Alien’s Original Script Almost Ruined Xenomorphs By Making Them Smart
The Xenomorph is one of sci-fi horror’s scariest monsters, making it strange that Alien’s original script turned them into scholars of architecture.
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The titular foe of 1979’s Alien is one of sci-fi horror’s most memorable monsters, but the Xenomorph was originally going to mature into a smart, scholarly figure in its old age. Released in 1979, the sci-fi horror blockbuster Alien was a grimy, brutal space-set chiller that introduced the world to Sigourney Weaver’s iconic heroine Ripley.
The original Alien was a terrifyingly effective horror whose “haunted house in space” thrills earned its director Ridley Scott the chance to helm Blade Runner, an ambitious adaptation of the trippy novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Unlike that later cult classic, though, the 1979 sci-fi horror hit was successful thanks to its simplicity — something that can’t be said of Alien’s original script.
Written by future Return of the Living Dead scribe Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the original script for Alien borrowed from all manner of sources to cobble together its terrifying tale. However, some elements of the script were far from scary and ended up excised thanks to their bizarre and potentially unintentionally comical nature. Among these was the revelation that the Xenomorphs, the lethal eponymous monsters of the franchise, were actually only feral creatures for one period of their life cycle, and eventually grew into mature, worldly scholars and architects.
Per an in-depth MonsterLegacy.net article, the script originally depicted the killer Xenomorph species as a full-blown civilization, complete with an elaborate pyramid that contained the means for their convoluted reproduction cycle to occur. O’Bannon himself conceded that the alien’s life cycle was “extremely complicated,” with the first stage consisting of an egg that sought out a host (as embodied by the infamous Facehugger) and the second stage being the Chestburster, i.e the rampaging killing machine that viewers know and love. But this was not, originally, the end of the line for the Xenomorph. The monster, not unlike the Predators of a competing franchise, eventually became intelligent, self-aware beings. Ron Cobb, the designer of Alien’s technology, put it this way: “Finally — its bloodlust gone — the Alien becomes a mild, intelligent creature, capable of art and architecture, which lives a full, scholarly life of 200 years.”
O’Bannon explained that this version of Alien’s deadly monsters would have had a long-abandoned pyramid lair built solely to accommodate their procreation process. However, due to both a lack of screen time to explain their origins and a lack of money to visualize this onscreen, the set instead became the derelict spaceship that contains the Space Jockey (which, in turn, gave rise to the Engineers of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant fame). As a result, viewers eventually ended up with Ridley Scott’s complex backstory for another, separate alien species, a choice that some franchise fans thought delved too far into the byzantine backstory of the series, and the franchise never returned to the Xenomorph homeworld despite some thwarted attempts to do so over the many sequels. In any case, viewers can at least be glad that Alien fans were mercifully spared the sight of Ripley matching wits with an intelligent, well-read Xenomorph.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/alien-original-script-intelligent-xenomorph-bad-why/