Sigourney Weaver has been dubbed “the Queen of Sci-Fi,” and she’s lived up to this title by not only starring in such classic of science fiction cinema as Avatar and the Alien franchise, but also playfully ribbing her own status as a sci-fi icon in comedies like Ghostbusters, Galaxy Quest, and Paul. She’s also an incredibly talented actor. How often does an actor get nominated for an Oscar for starring in a blockbuster sequel? It’s practically unheard of. But when Weaver starred in Aliens, she received a nod for Best Actress. So, here are Sigourney Weaver’s 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes.
TIE: A Monster Calls (86%)
Before he hammered the final nail into the Jurassic Park franchise’s coffin with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, J.A. Bayona directed this family-oriented fantasy drama. It tells the E.T.-esque story of a boy’s burgeoning friendship with a tree-like monster played by Liam Neeson. Sigourney Weaver plays the kid’s mean grandma, with whom he has a very contentious relationship. A Monster Calls may have tanked at the box office, but it deserved to reach a much wider audience, because it had a positive message – that not everyone who’s different is necessarily a monster – and it was also just a fun, well-made movie.
TIE: Cedar Rapids (86%)
This quirky little comedy came and went without making much of a splash at the box office, but there was some pretty impressive talent in the cast. Ed Helms stars as an insurance salesman who’s sent to a small Midwestern town to represent his company at an annual convention. Sigourney Weaver co-stars as one of his old teachers, who he’s now in a sexual relationship with. Unlike director Miguel Arteta’s other, more darkly themed work, Cedar Rapids is a pretty much straightforward comedy, but it stands out by blending R-rated crassness with an honest sweetness that is often lost in Hollywood comedies.
The Year of Living Dangerously (87%)
This movie from director Peter Weir combines the romantic drama with the geopolitical thriller. It’s set on the eve of a major coup during the overthrow of President Sukarno, following a bunch of foreign correspondents stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia. The movie is framed through the love affair shared by an Australian journalist played by Mel Gibson and a British Embassy officer played by Sigourney Weaver. With Weir’s focus on the love story detracting from any kind of political commentary, this movie doesn’t feel like a searing dramatization of an important international event, but it is still a well-crafted piece of cinema.
Galaxy Quest (90%)
The first two names in sci-fi parody are Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest. Whereas Spaceballs is a straight-up spoof of Star Wars and its incessant merchandising, Galaxy Quest is more meta than that. It’s about the cast of a Star Trek-like series getting beamed up by an alien crew that believes the tapes of their show to be historical documents of Earth’s intergalactic victories.
They want these burned-out actors who are constantly pestered by nerds for autographs – played by Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, and other actors in the same predicament – to win a cosmic war for them. It’s a hilarious satire that never comes off as mean-spirited.
Finding Dory (94%)
Sigourney Weaver only had a small role in Finding Dory, the belated sequel to Finding Nemo, but it was pretty memorable, because she played herself. The plot of the sequel involved the characters leaving the ocean behind for the Marine Life Institute in Dory’s search for her parents. Weaver provides the voiceover for the institute, welcoming guests. Apparently, the movie originally took place at a SeaWorld-like location, but then the filmmakers saw Blackfish and witnessed the torture that SeaWorld itself puts its enclosed wildlife through and instantly changed their minds and made it more of a research facility with a focus on conservation.
TIE: Dave (95%)
This political comedy was based on an original idea by screenwriter Gary Ross, the guy who would go on to direct The Hunger Games and Ocean’s 8. It stars Kevin Kline in dual roles as the U.S. President and an average guy named Dave. Dave runs a temp agency in Washington, but he has a side gig impersonating the President. At first, he thinks he’s been recruited to double for the President as a matter of national security, but as it turns out, he’s being used to cover up an affair that the President has been having. Sigourney Weaver co-stars as the First Lady.
TIE: WALL-E (95%)
Pixar’s WALL-E becomes more and more relevant every year. As we continue to fill the world with trash and disrupt the climate and impose an all-too-soon apocalypse on ourselves, the Earth will look like it does in WALL-E in a few years’ time. The only difference is that we won’t have a giant floating mall to escape into space in. Sigourney Weaver voices the ship’s computer, and director Andrew Stanton joked to her that she’d gone from playing Ellen Ripley to “Mother,” which was the name of the Nostromo’s retro computer in Alien. WALL-E has the same high quality of emotional storytelling that we’ve come to expect from Pixar.
TIE: Ghostbusters (97%)
The original Ghostbusters movie from the ‘80s still stands as a masterpiece today. The central cast of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson all share impeccable on-screen chemistry and improvised a ton of hysterical dialogue. And the movie utilizes its premise brilliantly. The premise’s hook is that these are just regular guys who are called upon to save New York. They’re not gun-toting badasses like the characters in the 2016 reboot – they’re completely unprepared to tackle the paranormal threat they’re faced with. Sigourney Weaver played Dana, Murray’s love interest who gets possessed by the main ghost, Zuul.
TIE: Alien (97%)
When Ridley Scott was hired to direct Alien, he could’ve phoned in a by-the-numbers B-movie. Instead, he took the premise of a haunted house movie set on a space station to bring out the best of the sci-fi genre and the best of the horror genre in one of the most masterfully crafted hybrid-genre movies ever made.
The original script didn’t specify any genders for the characters, with the idea being that they would be interchangeable in a utopian distant-future setting. By choosing to make the Ripley character a woman, Scott inadvertently changed the course of female representation in action cinema. Of course, all credit goes to Sigourney Weaver for making an icon out of the character.
Aliens (99%)
James Cameron took the reins from Ridley Scott to direct the sequel to Alien. Where the original was a sci-fi horror movie, focusing on a space crew’s intimate, suspenseful struggle against one xenomorph, Cameron made the sequel as a sci-fi action movie, telling the story of a military unit’s spectacular, large-scale assault against dozens of xenomorphs. He knew he couldn’t top the original, so he decided to do something different entirely. And it worked out. Alien and Aliens are different enough that they both stand among the greatest science fiction films ever made, distinct from one another, while still being tied together by an overarching narrative.