Awesome / Alien³

• Dillon's Dying Moment of Awesome. When he notices the Alien climbing out to follow the two of them, he quickly decides to remain in the pit, taunting the Alien all the while that it isn't fighting him hard enough: "C'mon! Is that hard as you fight? Come on, motherfucker!"
  • "Fuck You!!!"
• Ripley committing suicide so that Weyland-Yutani can't get their hands on the Alien, essentially giving them the finger in doing so.
  • Even better. It bursts out of her chest while she's falling, so she grabs it and holds it to her as she falls into the incinerator.
  • The 2003 cut doesn't have the queen chestbursting, but it does have Ripley telling off the Company in a quiet, dignified way: "You're all crazy."
  • In the end, what killed Ellen Ripley? Aliens? No. Marines? No. Weyland Yutani? No. It took herself to kill herself - everything else tried and failed.
    • Even more awesome about this very fact? The only way to kill the titular alien is to kill Ripley herself. See, Ellen Ripley needs the alien, and vice versa. Ripley has outsmarted the alien twice over the course of 60 years, and now it's official that even a fucking chestburster inside of her won't stop Ripley. Why? Because the alien itself has the most personal relationship with her, of anyone. Ripley made her duplicity clear to the Xenomorph queen, and all her years of experience had made her unafraid of death- in fact, she is basically thrilled at the thought of dying just to rub it into the alien race. So after a number of years of death, misery, and what not, Ripley dies just to say "fuck you" to the very thing trying to gaslight her into submission. And it's fucking incredible.
• Ripley and Dillon's speeches to the other convicts about how they're all going to die sometime, but they can either go out on their knees whimpering, or on their feet, fighting.
  • What makes this moment so awe-inspiring is how Dillon manages to rally the other prisoners to fight for a common goal and risk their lives despite the prison population basically being described as rapists, murderers, and child rapists, essentially the dregs of human scoiety and the worst parts of humanity, all showing valor and bravery in the face of a monster that wants them all dead.
  • Also Dillon's Big Damn Heroes moment when he rescues Ripley from attempted gang rape—and beats the everloving hell out of the cons responsible.
    • "Take off. I gotta 're-educate' some of the brothers! We're gonna discuss some matters of the spirit"
    • Only a mild beating. You know, breaking some bones, rupturing some tendons. Some religious re-education.
• Aaron attacking Bishop with a pipe to the head, after one of Bishop's men shot Morse, finally standing up to Weyland-Yutani after being a submissive slave all this time.
• In the Assembly Cut, Ripley's first plan against the creature did work, they actually got the creature trapped.
• So, About that unused script William Gibson did for the film...
• The third time Andrews does a "Rumor Control" speech, still not believing in "The Dragon," the alien grabs him from an airshaft. ...which is a pretty effective way to settle the rumors.