Word: fighting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arriving at their destination, they find the colonists' space station deserted, except for Newt (Carrie Henn), a traumatized child who is the only survivor. The first film had merely mobilized Ripley's basic fight-or-flight instincts. The presence of Newt allows her to discover stronger, higher impulses, gives her positive rather than negative emotions to act upon. The audience too has a much stronger rooting interest in Ripley, and that gives the picture resonances unusual in a popcorn epic...
...largest function of all these people is to provide a bustling background for Ripley's quieter, more intense development. In the first film she was a smart, self-contained careerist, essentially a reactive character, desperately fighting against something but not for anybody or anything except her own life. The sequel gives her something, someone wonderful to fight...
Ripley's bonding with Newt is inevitable, as Hurd says, "because they were both survivors of their own particular group's encounter with extraterrestrial species. They knew what they were up against, and the others didn't. In Alien, people had to fight or die. Now Ripley could save herself but chooses to fight to save Newt." It is, in part, the unexpectedness and depth of her feelings that give the film its propulsive power, fueling the final hour to at least two more heart-stopper endings than the average thriller...
...city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns and escorted by about 160 U.S. soldiers, had been flown into the South American jungle to assist Bolivian authorities in wiping out that country's production of cocaine...
Mills does not belittle the tactics of the U.S. fight against drugs so much as he decries their halfhearted nature. Last year, he notes, the Reagan Administration told Bolivia that to qualify for $14.4 million in economic assistance, it would have to eradicate 10,000 acres of coca crops, roughly 9% ; of the total. Bolivia failed to do so, claiming extenuating circumstances. Yet the U.S. withheld just half the money. "The U.S. did have an eradication program in Bolivia," says Mills, "but the Bolivians didn't pay any attention to it." As a result of many such situations, he says...