good dreams for their space sleep back to Earth.  

Summary by Johanna Chock, S.B., M.D. (1992)