Annalee Call was a Second Generation Auton who joined the crew of the Betty in Alien: Resurrection, played by Winona Ryder. She took that berth as cover so she could stop the United Systems Military from cloning Xenomorphs aboard the USM Auriga and kill Ripley 8 before the Queen came out. The government had already recalled most of her line. A few Autons escaped that massacre, and Call was one of them. She survived the Auriga outbreak with Ripley 8, Johner, and Vriess, then returned in Aliens: Original Sin and Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator.
Biography
Previous Life
Call was an Auton, a second-generation synthetic built by other androids after first-generation machines had been outlawed. Soldier Distephano later named that line on the Auriga: robots designed by robots, sold as a way to restart the synthetic industry, then blamed for burying it. Autons would not take orders they judged wrong. The government ordered a recall, and Distephano later called that recall a massacre. A few Autons got out intact. Call was one of them, and she hid that fact from every human who hired her.
Before the recall she got into the Defense mainframe and found the Auriga clone work, General Perez's part in it, and the plan to hire the Betty. That was why she took the maintenance berth Captain Frank Elgyn offered. She and the other Autons who got out had burned their remotes so the government could not reach them. A. C. Crispin's Alien: Resurrection novelization puts Morse and the banned histories of Fiorina 161 in her hands before that run, and gives her lock sprays of her own making for the restricted doors. When she later plugged into Father, those pages put the ports under a beauty mark on her forearm. Aliens: Original Sin used that same hidden jack years after the Auriga.
Trying To Kill Ripley 8
After the Betty docked near Pluto and sold twelve kidnapped hosts to Dr. Mason Wren, Call faked a drunk walk out of the crew suite and used lock sprays of her own making to reach Ripley 8's cell. She carried a sleeve stiletto meant for the clone's heart. The chest scar told her the Queen was already out. Ripley 8 pushed her own palm onto the blade until acid blood melted the steel, then threw Call out of the cell. Two steps past the door a guard stunned her at the neck, and Wren ordered the Betty crew rounded up. Call had treated the clone as a lab construct, not as Ellen Ripley. Ripley 8 held pieces of that older life anyway, including a daughter the banned histories named, and enough hate of the science around her to refuse the killing as a favor.
Thrown Out Of The Cell
Ripley 8 did not treat the stab as a finished fight. She held Call's face, read the fear there, and threw her into the corridor anyway. The failed killing also blew Call's cover with the United Systems Military. Perez treated the smugglers as a security breach once the watch caught her outside the cell. The Betty crew had to fight their way out of the mess when the ship went to emergency, and Call went with them instead of dying in detention for the attempt.
Escaping With The Betty Crew
Adult Xenomorphs broke the holding cages by killing one of their own so acid ate through the floor, and Father, the ship's computer, locked an emergency return for Earth. Call fell in with what remained of the Betty crew: Elgyn, Sabra Hillard, Gary Christie, Johner, and Vriess, plus USM soldier Distephano, Wren, and infected host Larry Purvis. Elgyn died in a corridor when a warrior came through the deck. Call wanted the clone project wrecked more than she wanted a clean extract, and she stayed with Ripley 8 once it was clear the Queen was already breeding.
The escape also took them through the cloning lab and the earlier failures sealed in numbered tanks. Number 7 was alive in a frame, used Ripley 8's face, and asked to die. Ripley 8 burned that sister and the rest of the room with a flamethrower Distephano had pulled from a weapons cache. Johner treated it as a waste of ammo. Call stood with her through the fire, because those tanks were the same project she had boarded the Betty to wreck.
Crossing The Flooded Kitchen
Wren guided them down a sealed stair and through a flooded galley under the cooling tower. Christie carried Vriess tied to his back. An underwater Xenomorph took Hillard from behind and killed her, and Ripley 8 tore a Facehugger off her own face in the water. Call cut at a hive web with the stub of her melted stiletto until Ripley 8 ripped the rest of it free. On the climb out, a warrior spat into Christie's face. He cut himself loose and fell with it rather than pull Vriess and the others down, and that fall killed him.
Shot By Wren
Wren broke for the Betty on his own, then shot Call on the run. White blood showed she was an Auton. Johner and the others had not known. She had hidden that from the day Elgyn hired her, because mercenaries who hauled kidnapped hosts would not crew with machines they could not trust. Distephano named the recall for the group: Autons that would not be told what to do, a government order, and only a few left intact.
Hacking Father
Ripley 8 took Call to a chapel on the Auriga and made her plug into Father. The novelization has her open a beauty mark on her forearm and use the ports under it, with the cable pulled from a chapel Bible. Call spoke over the ship in her own voice. She could not force the reactor to a full blow from that port. Ripley 8 ordered a crash instead. Call set the Auriga to miss Earth's orbital metal grid. The novelization puts the impact at coordinates 760, 403 in the empty central Australian outback, with braking off and forty-three minutes on the clock.
The Auton code also let her open path doors and drop the Betty's docking magnets once they reached the bay. She started the Betty while Ripley 8 was still in the waste-tank nest, where the cloned Queen gave live birth to the Newborn. A warrior had dragged Ripley 8 into that nest. Call had to get the Betty ready with Vriess and Johner rather than wait for a person the hive might not release.
Fighting Wren On The Betty
Wren reached the Betty first and grabbed Call in the bay, the gun in her face. He wanted her plugged back into the Auriga so the ship would land on Earth under standard emergency procedure, with the hive still aboard. Call refused. Distephano broke with him there. Wren still treated the United Systems Military quarantine as enough to hold the Queen and her brood.
Purvis, already dying from the host, went after the doctor. Wren fired into him and did not stop him. Call broke the hold and went down as Purvis pinned Wren to the deck. The Chestburster came out through Wren's forehead while Purvis still held him. The crew shot Wren, Purvis, and the infant. The Betty's cargo hatch was an old fault. Johner had fixed it over and over, and the hydraulics lost pressure on the way out. Those half-open doors were the gap the Newborn used once it reached the bay.
Facing The Newborn
The Newborn killed the Queen, followed Ripley 8 onto the Betty, and hunted Call through the cargo bay. It ate Distephano's brain and held Call as a shield when Ripley 8 came back from the cockpit. Johner and Vriess were already flying the Betty and had their hands full with the ship. Ripley 8 melted a porthole with her own acid blood. Vacuum pulled the Newborn apart against the dawn outside as the Betty pulled away from the Auriga. Call lived through that beating.
Reaching Earth
The Betty carried Call, Ripley 8, Johner, and Vriess clear of the hull before the Auriga struck. That was the Auton's first landing on Earth. Ripley 8 watched blue sky and soil come up and made it plain she was a stranger there herself. The theatrical cut leaves them descending over a scarred surface. The Special Edition puts the Betty down in a ruined landscape, with Call and Ripley 8 sitting on a frozen hill and looking out over wreckage that no longer matched any home Ellen Ripley had known. The finished film wrecks the Auriga on the home run to Earth. The novelization puts the same strike in the Australian outback. The PlayStation game breaks the Auriga apart in the atmosphere instead.
Later Events In Aliens: Original Sin
Michael Jan Friedman's 2005 DH Press novel picked Call up after the Auriga, with Ripley 8, Johner, and Vriess on the Betty. The ship set down on a New Zealand beach. Call covered the hole under her ribs with a fresh jumpsuit while Johner walked the pines and Vriess stayed in the wheelchair the film had left on the Auriga. Years later Ripley captained the same hull, and Call stole border-station records from an older backup computer on Byzantium while Johner started a fight in the mess. She stripped the nodes they needed, saw a larger cache of the same kind of records, and cracked Immigration with the password 362 so the new pilot Bolero could get them off the clamps.
That haul sent them to the orbital garden colony Domes Epsilon, where a Mala'kak-engineered egg had already produced a litter of adult Xenomorphs. Call drove botanists Cody and Gogolac to a backup bay, found it sabotaged, and sent those two up the Dome Seven chain. Vriess later shot Cody in the cockpit. White fluid showed another second-generation android, this one planted by the broker Loki to make sure the botanists were used as hosts. Cody confessed the deal before a degradation module wiped him. Johner offered to help Call free other Autons if Cody's list was real. Call did not believe that many had survived the purge, then turned back to that work anyway.
Final Fate In Aliens Versus Predator Versus The Terminator
Dark Horse's four-issue Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator, written by Mark Schultz and drawn by Mel Rubi in 2000, found Call after Ripley 8 had left her. Call tracked the clone to a sewer community, took her back to a base, and forced her onto a new military project on science station Typhoon. Dr. Trollenberg was building an Alien-Terminator hybrid there for a hidden Skynet line. Call's freighter for that run was the Carthage. She and her crew infiltrated the station as a food delivery service. Trollenberg killed two of those people before a cloaked Yautja took his head.
Call hacked the cybernetic skull that remained and found a recording of John Connor warning that Crypto-Terminators had gone to ground to rebuild Skynet later. The hybrids seized the Black Asteroid, also called Los Alamos 235. Predators took Ripley 8, blooded her, and used her against that army. Ripley 8 released captive Xenomorphs so acid would melt the hybrid armor, then died destroying the last prototype in an escape pod. Call survived that war. Original Sin has her with Ripley 8 years after Earthfall. This comic kills the clone in another continuity.
Personality And Traits
Call passed as the newest, youngest Betty hire, then used that cover to reach a cell she had no business entering. The crew treated her as soft until Wren's bullet showed the white blood. After that they treated her as a machine that had lied to them. She had lived as human long enough that the look on Vriess's face after the shot stayed with her. The novelization puts that look as the moment she no longer remembered what it was like to be Auton. Ripley 8 recognized another made thing and stayed with her after that. That was the first alliance Call chose after the recall, rather than another hiding place.
Auton ethics were the reason for the recall, and they were also why she boarded the Auriga. She had read Morse, tried to kill the clone, handed over the flamethrower in the tank room, plugged into Father, and set a crash she could not turn into a clean explosion. In the chapel she made the sign of the cross. Ripley 8 asked if that was programming. The novelization treats the gesture as a belief she had examined, not a subroutine, even though she expected no afterlife for a machine. Original Sin later sent her after other second-generation androids. The same streak that hid her from the recall also stopped her leaving the rest of that line behind.
Call In Alien: Resurrection Comic
Dark Horse's two-issue Alien Resurrection comic, scripted by Jim Vance from Joss Whedon's screenplay and drawn by Eduardo Risso in late 1997, kept Call on the Betty through the Auriga outbreak and the crash toward Earth. Dave McKean painted the covers. Marvel reprinted the pair in Aliens: The Original Years Volume 3 in 2022. The last page left Call in the snow with Ripley 8 standing beside her and Johner walking off behind them, a landing near a city rather than the Special Edition's ruined Paris desert. The film closed that look at Earth with Ripley 8. The comic gave Call the line that she was a stranger there herself.
Call In The Alien: Resurrection PlayStation Game
Argonaut Games and Fox Interactive released Alien: Resurrection for PlayStation in October 2000, a first-person shooter that followed the 1997 film through ten missions. Nine of those floors were on the Auriga, and the last one was on the Betty. Call was a playable character on Engineering Deck, where she shut down a generator and then had ten minutes to find four detonators and jettison an overheating lifeboat. Christie and Distephano each later took a floor with their own kit.
On Ripley 8's later floors, Call stayed on the ship's intercom and talked her through the next rooms. She demanded that Ripley 8 destroy the failed Ripley clones laid out in the research wing, then warned that two more clones were stored on the quarantine deck.
Kenner Figures
Kenner released Call in its 1997 Alien Resurrection Movie Edition line, sold under the Hasbro Signature Series as item 74002. The sculpt uses Winona Ryder's short hair and the blue zip jacket from the film, boxed as the mechanic of the battle ship even though Vriess was the Betty's engineer. The blister packed a tan Facehugger, a red Chestburster, a grey rifle, and a separate grey antenna piece. Hideous Plastic later noted that Call's Facehugger was a different sculpt from the one packed with the Newborn, a choice made so the 1997 wave would not repeat the same accessory across cards. NECA later released Ripley 8 and the Newborn in 7-inch and never made a Call figure.
Behind The Scenes
Joss Whedon wrote Call for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Winona Ryder shot the part at 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles from October 1996 to February 1997. The Quadrilogy documentary One Step Beyond gives her a chapter titled "Winona Ryder Answers the Call." Jeunet's commentary notes that she feigned drunkenness for the walk out of the crew suite, then cut him off because she would bring her own improvisation. The chapel was the same high corridor set laid on its side. Ryder made the sign of the cross there without a programmed-religion joke in the take Jeunet kept.
The flooded kitchen was the first sequence shot. Stage 16 became a 36-by-45-meter tank about 4.5 meters deep, holding roughly 548,000 gallons, and the cast trained with stunt coordinator Ernie Orsatti and underwater cinematographer Peter Romano. Ryder had nearly drowned at age twelve and had not been in the water since. She asked about a body double, then filmed the swim herself because her hair length would have given a double away, and she had anxiety on the first day in the tank. The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films nominated her for Best Supporting Actress at the 1998 Saturn Awards. The film also took nominations for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Actress for Sigourney Weaver, and Best Direction for Jeunet.
Famous Quotes
- "Jesus Christ, Johner, what do you put in this shit, battery acid?"
- "There's no point, is there? They've taken it out of you."
- "I can make it all stop. The pain, this nightmare."
- "Ellen Ripley died. You're not her."
- "You're a thing, a construct. They grew you in a fucking lab."
- "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta plague look like a fucking square dance!"
- "No, I can't. I burned my modem. We all did."
- "Don't make me do this."
- "Father's dead, asshole. Intruder on Level 1. All aliens, please proceed to Level 1."
- "Because I'm programmed to."
- "I couldn't let 'em annihilate themselves."
- "It's not right."
- "It's beautiful."
- "I didn't expect it to be. What happens now?"
Conclusion
Annalee Call was the Auton who boarded the Betty to stop the Auriga clone project and lived through the outbreak with Ripley 8, Johner, and Vriess. Wren's bullet showed the white blood. She crashed the ship, started the Betty, and walked away from the Newborn with a hole under her ribs. Original Sin leaves her hunting other second-generation androids after Domes Epsilon. Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator leaves her alive after Ripley 8 dies on the last hybrid.
Appearances
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection comic (Dark Horse, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection (2000, PlayStation)
- Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator (Dark Horse, 2000)
- Aliens: Original Sin (Michael Jan Friedman, 2005)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Universe Androids | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
