Look, we’ve gotten a lot of spoilers for Alien: Covenant at this point, so it’s nice that Ridley Scott has decided to take a break and go back to talk about the very first Alien film a bit. The only problem is that it doesn’t bode well for Scott’s characters and the decisions he wants to make for them. I’m not liking anybody’s chances in the new films after this chat from Entertainment Weekly — featuring a sweet piece of fan art by Robert Sammellin for the magazine.
According to Scott, the original Alien apparently had a far more bleak ending than what we got in the final product. Not only did Ripley fail to kill the xenomorph, but her options for future sequels were also quickly revoked:
“I thought that the alien should come in, and Ripley harpoons it and it makes no difference, so it slams through her mask and rips her head off.” Next, Scott says, he’d have cut to the tentacles of the alien pressing buttons on the dashboard. “It would mimic Captain Dallas [Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off.’”
That is the kind of ending that can ruin a perfectly good film. It is bleak enough as it is, with Ripley just sorta floating through space and the xenomorph not mimicking anybody else’s voice. Just look at what happened with Life two weeks ago and you’ll see why an ending like this is a bad idea. It’s possibly the one time in the history of Hollywood that a studio executive showed up on set and did the right thing:
“The first executive from Fox arrived on set within 14 hours, threatening to fire me on the spot,” says Scott with a laugh. “So we didn’t do that [ending].”
What’s clear here is that Scott has bloodlust inside him and he’s going to use these twenty Alien films he has lined up to rip, tear, devour, melt, and destroy every young recognizable actor in Hollywood. It’s going to be a bloodbath. We already got a hint at what he’s going to do to Noomi Rapace thanks to the latest teaser and we also apparently know what is going to happen to a lot of characters thanks to Scott’s own spoiler tour around the nation.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
