ALIEN

		Review by E.C.McMullen Jr.
FIGHT CENSORSHIP SUPPORT CBLDF ALIEN: THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY - 2020 Writer: Cristiano Seixas Artist: Guilherme Balbi First Pub; Dec. 15, 2020 Dark Horse Comics $19.99 US ISBN: 978-1-506717-66-1

Over 40 years later and "You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you?"

The perfect Alien Monster movie.

We're well into 2022 and in 2020, a year after finalizing the purchase of 20th Century Fox (a company that waited two decades too long to turn themselves into 21st Century Fox) Disney announced that they were going to make an ALIEN TV Show (thus fulfilling my prophecy after having endured ALIEN COVENANT).

Well, COVID-19 may have put the brakes on that for a bit. All we do know is that the TV show is from the same stewards of the ALIEN franchise who have spent nearly 40 years bearing the responsibility of ever diminishing returns for ALIEN³, ALIEN RESURRECTION, ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM, PROMETHEUS, and ALIEN COVENANT (Plus an anniversary package of 8 DVDs all slipcased into scratchy paper sleeves instead of raised protective cores, as is typical of protecting recorded media discs from CDs to 4K Bluray for the last 40 years). Which means the TV show is going to shit the bed wetter than ever and likely kill off the ALIEN franchise the same way Disney killed the Star Wars franchise and is thirsting to kill off Pixar.

When that happens, and yes it's a matter of When and not If, ALIEN fans, like THE TERMINATOR, TREMORS, and HELLRAISER fans, will turn to the first two movies and ignore the deformed stillbirths that came after.

In fact, it would seem Disney is preparing for it.

Dark Horse Comics released the 5 comic miniseries in late 2020 culminating in the final issue and the hardcover graphic novel, ALIEN: THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY, being released in the same month.

Then Disney/Marvel took over the ALIEN comic book reigns, likely permanent.

Though I'd read the original Dan O'Bannon screenplay some years ago, it was interesting to see all of the oddly named characters interact visually. I say oddly because my first exposure to ALIEN, like many people, was the movie.

Cristiano reinterprets O'Bannon's characters mostly as different races and genders, except for the engineer, Jay Faust. For whatever reason, the engineer stays a black man.

Despite taking an alternate route through the tale of ALIEN I've grown to love and know so well, my biggest problem with the book is how Guilherme's characters all look the same. Broussard and Melkonis look like identical twins, separated only by their blonde and black hair and that's not always constant. At times there are two white men with black hair in the same panel, arguing with each other, while talking to a third person. Apparently the limited number of faces confused colorist Candice Han as well.

In the many close-ups of Broussard and Melkonis as well as Martine Roby and Captain Standard, there's just no telling. Hair-style is all that separates them.

Worse, Captain Standard's hairstyle, long on the left side, shaved on the right, flips throughout the comic. Suddenly her head is shaved on the left side, long on the right, and it flips from panel to panel in the same scene.

Worse than that is her skin tone changes from panel to panel, Dark brown, light brown, to Caucasian.

Only the characters of Hunter and Jay Faust are noticeably different. Hunter because he's a muscle bound giant: bald, and bearded. Faust because he's the only black male, and about as tall as Hunter.

Confusing the characters, often trying to figure out who was who, torpedoed the pace more than a few times until enough characters had died that it was easier to see who was doing what.

Seeing as there are now two graphic novels of the same movie, drawing comparisons is natural. For me, Walter Simonson's art in ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY is less technically accurate, but easier to follow. His experiments with panel placement was not only accurate, but emboldened the drama of the moment: each character was their own person and were easy to tell apart from each other.

That said, both Dan O'Bannon's tale and Cristano Seixas adaptation of it carry the day.

O'Bannon originally portrayed the crew as consummate professionals. Each with their flaws, each human, but all emotionally mature.

But there's not enough drama to that, so the added mix of Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and David Giler, created the coarse lowbrows of engineers Parker and Brett and the professional but sulky teenage sister of Lambert. Ripley, Dallas, and Kane were all that was left of O'Bannon's emotionally mature professionals.

As for Ash? O'Bannon's original story didn't need an Ash and in this case, it's not a loss. All Ash brings to the table is a side plot that never goes anywhere because it can't. In the Ash version, the "company" already knew about the planetoid and was more than happy to blow a fortune sending another ship with an ultra expensive cargo and no means to accomplish their goal?

Ash is the biggest plot hole in the original movie. The company sent him to make sure that the humans didn't kill the alien once it was onboard.

But as we see from the movie, the Nostromo isn't built to make such a landing on such a planet. It nearly wrecked itself and required extensive repairs.

Then there's Kane. He was under no orders to further explore the alien ship once they realized that the creature who sent the message - the pilot - was long dead. Their air supply while out of their sleeping "freezerinos" is limited. They have to get back as soon as possible.

With so much of the alien ship to explore and so little time to do it, Kane didn't have to choose the only path (out of manyorifices leading to unknown hallways) that would lead him to the eggs, but he did.

Once there Kane didn't have to go down the alien catwalk among the eggs, but he did.

After Kane fell down among the eggs, he could have got right back out, but he didn't.

After Kane saw there was movement inside the egg, he didn't have to stick his face right inside an opening egg pod so there was nowhere else for the moving creature within to go BUT up, thus easily attacking him, or at least knocking him over, but Kane did.

In order for the company plan to work, Kane had to make all of these remarkably arbitrary random choices, a few after getting permission from Dallas first - who also didn't need to give permission and it was in their best interest not to. A direct domino trail: a single linear path out of many choices - all in order to get the alien onto the ship.

Even that's only because Lambert and Dallas chose to Not leave him for dead And break a quarantine protocol.

Even that wasn't enough as they could have "frozen" Kane and let the doctors at their destination unfreeze and save him (as fans of the movie will remember Parker repeatedly suggesting).

And they had every right to believe that Kane was dead or soon would be. It wasn't until Ash investigated that they realized the creature was feeding Kane oxygen, though that didn't make the creature any less dangerous to the rest of the crew and the ship.

And after the acid blood incident, they were fully aware of how deadly this alien could be to all of them, alive or dead.

Ripley: Ash, are you kidding? This thing bled acid. Who knows what it's gonna do when it's dead.

Ash: I think it's safe to assume it isn't a zombie.

As a kid who grew up watching nature shows, I was sitting in the theater and my first thought was, 'It's blood stops being acid the second it dies?'

Immediately followed by my second thought, 'You know nothing of this creature, so how do you know it's dead and not dormant?'

And further, it was entirely rational to believe that the creature could have infected Kane with something contageous, but they let him out of medical quarantine to eat among them.

Seriously: If just one of those dominoes didn't fall, there's no alien to take home.

Fans sometimes bring in unspoken but safe-to-assume possibilities like the company being aware of Lambert, Kane, and Dallas's psyche evals, and putting them together accordingly, but then they would also know that Dallas, Ripley, and Parker would be jokers in the pack, with Engineer Brett canny enough to create a electric prod that nearly worked, and only then because the alien chose to hide in the vent shafts near, of all places, an area where it could be blown out into space.

Bottom line, the deepest dive into psyche evals could not navigate the unknown and overly complex Rube Goldberg path of human choices (and permissions) that this movie takes to get the alien onboard the ship, as well as the alien's choices that determined each subsequent move the crew made.

By themselves, all of the random choices O'Bannon originally wrote makes sense because life is random. That arbitrary and indifferent universe falls apart when Mother and Ash are both working according to the grand design of the company.

It would have been ridiculously easier and far less expensive for the company to send a spacecraft of Ash-bots to get the eggs and bring them back, all without the messy side trip of going to a mining colony twice as far away and then the long trip back.

The efficiency of the robots would have their drama once they returned to the humans in the company, so it's an entirely different story and one that anyone can write.

Go for it! Write the better story that O'Bannon wanted to tell!

Or we can remove Ash entirely and the tale, like the universe we live in, is a dangerously random place where space faring protocols regarding Emergency Beacons and possible first contact finally got their first bite.

Still that's all academic as ALIEN is what it became and there's no changing that. But a universe full of danger and space faring humans confronted by mysteries remains as unexplored as our galaxy, regardless of how many science fiction novels, short stories, comic books, TV shows, and movies come out each year.

So now you know why, despite all of the visual artistic missteps in the graphic novel, I like the original Dan O'Bannon version better, as well as Cristiano's adaptation of it. It wasn't quite "classic" status in this incarnation, but it was going in the right direction.

Speaking of the Right Direction, ALIEN: THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY goes in the right direction regarding the

!!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!!:
In Dan O'Bannon's original screenplay, the diameter of the planetoid Mother discovered was 120 kilometers. Not the 1200 meters diameter in ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY.

Why this is better -

Continued at Alien The Original Screenplay SCIMO

As for the Varmints

The dead pilot is its own creature, nice and bizarre while still being humanoid. The monster(s) are interesting Giger / Winston hybrids without being the sillier, weaker, PROMETHEUS missteps.

Only time will tell if I grow to love ALIEN THE ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY graphic novel as much as I do ALIEN THE ILLUSTRATED STORY, but for now,

Three solid Fanboys!

This review copyright 2022 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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