The script picks up where Aliens left off. In the closing minutes of that movie, only a few have survived the carnage on the planet where the xenomorphs were first discovered. The last characters standing are Ripley, a marine named Hicks, the loyal android Bishop, and a little girl named Newt. This small band of survivors has made it to their ship, the Sulaco, ready to get the hell out of this place. But the Xenomorph Queen has stowed away for one last major battle. Her massive stinger rips apart Bishop, separating his torso from his legs. Despite the severe damage, his upper body continues to function. Ripley and the Queen go head-to-head in a major showdown, as Ripley risks everything to save Newt, her surrogate daughter. The Alien Queen is ejected into space and the team survives. They go into hypersleep and head back toward Earth.
Gibson’s Alien III opens on the Sulaco drifting in space. Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and the wounded Bishop are unconscious in their hypersleep capsules, oblivious to the navigation error that sends their ship into a disputed sector of space, claimed by the Union of Progressive Peoples (U.P.P.)—a Communist coalition that serves as an obvious stand-in for the 1980s Soviet Union and its satellite states.
A passing U.P.P. ship stumbles on the Sulaco and sends a small boarding party to check it out; an eerie, voyeuristic moment ensues, as the slumbering Sulaco crew has no idea they’re being boarded and observed by enemy soldiers. “Commandos move down the line, guns poised,” reads the script. “They peer in at Newt, Ripley, and Hicks, but the lid of Bishop’s capsule is pearl-white.” They open the capsule to discover an Alien egg rooted in Bishop’s wounded torso. Seconds later, a feisty, well-rested face-hugger ejects itself and attaches to their Leader’s head. His soldiers manage to shoot it without killing him but the alien’s acidic body fluids spew everywhere and burn through his helmet. The commandos grab Bishop’s torso and scramble back to their own ship.
The next sequence opens on a space station called Anchorpoint, “the size of a small moon, and growing”; “a vast, irregular structure, the result of the shifting goals of successive administrations.” The Sulaco has just docked, with the team still in hypersleep. Tissue culture lab tech Tully is called in the middle of the night to come take samples and basically figure out what the deal is. Mysteriously, a couple of high-ranking people from “Millisci, Weapons Division” have also arrived . . . and the plot thickens.
Accompanied by a couple marines, Tully heads onto the Sulaco to collect atmosphere samples. Of course, just as they arrive in the hypersleep chamber, some unwelcome visitors arrive. Alien stowaways attack the marines, who barely manage to escape, hosing down the entire chamber with liquid fire from their flamethrowers. (In Gibson’s second draft, this scene is omitted entirely, which is probably for the best as it’s not entirely clear why or how the full-sized xenomorphs were roaming around the ship.)
In Anchorpoint’s medical clinic, Hicks and Newt meet lab tech Spence, Tully’s girlfriend; she will be one of the key players in this story. In accordance with Gibson’s parameters, Ripley remains in a coma, stuck in the interminable nightmare of Alien carnage.
This leads to one of the story’s most poignant moments. Newt stands beside the bed of the unconscious Ripley, “monitored by assorted white consoles. Her forehead is taped with half a dozen small electrodes.”
“She’s sleeping,” Spence tells Newt. “Sometimes people need to sleep . . . To get over things . . .”
“Is Ripley dreaming?” Newt asks.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“It’s better not to.”
William Gibson’s Alien 3 #3, written by William Gibson and Johnnie Christmas, illustrated by Johnnie Christmas. Published by Dark Horse Comics in 2019.
This short exchange encapsulates so much of what’s gone before; the unspeakable trauma of survival, the cosmic dread the aliens represent, and the unshakeable bond formed between Ripley and Newt, who’ve each lost all except each other.
It also exposes the script’s fundamental weakness. This early moment touches on deeper emotion than anything that follows. Newt gets shipped back to her grandparents on Earth, Ripley never wakes up, and the emotional stakes that remain are ambiguous. Every other character may as well be cannon fodder; as it turns out, the vast majority of them are.
Back on the U.P.P.’s Rodina, the Commies are mining Bishop’s torso for data, learning all about the aliens. Meanwhile, in a clever cut shot, technicians on Anchorpoint are extracting similar biological information from Bishop’s legs. Something unexpected is happening, and here, Gibson introduces an idea that in the real-life history of the franchise wouldn’t emerge until 2012, in the prequel Prometheus. Gibson imagines the Alien Queen as a biological weapon, leaving behind an instinctually hungry residue that’s as fiercely desperate for survival as its eggs. (The “black goo” in Prometheus is not alien residue, but the concept is similar; a biological substance that bends and mutates other living matter to its will and remakes it in its own image.)
The scary Millisci folks who’ve arrived on Anchorpoint are interested in exactly that. They inform Colonel Rosetti, Anchorpoint’s head of military operations, that scientific testing will continue on the aliens’ bizarre genetic material. (“The alien genetic material looks like a cubist’s vision of an art deco staircase, its asymmetrical segments glowing Dayglo green and purple,” Gibson writes.) Rosetti protests that such testing is in violation of weapons treaties. In a wink-wink manner, the Millisci people tell him the experiments are for cancer research. “We’ll nourish the cells in stasis tubes, under constant observation,” one says. Back on the U.P.P. Rodina, they’re doing the same thing.
The Millisci command also insists that Tully, the marines who originally boarded the Sulaco, and anyone else who knows about alien shenanigans be forced to sign a rigorous nondisclosure agreement.
But silence breeds death. A number of people have already been exposed to the alien DNA. As Rodina and Anchorpoint play politics over the safe return of Bishop, and insiders and outsiders on Anchorpoint jockey for power, the infection is spreading beneath the surface. And it bursts forth in a spectacular fashion at a meeting of Anchorpoint’s top brass, when one of the Millisci bad guys, a woman named Welles, is interrupted mid-evil-monologue to transform into something horrifying. This ain’t a chest-burster; it’s more like a whole-other-being-burster.
“Segmented biomechanoid tendons squirm beneath the skin of her arms. Her hands claw at one another, tearing redundant flesh from alien talons. . . . She straightens up. And rips her face apart in a single movement, the glistening claws coming away with skin, eyes, muscle, teeth, and splinters of bone . . . The New Beast sheds its human skin in a single sinuous, bloody ripple, molting on fast forward.”
This point occurs about halfway into the script, and from that point forward, it’s pretty much nonstop carnage, with people molting into New Beasts left and right, and the loose New Beasts doing plenty of damage themselves. The same thing is occurring over on the Rodina, which calls for help from its comrades, who come quickly—to obliterate the entire ship with a nuclear missile. An effective containment strategy, no doubt. Only one female commando escapes in the small shuttle first used to board the Sulaco.
On the Anchorpoint, Tully goes down, leaving Spence, Hicks, and the recently returned and fully repaired Bishop to lead a band of soldiers and crew on a perilous journey through the station to reach the lifeboat bay. The remaining sequences are pure action, as New Beasts pick them off one by one and the brave crew dwindles to nothing. Meanwhile, Bishop departs on a secret solo mission to hack the fusion reactors on the station to blow the whole thing, leaving just enough time for their escape. There are bloody, acid-bathed battles, claustrophobic tunnel sequences, and people getting skewered by alien stingers at the most dramatically ironic moments; all the things we know and love from Alien and Aliens. On the big screen, this would no doubt be fast-paced, heart-pounding, and exquisitely satisfying, but on the page it can be a bit hard to follow.
There are implications that th
e alien DNA isn’t just colonizing the people, but the ship itself. As in a side trip through a hydroponic farm, where “two of the Styrofoam structures have been overgrown with a grayish parody of vegetation, glistening vine-like structures and bulbous sacs that echo the Alien biomech motif. Patches of thick black mold spread to the Styrofoam and the white deck.”
Another compelling scene sees Spence revisiting the Anchorpoint’s eco-module, described in earlier scenes as “an experimental pocket Eden . . . lush rainforest, sun-dappled miniature meadows, patches of African cactus.” Once an idyllic refuge, the eco-module is now poisoned by the aliens, too. The primates are cocooned, poised to hatch. The lemur has become an alien itself, screaming and pouncing from the trees above. As it represents the Anchorpoint’s downfall, this arc also foreshadows the unthinkable, which has remained a source of ultimate dread throughout the franchise: What if the aliens make it to Earth?
In the story’s tense final moments, the U.P.P. commando arrives at the rescue. Hicks, Spence, and Bishop are the only survivors who make it onto her shuttle. (The still-unconscious Ripley was previously launched to safety in a lifeboat.) As Hicks and Spence try to comfort the commando, who is dying from radiation poisoning, Bishop observes, “You’re a species again, Hicks. United against a common enemy . . .”
But this particular version of Alien III would never be made (at least not into a film). Perhaps the producers had hoped for something more strikingly cyberpunk; perhaps they didn’t know exactly what they were hoping for, but this wasn’t it. David Giler told Cinefantastique, “We got the opposite of what we expected. We figured we’d get a script that was all over the place, but with good ideas we could mine. It turned out to be a competently written screenplay but not as inventive as we wanted it to be. That was probably our fault, though, because it was our story.”
Gibson’s script was followed by about thirty others. In the end, Alien 3 was based on a script by independent filmmaker Vincent Ward, although some significant changes were made to his story. This is a secret history all its own, as Ward’s original concept is also a famous unmade version—perhaps more famous, as it came much closer to being fully realized.
In Ward’s treatment, the penal colony where Ripley crash-lands in Alien 3 was originally meant to be, in Gibson’s words, “a wooden space station inhabited by deranged monks.” It’s also a fascinating take on the franchise. As pop culture critic Ryan Lambie describes it on Den of Geek, “when Ripley lands on the planet in an escape vessel, the horrors she brings with her are, from the monks’ perspective, straight from the depths of hell: the chestburster erupts from its victims like a demon. The full-grown alien is regarded as a dragon, or perhaps even the Devil himself.” Concept art was created by artist Mike Worrall and architectural designer Lebbeus Woods; the wooden sets were even built. Then the film’s release date was moved up and the producers decided to scrap the baroque weirdness and go with the more conservative setting of a prison planet. The frustrated Ward, who’d aspired to do something more ambitious with the story, then exited the production.
In 2018, it was announced that Gibson’s Alien III would be getting a second life. Dark Horse Comics is creating a five-part comic series based on the script, adapted by talented writer/artist Johnnie Christmas. “When your first contracted screenplay (or screenplay of any kind, in my case) isn’t produced, but the film is eventually made with a different screenplay, retaining nothing of yours but a barcode tattoo on the back of a character’s neck, the last thing you ever expect is to see yours beautifully adapted and realized, decades later, in a different medium, by an artist of Johnnie Christmas’s caliber,” William Gibson told CBR. “It’s a wonderful experience, and I have no doubt that Johnnie’s version, which adheres almost entirely to the script, delivers more of my material to the audience than any feature film would have been likely to do.” Christmas’s past work includes the critically acclaimed Sheltered (Image Comics) and a collaboration with legendary writer Margaret Atwood on a graphic novel series Angel Catbird. It will be a pleasure to see his interpretation of Gibson’s script. *
PAUL TREMBLAY
Behold, the Science-Fiction Cosmic Horror of Phase IV!
Phase IV (1974) could’ve been another schlocky, nature-run-amok B movie. Instead, it’s a strange, daring film full of big ideas and stunning imagery that informs speculative film/fiction four decades later.
The movie’s director, Saul Bass, was a legendary graphic designer and artist, credited as the founder of modern title design. A short list of his iconic title sequences include: The Night of the Hunter (1954), Vertigo (1958), West Side Story (1961), Goodfellas (1990), and both Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s curious (to be kind) remake (1999). In the original Psycho, Bass’s credits also included “pictorial consultant.” If you’re looking to make a deep Internet dive, go read about Bass claiming he directed the infamous Janet Leigh shower scene, offering his detailed storyboards as proof. Bass also won an Oscar for directing a short documentary film in 1969. Phase IV (1974), however, was the only feature length film he directed, as it bombed at the box office and initially received tepid critical response.
For a movie about killer ants, Phase IV was surprisingly heavy on the arthouse aesthetic, with surreal montages and inventively artsy shots.
The film opens with a deep space vista, replete with glowing galaxies, organ music to make the band Iron Butterfly jealous, groovy morphing colors, and an eclipse. The bright sun contrasted by its negative, which appears to be a black hole in space and time, is a visual motif that is repeated throughout the film. Via voiceover narration, Michael Murphy’s character Dr. Lesko (a code-breaking mathematician-cum-biocommunicator, able to translate whale calls and whistles) speaks of a mysterious cosmic event, one we were able to observe and one many feared would result in worldwide catastrophes. All was quiet on earth until, well, ants. Yes, the nameless, unknowable cosmic event wakes not the usual monstrous candidates (Lovecraftian squids and cephalopods), but jumpstarts global consciousness within the ants. The twitching trillions begin interspecies communication and cooperation. The resulting uber-hivemind is as alien as it is a formidable hyper-intelligence.
For the first nine minutes of the film, Dr. Lesko’s voiceover is the only human on or offscreen. We get an ant-only extended jam (way more organ music) as we watch them swarm and crawl through their labyrinthine nests, antennae and legs twitching. We eventually find the queen’s royal chamber, her head adorned in nature’s version of a crown, and as the camera pans down the length of her body, we see her laying eggs from a grotesquely large, translucent sac. (Flash-forward twelve years to when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley first sees the queen alien in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), and that scene plays like a shot-by-shot repurposing of Phase IV’s hail to the queen.) Otherworldly and hypnotic, Bass’s direction shows us these earthbound aliens interacting and planning, and he creates an ineffable sense of their culture without ever anthropomorphizing the creatures. It’s an unsettling and thrilling trick, managing to propel the first-act narrative through the ants while demonstrating the alien-ness of their group intelligence.
At the behest of the United States government, Dr. Lesko joins the maniacal Dr. Hubbs in a chunk of ravaged Arizona desert where ants have run amuck (that’s an entomological term). The two scientists hole-up in a white geodesic dome, stationed near a chorus of obelisk-like ant hives. The scientists attempt contact with the ants and when that doesn’t work, Dr. Hubbs provokes aggression by destroying the hives. Science fiction horror ensues, including a truly disturbing scene in which the scientists press the “yellow” button and accidentally poison a family of farmers who did not evacuate in time. Kendra, the farmer’s doe-eyed granddaughter, survives and becomes a third tenant of the dome.
The ants remain more than a few steps ahead as the humans succumb to the desert heat, paranoia, fear, and moral philosophizing. Dr. Hubbs (imagine a British, hirsute Jack Nicholson) loses what little he has left of his mind, an
d Dr. Lesko manages rudimentary communication with the ants using really old computers, audio wavelengths, and basic geometric shapes and concepts. It’s not quite an Arrival (2016) level of linguistic theory in play here, but for the purposes of this essay, it’s close enough.
Both endings of the film are wonderfully bonkers. Before release, the studio cut over four minutes of Bass’s psychedelic freakout that is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey meets a Jodorowsky film. The original ending of Phase IV was not restored until 2012. The ending that moviegoers saw gives us the CliffsNotes version of the freakout and a brief voiceover narration making sure that we (mostly) get what just happened. Dr. Locks and Kendra aren’t going to be consumed but are instead being welcomed or initiated into the hivemind’s super-intelligence. Got all that?
The movie was probably the unwitting introduction to what we so lovingly now call Lovecraftian or cosmic horror for many young minds who saw the film on TV in the 1980s and it’s hard not to think of work from authors Nathan Ballingrud, Livia Llewellyn, S. P. Miskowski, John Langan, and in particular, the work of Laird Barron, which often evokes a naturalistic cosmic horror vibe.
They Remain (2018), directed by Philip Gelatt, is a wonderfully creepy and trippy adaptation of Barron’s novelette -30-. Two scientists are hired by a mysterious corporation to study a remote area (the short story is set in the high desert, the film in a northeastern U.S. wooded area) where a death cult had encamped and done some death-cult-y terrible things. The scientists’ home base—a white, segmented/paneled structure—is most certainly a nod to Phase IV’s desert dome. The characters slowly succumb to madness and a cosmic awareness, a disturbing connectivity between the cult members and perhaps even with the flora and fauna of the location itself.
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