Ron Johner was a mercenary on the Betty, the smuggling ship that delivered kidnapped hosts to the USM Auriga in Alien: Resurrection, played by Ron Perlman. He was a scarred, hard-drinking bully who dropped a knife into a crewmate's paralyzed leg for fun and came on to Ripley 8 in the Auriga gym until she beat him. When the ship's cloned Xenomorphs broke out, he crossed the Auriga with the clone, Annalee Call, Vriess, and the other survivors, and hung upside down from a ladder to shoot an adult Xenomorph off his crewmates. He then helped Vriess fly the Betty down to Earth as one of four survivors, and he returned in A. C. Crispin's novelization and in Aliens: Original Sin, which ended with him alive aboard the Betty after Ripley 8's crew destroyed an infested garden colony.
Biography
Earlier Life
The film never explains where Johner came from. A. C. Crispin's novelization fills in part of that history. He had flown with Gary Christie, pilot Sabra Hillard, mechanic Vriess, and Captain Frank Elgyn longer than anyone else on the Betty, and the five of them had worked as mercenaries before Vriess was paralyzed. The newest hire, Call, did not know his first name, and the novelization describes him as a tall, heavy man with pale blue eyes and a ragged scar across his face. S. D. Perry's 2014 Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report later gave him the first name Ron and the serial number FYY3289.
That scar came from the same fight that crippled Vriess. On a swampy world called Kawlang, shrapnel lodged in Vriess's spine, and he begged the others to leave him and save themselves. Elgyn refused, Hillard tied Vriess onto Christie's back, and Johner complained the whole way out, swearing he would haunt Vriess if the rescue got them all killed. An ambush hit the group just before they got clear, and Johner's face was cut open. He blamed Vriess for ruining his looks, and the two men were never on easy terms again.
Arriving On The Auriga
As the Betty closed on the Auriga, Johner stood on a catwalk above the engine room while Call and Vriess worked below. He dropped his knife into Vriess's leg, and when Vriess finally noticed it, Johner laughed and pointed out that the mechanic had not felt anything. Call pulled the knife out and refused to hand it back. The novelization has her snap the blade off between two metal supports. Johner warned her not to push him, and he told her she would learn he was the wrong man to cross if she stayed with the crew.
The Betty docked with the United Systems Military ship to sell its cargo of kidnapped sleepers to General Perez and Dr. Mason Wren. Soldiers searched the crew for weapons at the airlock. Johner opened his coat for them, and the thermos on his belt passed as a flask of home brew. The novelization reveals what the search missed. A revolver was hidden inside that thermos.
Meeting Ripley 8
While the Betty crew waited out their stay, they came across Ripley 8 shooting baskets alone in the Auriga gym. Johner walked up to the tall stranger, offered her a game of one-on-one, and followed it with a crude suggestion about other indoor sports. When he tried to take the ball, she knocked him down. In the novelization she drove an elbow into his stomach and punched him hard enough to send him sliding across the floor into a stack of punching bags.
Christie came in to help, and the clone beat him as well, then caught Johner in a headlock when he went back at her. She threw the ball over her shoulder from far out and sank it while the crew watched, and the scientists called her away. In the novelization, Johner asked what she was, and Ripley 8 told Dr. Wren only that he smelled.
Arrest And Outbreak
That night Johner drank his home brew with Christie and Call in front of a shopping channel. Call asked if he put battery acid in it, and he answered that it was only for color. After Call failed to kill Ripley 8 in her cell, Wren and a squad of soldiers came for the crew in the mess hall and accused them of smuggling a terrorist aboard a military ship. Elgyn denied it, and the confrontation turned into a shootout. In the novelization, a soldier's shot blew the top off Johner's thermos, the hidden revolver dropped into his hand, and he later took soldier Distephano's gun.
The novelization also has Johner call for Call to be shot as a mole. When the Xenomorphs broke out of their cells, he wanted to head straight back to the Betty without Vriess. Elgyn was killed when a warrior pulled him through the deck. Johner wanted to hide and let the army deal with the creatures until he learned the soldiers were dead. He then turned his gun on Wren, since the crew no longer needed the doctor. Distephano stepped in front of Wren, and the novelization has Call stop the killing.
Crossing The Auriga
Ripley 8 caught up with the survivors. When she asked who she had to sleep with to get off the ship, Johner offered himself but not the ship. He wanted to leave Vriess behind to save time, and Hillard told him that nobody would be left, not even him. The group learned that Father, the ship's computer, was taking the Auriga home to Earth. Johner called Earth a dump, and Original Sin later notes that he had never seen it for himself.
As the group moved on, Johner asked the clone if she had faced these creatures before, and she said she had died. He did not like that answer. In the cloning lab, Ripley 8 found her failed predecessors and burned them with a flamethrower. Johner called it a waste of ammunition and decided it must be a woman's thing. The group then found Larry Purvis, a worker the Betty had kidnapped on his way to a nickel refinery, with a Chestburster growing inside him. Johner did not want the thing hatching anywhere near him, and when Call took charge of Purvis, he asked who had put her in charge.
The Flooded Kitchen
Below the cooling tower, the route to the freight elevator ran through a flooded kitchen. Christie tied Vriess to his back, the same way the crew had carried him out of Kawlang, and the group swam the length of the galley holding their breath. Partway across, Johner saw two swimming Xenomorphs chasing them. He fired underwater and blew one apart, and the other took Hillard.
The exit was a trap. A web covered the surface of the pool, and Xenomorph eggs waited above it. Johner shouted that it was an ambush and dove back under. Ripley 8 pulled a Facehugger off her face in the water and tore the web open for the others. In the novelization, Johner was the one who hauled the clone out of the pool and pushed her toward the ladder as the second swimming Xenomorph came up behind her.
Climbing The Ladder Shaft
At the top of the ladder shaft, Wren shot Call, who fell back into the water, and the doctor escaped through the hatch. Below Johner, the swimming Xenomorph climbed after Christie and Vriess and spat acid into Christie's face. He lost his grip, Vriess caught a rung, and the creature grabbed Christie's leg.
Johner hooked his legs over a rung, hung upside down with a gun in each hand, and shot the creature in the head. Its acid blood spattered the ladder. The dead Xenomorph stayed clamped to Christie's leg. Christie cut the rope that tied him to Vriess and fell with it so he would not drag the mechanic down. The novelization adds that Johner found a large spider in a web on the rungs above him, shot it in a panic, and clung to the ladder shaking before he climbed on.
Reaching The Betty
Call rejoined the group with white fluid in her wound. Johner called her full of surprises and decided that for a synthetic she was a big psycho. Once Distephano explained that she was an Auton, Johner asked Vriess for a socket wrench and joked that she only needed an oil change, then complained that he had nearly slept with a robot.
Call plugged into Father by hand and set the Auriga to crash. When the new course took them past the nest, Johner threatened to kill her if she was tricking them. An exhausted Purvis complained that he was tired, and Johner told him he could sleep when he was dead. In the film, Johner carried Vriess on his back to the docks. Near the nest, a warrior grabbed Ripley 8 and pulled her down through the floor, and Johner and the others went on to the Betty without her.
Flying The Betty To Earth
Aboard the Betty, Call asked Johner to put Purvis in the freezer. Wren was hiding on the ship and took Call hostage, demanding that she send the Auriga home under normal emergency procedure with the hive aboard. Johner did not move and waited for an opening. Purvis knocked Wren down, and the Chestburster burst from his chest through the doctor's skull. The crew shot Purvis, Wren, and the creature. With Elgyn and Hillard dead, Johner and Vriess had to fly the ship themselves, and they were struggling with the controls when Ripley 8 came back. Johner asked if she could fly the Betty, and she told him it was even older than she was.
During the escape a hose ruptured, and Vriess yelled at Johner to patch it. Johner yelled back that he was not the mechanic and mostly hurt people. The Newborn got aboard through the cargo hatch and killed Distephano. While Ripley 8 dealt with it, Vriess called Johner forward, and the two men took the controls together. The Betty broke away before the Auriga hit Earth. The theatrical cut ends with the ship descending through the atmosphere, and the Special Edition lands it near a ruined Paris. The novelization has Johner kiss Vriess on the mouth once they had the ship under control, and the book closes with the survivors in the air over Earth.
After Resurrection
Michael Jan Friedman's 2005 novel Aliens: Original Sin opened with the Betty on a beach in New Zealand, where Johner explored the pine forest above the sand and came back amazed that there were no towers or roads. Years later he flew under Ripley 8 with Call and Vriess. On Byzantium Station he started a brawl in a mess hall full of cargo haulers so that security would leave their posts while Call stole the station's records. When a reporter named Simoni stowed away, Ripley told Johner to get rid of him, then stopped him as he forced the man into a waste disposal hatch.
Masked boarders later forced their way onto the Betty, and Johner and Call shot most of them in the cargo bay. The attackers came from Loki, a secret network that brokered human hosts for the Mala'kak, the species of the dead pilot on Acheron, who needed Xenomorph DNA and paid for it with human hosts. The crew's next stop was Domes Epsilon, an orbital garden colony where an engineered egg had produced a litter of Xenomorphs.
Johner dropped into the colony on cargo chains with Ripley, Call, and Krakke. When the colonists questioned the evacuation, he said administrator Philip Philipakos could kiss his hairy ass. Ripley took him to check a backup supply bay, knowing from years with him that he only pretended to be stupid, and on the way back they killed an adult Xenomorph in crossfire with shock rifles. Johner went on firing after it was dead, then admitted he had forgotten how creepy the creatures were. After the outbreak killed most of the colonists, he helped Ripley and Call burn a creature in the Betty's cargo bay until its inner jaw went limp, and Ripley destroyed the colony.
In the epilogue the crew drank to their dead engineer Rama with Johner's moonshine, and Johner toasted him as "the most annoying, know-it-all son of a whore I ever met." Drunk, he followed Call into the corridor, refused to believe she would break her promise to a dying android to free others like him, and offered to go with her whenever she was ready. She told him he would be the first to know, and he staggered back into the mess hall in his last scene. The novel ended with him alive aboard the Betty while Ripley waited for Loki to strike back.
Personality And Traits
Johner treated cruelty as entertainment. He stuck a knife in Vriess's leg because the mechanic could not feel it, called Call "little Call," made crude passes at Ripley 8, wanted to leave Vriess behind, and threatened to shoot Wren. His first answer to most problems was to shoot someone. That made him useful when the Auriga filled with Xenomorphs, and he was the gunman who saved Vriess on the ladder and carried him to the ship.
In the film, Johner joked his way through most of the outbreak. The novelization makes him much more frightened: he hated bugs, shook after the ladder, and wanted to hide from the Xenomorphs when Elgyn died. That book also gives him a moment of guilt. In the lab he found one of the Betty's kidnapped sleepers in an opened cryotube, and he realized he had delivered her there for money without asking questions. Christie stood beside him until he pulled himself together.
Johner In The 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, followed Johner and the Betty crew through the outbreak. Its last page put the survivors on a snowfield on Earth. Ripley 8 crouched in the snow beside Call while Johner trudged up behind them with Vriess on his back.
Behind The Scenes
Ron Perlman played Johner for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet from Joss Whedon's script. Perlman had starred as One in Jeunet and Marc Caro's The City of Lost Children in 1995. In a November 25, 1997 AOL chat, he said the film was shot entirely on the 20th Century Fox soundstages in Los Angeles. He also said that makeup artist Barry Koper created Johner's facial scars by painting on a chemical that pulled the skin inward like a healed wound.
The flooded kitchen was the first sequence filmed. Perlman said it took about three weeks, that he ran out of air several times, and that once, after hearing "cut" over the underwater speakers, he had to feel around for the one spot where he could surface. He also nearly spoiled Sigourney Weaver's real basketball shot. Weaver's set journal, published in Premiere in December 1997, records Perlman grinning and swearing into the camera two beats after the ball dropped. The editors cut the take before his reaction, and the shot in the finished film was real.
Famous Quotes
- "Don't push me, little Call. You hang with us for a while, you'll find out I am not the man with whom to fuck."
- "I say we stay here, man. Let the army guys deal. Where the fuck are the army guys?"
- "I can get you off. Maybe not the boat, but..."
- "Well, I say if we wanna make any decent time, I say we ditch the cripple."
- "Earth, man. What a shithole."
- "Hey, Ripley. I heard you, like, ran into these things before."
- "What's the big deal, man? Fucking waste of ammo."
- "I thought synthetics were supposed to be all logical and shit. You're just a big old psycho, girl."
- "Hey, Vriess, you got a socket wrench? Maybe she just needs an oil change."
- "Sleep when you die, man."
- "You can't fly one of these things too, can you?"
- "Hey. I'm not the mechanic here, Ironside. I mostly just hurt people."
Conclusion
Johner was the scarred gunman of the Betty crew, a bully who tormented Vriess and Call and picked a fight with Ripley 8 that he lost. When the Auriga outbreak killed Elgyn, Hillard, and Christie, he shot the Xenomorph off the ladder, carried Vriess to the ship, and helped fly the Betty to Earth. He survived with Ripley 8, Call, and Vriess. In Original Sin he followed Ripley against Loki's trade in human hosts for the Mala'kak, and the novel ended with him alive aboard the Betty, offering to help Call free the surviving androids.
Appearances
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection comic (Dark Horse, 1997)
- Aliens: Original Sin (Michael Jan Friedman, 2005)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report by S. D. Perry (2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
