Alien 3 :: essays research papers

It was in 1979 that the nightmare began, when the spaceship the Nostromo landed on an unknown planet to answer a rescue message and later explore an abandoned vessel. That’s where the crew met for the first time a creature as deadly as beautiful, the Alien. This creature and it’s environment, created by the talented Swiss artist H.R. Giger, were the main antagonists from the movie  « Alien  », directed by Ridley Scott and featuring Sigourney Weaver as the only survivor of the Nostromo crew when the Alien penetrated it. This movie was the first chapter of a cult saga still active these days. From the four movies featuring the Aliens, the third one is considered as the worst one. Even though it’s visual quality was exceptional, it’s poor scenario deceived most Alien fans throughout the world, leaving not much place for improvement for a forth movie. But most people don’t know that the critically acclaimed cyberpunk author William Gibson wrote an alternative scenario to Alien ³, much more researched, focusing on future technology and human contacts rather than on explosions and gratuitous violence. Both Alien ³ and Gibson’s script have a similar opening, where the audience learns that a Face-Hugger (a crab/spider-like creature whose function is to implement an embryo inside a chest cavity from a living organism) has been able to hide in the Sulaco, the ship with which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Hicks (an injured marine soldier), Newt (a 12 years old girl) and Bishop (an android seriously damaged) escaped from the Alien colony in the previous movie, Aliens. But this similarity between the to scripts is maybe the only one. From now on, the two stories will take completely different courses. In Alien ³, an electric malfunction (usually attributed to the Face-Hugger) causes the ship to crash on a planet called Fiorina 161 containing a disaffected mining colony now used as a high-security prison. This leads to predictable, violent, confrontations between Ripley (the only survivor from the crash) and the prisoners. From now on, the viewers knows that the movie will be based on sexist debates and on useless violence. However, in Gibson’s version, the Sulaco does not crash on a planet but rather continues on it’s original path but with a small deviation. This deviation makes the ship enter an area claimed by the Union of Progressive Peoples, or UPP, a somewhat clear analogy to the late USSR. It is rumored that this similarity contributed to the demise of Gibson’s script. The presence of a political force in the story would have been the first apparition of any kind of political debates in all the Aliens movies. And at the same time, the audience learns that there’s not only one powerful