It was in 1979 that the nightmare began, when the
spaceship the Nostrum landed on an unknown planet to
answer a rescue message and later explore an abandoned
vessel. That where the crew met for the first time a
creature as deadly as beautiful, the Alien. This creature and
it environment, created by the talented Swiss artist H.R.
Geiger, were the main antagonists from the movie « Alien »,
directed by Riley Scott and featuring Journeyer Weaver
as the only survivor of the Nostrum 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 visual quality was exceptional, it poor scenario
deceived most Alien fans throughout the world, leaving not
much place for improvement for a forth movie. But most
people know that the critically acclaimed cyberpunk
author William Gibson wrote an alternative scenario to
Alien³, much more researched, focusing on future
technology and human contacts rather than on explosions
and gratuitous violence.
Both Alien³ and Gibson script have a similar opening,
where the audience learns that a Face-Rugger (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 Sula co, the ship with which Ripley
(Journeyer 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 Alien³, an electric
malfunction (usually attributed to the Face-Rugger) causes
the ship to crash on a planet called Fiona 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 version, the Sulaco does not crash
on a planet but rather continues on it 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 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 not only one powerful.