That being said, we're starting to see some pre-visualization sketches coming out for what will be Alien 5, and I'll be damned if they don't look sorta familiar. Because, you see, back in the 1990s, when the independent film boom was bringing new visionaries to the screens of America -- a torch that has since been passed to cable television -- I thought I had a new take on the Alien idea, fueled by my love/hate relationship with the end-of-the-world fever-dream that was David Fincher's Alien3.
I felt that some wrongs had to be righted, the worst of which being that the beloved side characters who survived Aliens deserved better than being killed in their sleep at the top of part three. I believed that the future of the Alien franchise hinged on three basic questions:
1) What if Alien3 really were some kind of dream? Could I finagle a "take-back" that made sense in the arc of the whole series?
2) Could an android feasibly be a host for an alien embryo? And what would the resulting creature look like?
3) The teaser trailer for Alien3 featured a giant Alien egg floating above the Earth... what if that original idea (later scrapped for a setting on a prison planet) was followed through?
With these thoughts in my head, I started visualizing my own version, one that wouldn't have to involve Sigourney Weaver if she wasn't game to reappear (although for Blomkamp, she apparently is). In the interest of testing my precognitive abilities against that far-away release date, I submit my treatment here for your approval:
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It begins with Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, now grown up. She lies on a dark hillside on Earth, looking up at the stars and imagining that Ripley is singing "You Are My Lucky Star" to her. A shooting star streaks across the sky, followed quickly by another. And another. Soon there are dozens of them, drawing lines in the sky, lines that begin to take the form of an enormous Alien head, bending down toward her and opening its jaws, as if it intends to swallow the Earth whole...
Rebecca wakes up; she hadn't realized she nodded off while lying on the hillside. She goes back into the farmhouse where she lives with her grandparents and quarrels with them. She still believes that the world is in danger, while they think that she is still suffering from the trauma she endured as a child in the doomed colony of Hadley's Hope on LV-426.
They have cause to worry, too. When Newt and Ripley arrived back on Earth, they spent the next five years trying to evade the law and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It ended with a standoff situation, Ripley finally giving up Newt on the condition that she be left alone and returned to her surviving family. Ripley then escaped capture and disappeared. Now that Newt has graduated college (online, not having left the farm the entire time), her grandparents believes she needs to get back into the world. She resists, but eventually concedes to going to an interview for a social work job in the city.
Meanwhile, in the bio-labs of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a science team (led by the a man named Marcus King, and partially comprised of seven mentally-connected Bishop androids that are modeled in his image) have managed to salvage a small cache of Alien eggs from deep beneath the nuclear wasteland of LV-426 and have brought them to Earth for study. They have taken every precaution, and have as their chief of security former Marine Dwayne Hicks. Now scarred and half-blind from his previous run-in with these creatures, Hicks very good at his job and watching this project with keen interest.
Rebecca ventures into the city for the first time, and marvels at its splendor. W-Y has used its terraforming capabilities to transform former urban blight into a rainforest-like utopia. All the skyscrapers have their own exterior ecosystems -- including hanging gardens and bioengineered rabbits that can leap dozens of feet from ledge to ledge. The jewel in this emerald crown is the W-Y headquarters, a beautiful, gigantic glass pyramid. Newt can see it from the office building where she has her interview, where she hopes to start working with troubled kids. She aces the interview -- having been a frightened child once herself -- and goes to have lunch in a nearby park.
There, she sees a man preaching to anyone who will listen. She recognizes him from Ripley's description of a hypersleep-induced dream she had on their way back to Earth... in the dream as well as here, the man’s name is Dillon. Fascinated, Rebecca follows him to the place where he holds his own version of church services every midnight. He runs the Church of Hypnos, a group devoted to the interpretation of dreams. His beliefs center in particular around oxygen, which he sees as a gateway to divine dreaming. Since Ripley's vision was had in super-oxygenated hypersleep, Dillon is very interested to hear it. When he unveils a painting he made while inspired by a nightmare he recently had, Newt recognizes the face of the Alien and faints.
Meanwhile, something has gone wrong in the W-Y biolabs... While King is conspicuously absent from the lab, a massive power outage affects the entire building. The science team had been wearing coolsuits to mask their body heat so they could study the Alien eggs at their leisure, but as the power fails, so do the suits, and the eggs start to open up, sensing possible hosts. Hicks, seeing what is happening, activates an old high-level security code that effectively closes the building's defenses against nuclear attack, including blast shutters over every window and utterly sealing all exits. It's an extreme measure, in effect closing the building off from all communication with the outside world, but Hicks knows better than anyone else the horrible outcome if an Alien were to get loose... This is why he became security chief at W-Y after his honorable discharge from the Marines -- to prevent this very situation from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, the science team -- including the androids -- become hosts for fifteen of the creatures.
Leaving the Church of Hypnos, Dillon and Newt are confronted by a young woman in a limousine. She is Mimi Yutani, daughter of the current CEO of W-Y. She wants them to help her get inside the building, because now that the building has been closed up, her father is trapped in there. W-Y has clearly been keeping tabs on Newt all along, and now Mimi sees her as a way to get to her father. In exchange, she says that she has similarly-obtained information on where Ripley is, and will help Newt… if she helps Mimi first.
Avoiding the gathering crowds and arriving at a secret subterranean entrance to the building, Mimi gets in contact with Hicks and uses Rebecca in a reverse-hostage situation, to get *into* the building. Hicks manages to broker an exchange... all the personnel in the building that he can get together in exchange for letting Mimi in the building. The transfer goes well, but Mimi brings Newt in as a possible further bargaining chip, and this sets up an adversarial but symbiotic relationship between them... one is trying to find her father, the other trying to find her foster mother, and each using the other to get there. Dillon, refusing to be separate from what he sees as his divine destiny, goes in as well.
Pulling up a schematic of the building, Hicks realizes that none of the personnel he could save came from a certain area in the building, a vast greenhouse deep within the pyramid called "The Atrium", where a division of W-Y is trying to naturally reproduce various pharmaceutical chemicals usually found in a rainforest biome. Hicks' small security team, along with Newt, Mimi, and Dillon, venture warily into the area.
There, in the dark caused by the power outage, they find an Alien hive, and many of the missing personnel being held as potential hosts for a small, rapidly-maturing Queen. Just as they attempt to rescue them, though, a different tribe of Aliens -- sleeker, faster albinos bred of the Bishop androids -- arrive and tear the old breed apart, carting off the captured humans for their own use. Hicks and his team only manage to survive by pulling back from this Alien crossfire.
After leaving The Atrium, they run into King, who claims that he knows nothing about what went wrong with the power, and says he's trying to find CEO Toshiro Yutani. Hicks and Newt don't trust him, but Mimi will do whatever she has to in order to rescue her father. When King says there are more Bishops that they can revive to help, the group reluctantly agrees.
He leads them to a biolab storage office, where there are not only four more Bishop androids, but a cache of prototype bio-limbs, reverse-engineered from what the Company knows about the Aliens so far, which give the wearer extraordinary arm and leg strength. Armed with four hive-mind Bishops and arm/leg augmentations that might prove to be somewhat of a match for the android-Aliens, the crew heads for a large elevator shaft that leads up to the very top of the W-Y pyramid, where Mr. Yutani's office is. Mimi is convinced that this is where her father is hiding.
Halfway up the shaft, the team meets up with a group of bone-white androidal Aliens, and a vertical battle ensues. Over the course of it, it becomes clear that not only has King programmed the Bishops to value Alien life over human, but that he caused the power outage, sacrificing his science team to experiment with how android-based Aliens will differ from human-based. Unfortunately, his experiment went too well, and he couldn’t contain the results. Even now, he's only trying to get the new Bishops up to the android Queen (who we're sure is residing above) so she can have more minions.
They reach the apex of the pyramid, which is glass on all four sloped sides, the only part of the building that is strong enough that it doesn't need the blast shields. That turns out to be a good thing, because here is where the white android Alien Queen has built her transparent nest. The sun is setting outside, and Mimi finds her father, who has been cocooned in the clear resin just like all the other captives that have been brought up from the rainforest atrium.
The final battle happens here in the blood-red and purple of twilight, and everyone ends up being destroyed except for Newt, Mimi, and the Queen. An airlock does manage to get blown open, and the Queen escapes to the outside of the building. The two women, their arms and legs still outfitted with bio-limbs, follow her out.
It has been raining, and the outside of the pyramid is slick. The Queen, seeing her opportunity to escape, begins sliding down its side toward the city below. Newt and Mimi follow her, just managing to destroy her before she does. When they reach the bottom, and confronted by the police forces that have surrounded the building, the two of them escape together in fifty-foot leaps, on their way to find Ripley.
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So that's what I came up with... I think I kept a lot of the elements that I enjoyed about the first two Alien movies. There's more detail that I left out here, of course, mostly about how the dream prophecy of the third affects the events and decisions the characters make, and there are always a few more things that need to be fleshed out, explained, streamlined or just plain rethought.
But at least it's now out in the real world. Let's see how Neill and Sigourney handle their version of it. This franchise was the first to teach me how related stories could be told in drastically different styles and still feel of one piece, so I'm genuinely excited to find out.
