Script review – “Alien” by Walter Hill and David Giler (1978)

I didn’t really want to wade through all the different versions of this story, so I thought I’d read the draft I could find closest to the shooting date. It seems pretty close to the final film, with some changes – dialogue, in this person Ripley and Dallas are having an affair. It’s written in tough, terse Hill style – lots of short sentences – which suits the Alien universe.

Whoever contributed what, this is a brilliant script, unfairly overlooked because of the stunning work from the filmmakers (Scott, Geiger, Weaver): it’s logical, believable (as Hill points out, truckers in space became a cliché almost immediately eg Outland), which builds in excitement. It’s a shooting gallery-And Then There Were None type structure, people being knocked off one by one, but there is sufficient freshness: the space ship setting, the chest bursting scene, discovering Dallas and the others in a web (this was filmed but cut), the twist of Ash being in cahoots with the corporation (a great second act twist – apparently this was Giler’s idea).

(NB I couldn’t resist looking at an O’Bannon draft - the crew was all male, the dialogue not nearly as good – I agree with Hill, it’s awful, the tone not as gritty, the plot and structure remains, and is very sound: landing on the planet, being attacked, the chest burster, knocking off people one by one, final survivor escaping in a pod with a cat and signing off. It doesn’t have the corporation conspiracy stuff- Hill and Giler should have gotten a credit but the WGA were probably hostile to them because they were also producers. They also might have been annoyed by little tricks like changing all the names of the characters. But O’Bannon did a tremendous amount of work.)