Let's Talk Story - Page 2

The interview was conducted in June while he was in post on Village. But your point on filmmaker's is definitely valid. That's kind of how I feel about Cameron's and Scott's ALIEN 5 sound bites.

Hiring M. Night Shyamalan and Ridley Scott is certainly a good idea. However, it isn't a story idea.

This is by far the most important part.

Loved those alternate Resurrection scenes, as well. Terrible shame to have lost them from the final script.

Tee hee! Do you think Barry was being serious?
we met newt when she was a kid. fancying her is like fancying your niece.

Anyway, nothing beats Sigourney's tiny white panties, so let's not even try.

And what's wrong with that?!

But come on! Give her long curly blonde hair, like she has in one of those comics, perhaps a cute little scar under one eye, and kit her out in a tight grey tank top and low-hanging combat trousers. It would be awesome.


So anyway, how about those alien chaps, then?

M. Night Shymalan's ALIEN 5.

Ripley gets nightmares (again). She feels the Aliens are still out there somewhere. She chats with an old General who believes her but has fallen out of favour with the UEA or whatever, played by Bruce Willis. He gets a team together of specialists together with one purpose: to find the Alien homeworld and destroy them once and for all.

They go to LV-426, study the Alien ship and through some incredibly contrived plot point, they manage to find a way to use its navigational data. They find the Alien homeworld, and get ready to nuke it. However, scientists on the mission need to study (again), so they go down to the planet. After much replaying of ALIENS, they find a hidden secret base, where the origin of the Alien's creator is revealed.









Guess what? It was 20th Century MAN. Didn't see that one coming, did you? Cue T2-ish commentary on how it's in our nature to destroy ourselves, etc etc. The credits roll and we're left with yet another underwhelming sequel.

An excerpt from a 2001 interview with Whedon in the British magazine Starburst (keep in mind he's quite drunk at this point in the interview):

here's my cockamamie idea i've been kicking around for a while. apologies in advance if this is a bit confusing, i need sleep. anyhow...

the alien is the protagonist.

ok stop laughing for a minute. remember the scene in aliens when ripley lights the flamethrower at the egg room - for that brief moment you think; oh, that queen's gonna be mad now. you're relating to the queen, you feel her pain; oh the tragedy of motherhood unrequited. then the giant bug operated an elevator and its back to brain-dead land. anyhow... jeunet (whedon?) tried to go there in the climax of alien4 but the son of pumpkinhead was stealing what was left of the show at that point, and it got lost in among the gooey licks and puppydog gazing.

since there's no point popping the alien in and out of the shadows anymore, make the humans the bad guys. (sorta like starship troopers, but not so subtle. that went way over the head of most people) weyland yutani gets it's act together and finds out where they come from. they send in the marines, but not just one squad anymore, lots. we dont meet them, we dont know them, we dont pal around with them in the mess hall before the action starts.

we're following the aliens the entire time. all the dialog is overheard marine chatter and radio. we understand it, the aliens dont. the aliens win; kicking the balding space monkeys out of their cozy, slimy, dark, geiger/moebius nightmare of a home town. theres a few 'hero' aliens we can visually identify to guide the viewer through the story, and by the end of the movie we have seen the following things:

1) a complete alien lifecycle, including those pesky teenage years between the chesterburster and the adult
2) a few other species on the planet which the aliens compete with for food; perhaps a raid on their home hive - think the monkey fights at the beginning of 2001. keep the angular stylings (and six fingers) of the first alien movie; if not for the aliens then for their 'neighbors'. it ties up a nice design flaw neatly in the existing sequals.
3) what the aliens actually eat, when they can't get character actors.
4) what the facehugger naturally evolved to fit onto: unlucky for us humans they fit on us as well. their food isnt necessarily their reproductive hosts, but a character actor will do for both in a pinch.
5) a full on war scene of ungodly mayhem for the big finish when the humans launch their doomed 'full tilt boogie' attack
6) what a LARGE alien colony would look like; not a small infestation tucked under the plumbing
7) the alien is restored to its rightful place as the bad-ass supreme of sci-fi cinema.

director? first choice is david lynch - you'd need someone who could sustain your interest for long scenes of minimal or non-existant dialog. he'd never do it of course. you'd want walter murch for the sound (THX 1138 style) but he wouldnt do it either.

too silly for words? perhaps. maybe tone it down to a discovery channel 'walking with dinosaurs' type faux nature documentary? i think there's enough of a skeleton to their character (no pun intended, honest) to hang a whole biology on, and it would make a neat movie.

Well, I'd certainly watch it. However I think we can all agree this is quite likely one of THE least likely-to-be-made films ever conceived, and it would take an incredibly brave/stupid company to even consider making something like this, in today's AVP-friendly climate.


Also, on a more personal note, the idea of a documentary look at the creatures would seriously eviscerate their 'mystery' aspect. As has been said in this thread before (quite possibly by me) - the fact we don't know so much about it is something that adds to it a great deal, and seeing it grow, eat, evolve and do the whole 'balanced ecosystem' thing could seriously lessen their status as terrifying unknowable killing machines.


Still, as long as alternate universe, adult Newt gets a shower scene: sold.

Trinity's Gusset:

"Prater: 'Starshit Troopers'? Deliberately misspelling titles acutally proves something? You have passionate ideas about stuff. You don't need to rely on that 13-year-old crap. Let that particular strand of internet 'wit' go."

But making all of your posts look like haiku is an acceptable form of internet "wit"?

Prater:

"...Ripley fighting hand-to-hand combat [with a xenomorph] would have made her more ridiculous then she already was/is."

I couldn't agree more.

Kreeper:

"What was so brilliant about 'Aliens'... was that it took everything great about the first one and transscended it."



Colt45:

"Scott set the tone by having the creepy music, realistic 'truckers in space' motif..."

Question: how are "truckers in space" realistic?

"[M. Night Shyamalan and Ridley Scott] could pitch to Fox, who would jump at the chance to make a movie with [these] two juggernauts."

I'm afraid it might not work out that easily: Night pitched a "Superman" idea to Warner Bros., who ended up picking a number of extremely less caliber directors and writers instead (McG, Bryan Singer, etc.).

Here's an idea for an "Alien" sequeal: redo the last three films.

dearest Msamadhi,
i would write a haiku about you but i don't know how many syllables are in your name.
sorry.

An incredibly brave/stupid company spent 50? 60? million dollars making a summer feature out of 'Fight Club'... with grand results all around. while it wasnt the 'blockbuster' they might have hoped for initially, i would imagine that Fox is very proud of that film and glad they did it. Well, I would like to imagine that. I hope so, anyhow. They should be.

Here i must disagree - Tell me you don't tune into the Discovery channel during 'shark week'... The 'alien' is an INTERESTING creature above all else; knowing more about it doesn't change that fact. Seeing it do the same thing again and again in sequel after sequel diminishes the appeal, and reduces its character to that of boogeyman. That is one reason AVP didn't really work - we didn't learn anything new that added onto the creature's character. We did learn various new things about the predator, but they were all re-goddamned-diculous. consider this, if you will -

alien - introdcution to the basic life cycle
aliens - social structure is established, hive/queen stuff
alien 3 - mutating morphology (it resembles its 'parent' host to an extent) is introduced
alien 4 - they are intellegent, and can solve problems. they can swim quite well (hinted at in 'aliens')

each film, with the exception of AVP, tells us more about 'what the alien is', and it all works together to create a believable creature with a believable 'lifestyle' for lack of a better word. Hollywood, tell me more! Bullet-time facehugger 'action' not necessary. Instead, show me some alien-homeworld aquatic hunting.

Hell, I'd settle for Winona Ryder in a wet t-shirt. But that's just me.

Because at the time, no sci-fi film had ever treated the genre like anything but hyper realised social systems. Truckers in space was like average guys in space and that was unique and realistic.

Point taken. But here's another: a good friend of mine has been known to claim that sci-fi is simply a period piece, like historical drama -- it just so happens that the period in question has yet to arise. As such, taking today's social, political, technological, or even philosophical facets and projecting them onto this future epoch is not unlike an author in the eighteenth century taking slavery and placing it in the twenty-first.

Just, y'know, some food for thought.

It is a good point, and lord knows i've tried to write a future documentary, but it is just a pipe-dream. that kind of 'pure' future history is a fantasy. quite apart from the practical impossiblility of doing it, it isn't something that can exist.
Every piece of fiction speaks about the time it was made in. You can say that this is a result of failings in the writer's imagination or you can put the stronger argument that the purpose of science fiction or fantasy is to inform us about our modern world from a fresh perspective.
I used to think that it was the former (where a film being an obvious metaphor for something in the real world was just lazy writing), but now i think the latter. it's a big debate.

While I definitely agree with the latter, I would also just like to point out Star Trek as opposed to, say, Andromeda.

If I was to be given the reigns to Alien 5, I think I would do a hint of iconoclasm. Basically I would not include any of the surviving characters unless I really needed too. Anyways this would be my treatment.

The film starts aboard a huge military vessel, the first shot is of it gently rolling ever so slowly huge chunks of its hull ripped apart from what looks to have been a big space battle. Attached to the military vessel is a ship just a tad smaller than the nostromo (the part which lands anyway). We cut to inside the vessel and find an evacuation under way. The military sheep is almost completely dark, the only elements of light flickering strip lights tinted red by blood. In the ship we see 3 or 4 military types being stretched or helped to an air lock by a medical team.

The smaller ship is a medical rescue ship, kinda like a space ambulance, and has been called in to evacuate any surviving personnel on the military ship. Of the 77 people only 4 have survived. These four when combined with the thread bare crew of the ambulance ship gives us a cast of roughly 16.

Of the soldiers brought aboard 3 are conscious 1 are unconscious. One of the conscious soldiers, a special ops commando, has seemed panicked ever since he was picked up and when he is left alone he tries to smother the unconscious soldiers but is stopped and put into solitary confinement. The other soldiers are revealed to be general grunts more than anything else.

Bascially from this set up, we find out the unconscious solider is infected with a queen alien. Which bursts out just as the ship is docking with on earth. Realising what is going on one of the soldiers, lets call him Sebastian for the time being and if you want to be really hokey you can call him the great great grandson of Ripley’s daughter, locks the ship down and takes control.

So the ship is in lockdown and Sebastian will not allow anyone to leave until the creature has been destroyed as he has seen these creatures cause havoc on his ship. The drama comes from the fact that the ship is docked and the people are metres away from safety but they can’t leave until either Sebastian dies or the creature is dealt with. The only light available is basic strip lighting and sunlight through the windows as the alien has destroyed all but back up power supplies.

You know what I'd do with Alien 5?

Ripley 8 mutates into a hybrid queen, grotesque face twisted like the failed clones...huge egg sack coming out of her ass. Just like the bullshit ADR'ed line explaining how the alien queen mutated into having a human reproductive system.

Call and Ron Perlman freak out as the new mutated Ripley/aliens attack the post-apocalyptic Earth seen at the end of Resurrection. To make matters worse...not all the aliens expired during the crash of the Augura and are now compelled by their survival instinct to wage war on the Ripley/aliens.

Basically it's the Dark Horse comic 'Genocide' crossed with the only scene that worked in Resurrection...the failed clone chamber.

Make it dark, make it scary. Most of all make it goddamn sick for all those kids who read Fangoria.

THAT'S Alien 5, baby...

"You can't do it better. The series is dead."
And the murderer is one Paul Anderson.....
When you hear the rumors that Ridley Scott was considering a new Alien film, but Fox decided to go with AVP and Anderson, you want to go into the Fox Boardroom and start commiting random and gruesome mayhem....