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Traditionally, the action genre has been among Hollywood's most sexist. The Wikipedia entry for the "action film" genre features a collage of eight "action stars"—Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wesley Snipes, and Jackie Chan—without name-checking a single action heroine. Many noted classics of the genre feature sexism as a matter of course (see, for one of many examples, the mind-boggling scene in 1964's Goldfinger in which 007 dismisses a bikini-clad conquest by slapping her buttock and saying "man talk").

But while big-budget action films of the 1950s and 1960s echoed the sexism of their time, something subversive was happening in the fringes of the film industry. In the seminal Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Professor Carol J. Clover discusses the significant feminist implications of the contemporary horror genre's "final girl"—the all-but-inevitable "last woman standing," whom the (primarily male) audience is encouraged to identify with as she faces down the killer. For the past five decades, the action genre has undergone a similar but less remarked-upon shift, as female characters have slowly but steadily evolved beyond the universal "hostages, victim, or conquest" archetype and became the heroines of their own action sagas.

It's impossible to talk about cinematic action heroines without talking about the most iconic, and still by far the best: Ellen Ripley, the lead character of all four Alien movies and, according to the American Film Institute, the eighth-greatest protagonist in American cinematic history. Even if you consider the original Alien film more horror than action, Ripley paved the way for nuanced-but-tough heroines—so well-written and acted that the character wasn't just a benchmark for female-led action films, she was a benchmark for the action genre, period.

There's a reason that Alien earned three direct sequels, and that Ridley Scott seems to be mining similar territory with the Noomi Rapace-starring quasi-prequel to the Alien franchise, Prometheus, which hits theaters later this year. The Alien movies (or, at least, the franchise's first two installments) hold the pivotal lesson for any studio that wants to make a successful female-led action movie: Don't ignore the unique qualities of womanhood; embrace them. Ripley's immortal cry to the Alien Queen in Aliens—"Get away from her, you bitch!"—is so powerful because it's the cry of a mother protecting surrogate daughter Newt from the threats of a dangerous world. Motherhood remains a common touchstone for the best of the genre. The underrated The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) features a former assassin grappling with how to raise her daughter, and The Bride's quest for revenge in the Kill Bill movies is, ultimately, a quest to reclaim her right to be a mother.