The William Gibson screenplay
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Alien³
merry christmas — 2 years ago(May 22, 2023 01:10 AM)
I haven't read it but I did read the comic adaptation. The wiki description is:
Gibson mockingly summed up his script as "Space commies hijack alien eggs—big problem in Mallworld".[16] The story picked up after Aliens, with the Sulaco drifting into an area of space claimed by the "Union of Progressive Peoples". The ship is boarded by people from the U.P.P., who are attacked by a facehugger hiding in the entrails of Bishop's mangled body. The soldiers blast the facehugger into space and take Bishop with them for further study. The Sulaco then arrives at a space station–shopping mall hybrid named Anchorpoint. With Ripley put in a coma, Hicks explores the station and discovers Weyland-Yutani are developing an Alien army. In the meantime, the U.P.P. are doing their own research, which led them to repair Bishop. Eventually Anchorpoint and the U.P.P. stations are overrun with the Aliens, and Hicks must team up with the survivors to destroy the parasites. The film ends with a teaser for a fourth movie, where Bishop suggests to Hicks that humans are united against a common enemy, and they must track the Aliens to their source and destroy them.
So the comic follows pretty closely except the space station wasn't a mall, it was a research lab. I didn't like it. Maybe a movie would have been better. Ripley is barely in it. She screams once and goes into a coma. Eventually she is put into an escape pod and shot to Earth. Newt doesn't do anything except hang around for a little bit and then leave for Earth. Hicks is in the background mostly. Bishop does some stuff. That could all be fine but the characters the story introduces are duds.
The Union of Progressive Peoples could be any group. Their ideology doesn't matter in the comic except the screenplay was written during the Cold War and it can end on a message that their minor antagonism with the Weyland-Yutani corporation (I guess) can be overcome to fight the alien. They don't interact a lot in the story, just at a few points.
I don't think a comic is a good medium for Alien. Seeing the alien move around in the flesh is one of the draws. A picture of an alien bursting from a chest doesn't hit like watching it happen. -
TaraDeS — 2 years ago(May 22, 2023 03:31 AM)
Agreed.
Except of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Spiderman and Asterix I never had been a huge comic fan anyhow…or graphic novels.
Movies are better.
I don't think a comic is a good medium for Alien. Seeing the alien move around in the flesh is one of the draws. A picture of an alien bursting from a chest doesn't hit like watching it happen.
My favourite Alien-movie is
Alien Resurrection
with
Winona Ryder
.
Winona Ryder is one of the best actresses, I think.
My little fandom began with
Beetlejuice
(1988)…sooooo funny!
And cause I like to watch her so much, can lightheartedly skip that she's a cute shoplifter. -
MagneticMonopole — 2 years ago(May 22, 2023 03:06 PM)
Years ago I somehow managed to get a copy of his Alien screenplay and I couldn't even finish it, it was so bad.
Gibson is my favorite science fiction writer, but he can't write a good screenplay if his life depended on it. Novels/short stories and screenplays require entirely different skill sets and he doesn't have the latter. -
merry christmas — 2 years ago(May 22, 2023 11:44 PM)
Yeah, a lot of his writing is dense descriptions of people and places which in a movie is mostly the responsibility of other people. In a way a screenplay is about compressing a story while a novel will do the opposite.
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BlablaBlackSheep — 2 years ago(September 10, 2023 11:48 PM)
I wasn’t a very big fan of Gibson’s story idea or the comic that adapted it. A virus that turns people into xenomorphs and aliens with red eyes all seemed like bad fan fiction. Also the virus that turns people into aliens part was reused in Prometheus and was just as bad.
Their mistake with Alien3 and Vincent Ward’s script was it went for a smaller scale and tried to replicate the success of the first movie, instead of doing something different and going bigger. What the story should have been about was with Ripley and Hicks teaming up to stop Weyland-Yutani from acquiring the xenomorph once and for all.
The Dark Horse comics that were published in 1988 as a sequel to Aliens actually had a better storyline than any of the official film sequels. It involved Hicks breaking Newt out of a mental institution and traveling to the Alien home world to destroy their hive. Along the way they encounter the Space Jockey from the first movie (not the sh*ty Mr Clean retcon from that aboriginal Prometheus) that sends Newt horrifying psychic messages. Then scientists on Earth manage to breed xenomorphs which soon overrun the planet. At the end Ellen Ripley shows up armed to the teeth and tells them they’re going to destroy the Xenos once and for all, they could have followed up with two movies about the battle for Earth, and maybe confronting the Queen Mother (the biggest alien that psychically controls all the alien hives in the galaxy).
Renny Harlin actually wanted to go this direction, but Fox and Brandywine producer David Giler vetoed this “Planet of the Aliens” idea because they said it would be too expensive to make and they lacked the technology to film it.
Frankly I think they should have waited a few more years until technology caught up before making a third Alien movie. -
merry christmas — 2 years ago(September 19, 2023 12:49 AM)
Taking it to Earth seems like the natural progression for the series since that is what the Weyland-Yutani Corporation keeps trying to do. But they should have gone with Ward's idea of a wooden planet full of monks. Joss Whedon wanted to bring them to Earth in the fourth.
I think James Cameron took the idea of escaping a mental institute from that comic for Terminator 2.