Hicks in Aliens: Corporal Dwayne Hicks Explained

Hicks is Corporal Dwayne Hicks of the Colonial Marines, played by Michael Biehn and billed third in Aliens 1986, directed by James Cameron, after Sigourney Weaver (Ripley) and Carrie Henn (Newt). Aliens is his only film, so it is also his first appearance.

He serves in the Marine unit that travels to LV-426 with Ripley, the company representative Burke and the android Bishop. Ripley agrees to join them on one condition, that the creatures be destroyed rather than studied. Around Hicks in the ensemble are Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), Sergeant Apone (Al Matthews), Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), Private Drake (Mark Rolston) and Lieutenant Gorman (William Hope).

If you are new to the series, these soldiers are a long way from the seven commercial crew members of Alien (1979), who were hauling cargo rather than carrying weapons. The alien movies in order guide shows where each film sits.

Hicks's arc is short and clear: he goes into the colony as one Marine among many and comes out as one of only four people left alive. When the unit finds the settlement empty apart from the child Newt, it enters the nest and is badly cut up by an ambush. Gorman, the officer in charge, loses control, and Ripley steps in to lead the remaining few back out.

After that, the survivors find out that Burke hoped to carry embryos home for the company, and that the colony's reactor is failing. Newt is taken, which sends Ripley back alone toward the hive and the alien queen.

Hicks leaves LV-426 together with Ripley, Newt and Bishop just before the colony is destroyed. The queen has hidden aboard their ship, and Ripley beats her with a power loader, pushing her through an airlock. The four then lie down in hypersleep. As such, Hicks finishes this film alive, so "did Corporal Hicks survive?" has a different answer depending on whether you mean Aliens or what follows it.

Hicks is tied most closely to the other three survivors of Aliens: Ellen Ripley, Newt and the android Bishop. Ripley ends the film with a makeshift family in Newt, and Hicks escapes the colony alongside them and goes into hypersleep for the trip home.

Among the Marines, his colleagues are Hudson, Apone, Vasquez, Drake and Lieutenant Gorman. Most of them are killed in the ambush in the nest, and their inexperienced commander panics before Ripley takes over. Burke is a different kind of companion, since he travels with the Marines while pursuing the company's interest in the embryos.

The relationship that matters for the later films is the one with Ripley. In Alien 3 (1992), directed by David Fincher, Ripley learns that Newt and Hicks did not survive, and her insistence on burning their bodies shows how much the two meant to her. Lance Henriksen also returns in that film as Bishop II, though that is a different character from the damaged android of Aliens.

Hicks is dead by the opening of Alien 3, directed by David Fincher, and the film settles his fate through Ripley's discovery rather than on screen. His hypersleep capsule is aboard the Sulaco with those of Ripley, Newt and the damaged Bishop when a facehugger gets onto the ship and a fire sends the escape pod away.

The pod comes down on Fiorina 161, the foundry world holding a small population of violent male prisoners. After the inmates pull Ripley out and the doctor Clemens tends to her, she is told that neither Newt nor Hicks lived through the crash. Fearing that something else came down in the pod, she asks for the bodies to be burned, and for Newt to be autopsied first.

That is the answer to the "Alien 3 Hicks body" search: the film shows Ripley coping with the loss, not Hicks dying. It also answers why he and Newt were removed: the story needed Ripley isolated on Fiorina 161.

In my opinion, Hicks matters most through where he ends up rather than through any single scene, and the moments that show this are structural. The first is the escape from LV-426. Four people leave the colony shortly before it is destroyed, and it could be argued that the mix is deliberate: a woman who has already survived one encounter, a child, an android and a Marine. Hicks is the soldier in that group.

The second is the fight with the queen. Ripley forces her out through an airlock using a power loader, and the survivors are left to settle down for the trip home. That outcome gives the Marines' ambush in the nest its weight, since most of the unit does not make it out.

The third moment is the final hypersleep. On its own, the image of four survivors going under for the trip home reads as a rest after the fight with the queen. Paradoxically, it becomes the bleakest image in the series once Alien 3 undoes it. If you watch Aliens first and Alien 3 later, the quiet last frames of the earlier film are where Hicks matters most. For the wider order of events, see the alien timeline.