The Xenomorph was not alien, but created by the Company
SuperAlien
MemberXenomorphApril 07, 2019I was not aware that in one of the early drafts of Alien, before Ridley Scott joined the team, the spores were not of alien origin, but only biological weapons created by the Company, thus making the crew of Nostromo nothing more than test subjects for the lethality of those weapons.
Fortunately the newly recruited director, Ridley Scott, decided to maintain the alien origin from Dan O'Bannon's script.
I found the excerpts of that early draft on Strange Shapes and I will quote it below.
Maybe it was discussed here before and I missed it, but that would explain the turn in Alien Covenant, to have David as the creator of the Xenomorph. Was Ridley Scott taking a road he refused to take 40 years ago, by making the Xenomorph a product of the Company, indirectly through David?
What are your thoughts on that?
Here is the early script I mentioned above:
"At one point in the film’s development, just prior to Ridley Scott’s recruitment as director, producers Walter Hill and David Giler presented a version of Alien without the pyramid or the alien derelict. “We believed,” Hill told Film International in 2004, “that if you got rid of a lot of the junk -they had pyramids and hieroglyphics in the planetoid, a lot of von Däniken crap- that what you would have left would be a very good, very primal space story.”
However, Hill and Giler did not merely remove the pyramids and hieroglyphics, but they replaced them as well. For this brief iteration of the script, the Alien spore was housed in a man-made construct known only as the ‘Cylinder’, and the derelict craft was a downed human ship, a “warmed over L-52,” according to Dallas. Inside the ship lies its human pilot, referred to by Dallas as “one dead space jockey,” (a slang term which stuck around to be bestowed upon the mysterious creature.)
Kane, Dallas and Lambert discover the derelict, which in this version of the script is a craft of human origin. “No signs of life,” continues Dallas, “no lights… no movement… “
A hatchway on the ship is open, and the trio venture inside…
Inside they find signs of a gunfight, and later, within the cockpit, they find an ‘urn’, along with the derelict ship’s dead pilot. Dallas spots the SOS beacon and turns it off. “One dead space jockey,” he concludes, “no sign of the other crew members; the old L-52’s generally went up with a compliment of seven…”
“They’re probably scattered out on this plain,” Lambert interjects.
Dallas can only offer a thoughtful “Maybe.”
Ash cuts in on the conversation, and tells them via radio that he can see something of an “irregular shape”. The three leave the derelict and venture out again into the storm, eventually stumbling across the mysterious object: a “red cylinder on the horizon. One hundred meters high.”
The Nostromo crew find the ‘Cylinder’, a man-made construct that houses the alien spore. As it turns out, the spore is in fact not alien, but instead is a biological weapon created by the Company. The crew have stumbled on a research facility, and are now its new test subjects, with all the slaughter to be observed and reported by Ash.
The Cylinder survives only in one piece of Ron Cobb’s conceptual art, which shows the short-lived construct looming behind the derelict “L-52”. In this version of the story, the Alien is a bioweapon engineered by the malevolent Company. The Nostromo crew are re-routed to be used as specimens to test the creature’s lethality. When Ron Shusett presented his and O’Bannon’s original script to the newly recruited Ridley Scott, Scott decided that they should go back to the original plan. Though the alien elements would go on to persist all the way to the final movie, the separate pyramid/silo, ultimately, would not."
"He survived, he’s now in Disneyland in Orlando, and no way am I going back there. How did he end up in Disneyland? I saw him in Disneyland, Jesus Christ!"
@ daliens,
Predators have been mimicking human speech since the 1987 original, well before The Predator, which is far from a masterpiece - in fact IMO it is the worst of the franchise (even if you include the AvP's).
As for Alex Garland's Annihilation, that movie was needlessly over-metaphorical, I would even say arty-farty; if you know my meaning. I love ambiguity as much as BigDave, but some writers and directors use it to cover up the lack of an actual coherent narrative and IMO Garland is one of them.
...
What my TLDR reply meant to say was that Ridley Scott is not and should not be the only person to determine the future of the Alien franchise. He doesn't even care for the franchises title character. I'm not saying we should all jump on the Neill Blomkamp bandwagon, but I fell after Prometheus and Alien: Covenant Ridley (and probably Giler too) is so adamant to remain at the franchises helm that he will cockblock any and all ideas he doesn't agree with, whether they be better than what he has brought to the table or not.
Don't get me wrong I enjoyed Prometheus but I feel Ridley is now drawing parallels with George Lucas during the Star Wars prequel trilogy era - the scripts and direction should have given to someone more capable.
David Giler's vision that the Alien was created by the company was rightfully shot down when they made the original Alien.
Giler's rewrites of Dan O'Bannon's script were done for one reason only, so that Giler could claim ownership of the script, the characters depicted therein and the production rights to Alien and subsequent movies using said characters, This he was successful in doing as Brandywine Productions (Giler, Hill and the late Carroll's production company) holds the production rights to Alien, and have lived off the profits ever since.
However, Giler's rewrites were superficial at best - he changed character names, eliminated the alien origins of the creature and added corporate conspiracy through the addition of Ash. The name changes were cosmetic, the change of the aliens' origins was reinstated back to Dan O'Bannon's original vision during production, and the inclusion of corporate conspiracy, although praised by modern audiences was a tired and overused trope of science fiction used through the '60's and '70's.
Having David be the creator of the Alien is, for me, against O'Bannon's vision and justifies Giler's mistreatment of O'Bannon, his undeserved ownership of the production rights, and his greed. Giler not only stole Alien from O'bannon but also drove David Fincher off the production of Alien 3 and forced Joss Whedon to rewrite his script for Alien: Resurrection to cater for Sigourney Weaver's needless return. Now it appears he is, through the return of Ridley Scott to the franchise, attempting once again to impose his generic and unimaginative recycling of bad science fiction tropes onto a franchise and property he did not create but has greedily profiteered from for the past 40 years.
I have two words in reply...
Fuck that!
