Why was Bill Paxton‘s Hudson, a cowardly Marine with the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old, included in a possibly dangerous rescue mission? The kind of guy who instantly wimps out when things go badly. Plus Paxton played a guy who confessed to having “a little dick” in True Lies (’94), and his Apollo 13 astronaut, Fred Haise, was also a whiner.

Paxton was 30 or 31 when he made Aliens. When did he finally graduate out of playing chumps and candy-asses? Answer: When Jan de Bont cast him as the tornado whispering hero in Twister. This apparently inspired James Cameron to cast Paxton as a non-boobish submersible guy in Titanic, and then Sam Raimi cast him as Bridget Fonda‘s morally conflicted husband in A Simple Plan. By ’98 he was out of that hole.