JamietheBastard
MemberOvomorphApril 17, 2015
My Alien Prequel/Prometheus re-write screenplay.
After being quite disappointed in the Alien Sequels: Alien 3, Alien Resurrection as well as Prometheus. I decided to have a go at re-writing it into the movie I really wanted Prometheus to be. Having been kicking around story ideas for years but never seeming to be able to do anything with 'em, I finally found the answer: try writing a screenplay rather than a short story and found this to be the way to go as the story is coming along nicely.
I started at the end of the story and posited a few questions:
How does The Company know about the Alien?
How much does The Company know about the Alien?
How does The Nostromo get re-routed to LV 426?
Why do the Company want the Alien so badly that they are willing to sacrifice the crew?
From here I wrote the ending of the story: a conversation between 2 Weyland Yutani executives, Melkonis and Roby (have named four of my characters after Dan O'bannon's original character names in Star Beast, Hunter and Broussard also feature) concerning a missing survey ship and a battered and damaged black box ejection pod recovered by a deep salvage team. I have now completed the first act, second draft and feel it's coming along nicely (some problems/ideas still need figuring out).
Just a few things to say: People may accuse me of being a bit unoriginal but I am not claiming to be a great writer(unlike Damon Lindelof, I at least can recognise where my story is going wrong, and try to come up with logical solutions) or original thinker. I am melding some of my story ideas with Prometheus', and trying to write a story that also captures the feel of Alien/Aliens, the 2 good movies in the franchise. I have included a few lines in my script as a homage to Alien/Aliens/Prometheus, and even a couple of kicks to the bollocks aimed at things in Alien 3/Alien Resurrection/Prometheus that struck me as a bit ludicrous or disappointing. As I said this is only fan fiction and these lines are included deliberately as homage.
I wanted to get back to the threat of a few Xeno's aboard ship (as well as incorporating a little bit of Aliens action) , this removes the solution of just being able to shoot them, Cameron handled this well but I felt it diminished the Xeno threat slightly and he had to compensate by having thousands of them (just an observation not an attack on Aliens, like I said I think James Cameron handled it well). Xeno's, spaceships, Alien planets, there is only so much you can do with these elements. I am only trying to produce a story that is personally satisfying to me (and hopefully to other Alien fans). So if no one has any objections I will go ahead and start posting story ideas, and pages (once I have rectified some logic holes, and decided on some thematic issues).
For now I will post some of my story ideas.
I liked Giger's unused pyramid design from Alien, and wanted to incorporate it in my story So this is not ripped off from Prometheus but the unused concept in O'bannon's original script. The story is set on LV 427 a planetoid orbiting the same giant ringed planet as LV 426.
As Ridley Scott always maintained the derelict was a weapons carrier it seemed to make sense that the story be set in a weapons manufacturing facility, Prometheus got this right.
My Space Jockeys are definately not humans in suits, but An Alien Species. Their backstory is : There are two factions of this ancient race, one Cruel, Vengeful, Eldritch and Unfathomable. It is their facility the story is set in, they abducted humans thousands of years ago to use as fodder in all sorts of hideous and obscene experiments. The other faction whilst their true motivations are unkwown, are more benevolent. While they don't have the power to create life they do have the power to help evolve suitable life forms to a higher state and may have been responsible for humanity's first steps up the evolutionary ladder. These two factions have been engaged in a galactic civil war for untold Millennia. The Evil Space Jockeys use gene splicing and mutagenics to mutate existing life forms into bioweapons.
One of my ideas is that the Space Jockeys were experimenting on Facehugger eggs to come up with new and improved Xenomorph strains. Totally ripping off Giger's Brett Cocoon sculpture concept from Giger's Alien/Original screenplay. I posited that the coccooned people in my story weren't actually turning into eggs but being used as a nutrient source for the mutations.
The dead cocooned humans are clones the Space Jockey race use as lab rats in thier experiments, but this may change as it would be more horrific to see the crew members coccooned. Not sure how to work this in though as the facility is long dead as in Prometheus, still figuring it out.
The weapons facility is a vast, Gigeresque Biomechanoid City. The cloud cover is so dense and polluted with the industrial waste produced by millennia of obscene experimentation that the only sunlight that gets through is diffused, and the whole planet is bathed in a sickly yellowish semi darkness during the day.
We see variation in Classic creature design e.g. Superfacehuggers: can lay multiple embryos (2 or 3), Scorpion Facehuggers: doesn't actually hug faces but can inject victims with a mutagenic venom which turns 'em into hideous Alien/Human hybrids, (like Fifield but more Gigeresque).
Humanity has discovered no evidence of complex life in the Galaxy until now.
Life does exist and is made up primarily of: Primate, Insectoid, Reptilian, Piscine, Vegtable and Bacterial/Viral, though all mainly in early stages of evolution.
There is a slight connection with my story and Planet of the Apes, not thematically but the title is a homage to 70's Planet of the Apes comics
So any feedback would be appreciated, positive or negative, all constructive criticism will be considered. Cheers.
