Sometimes a piece of art — a film, a book, a song, or what have you — has such potential, but something goes awry during the creative process and the finished work doesn’t quite match What Could’ve Been. For many fans of the Alien series, one such example of this phenomenon is William Gibson’s unproduced script for Alien 3. This is the story of how that version of the Alien saga finally saw the light of day with some of the original talent involved, thanks to the Audible audio drama adaptation, creating an alternate canon for the beloved franchise along the way.
Aliens, James Cameron’s sublime sequel to Ridley Scott’s revelatory Alien, has the perfect ending. It’s a gut-punch of a film about motherhood, about sacrifice, about love. About family. Ellen Ripley, borne aloft above an ocean of pain and death, fresh off the news that her daughter has died of old age while she was in cryosleep, has something incredible happen. She finds a new daughter. Newt, a young girl whose parents were killed in a Xenomorph outbreak, is hiding in the air ducts when Ripley and a cadre of Colonial Marines rescue her.
And as this group is whittled down, we’re left with Hicks, a soldier whose relationship with Ellen Ripley hints at a connection more meaningful than our hero has felt in a long time, and Bishop, a synthetic who against all odds helps to prove that even the most wounded person can learn to trust again. By the film’s roaring, exhilarating finale, Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop are a family unit of sorts, and Ellen Ripley bundles her damaged friends aboard the battered ship the Sulaco. She signs off, knowing that finally, finally, she’s earned a break.
David Fincher’s Alien 3, however, promptly vomits on this absolute softball of a sequel set-up.
The production woes that assailed the third Alien film are legendary, with multiple tortured drafts for scripts being approved, rejected, hacked up and compromised bit by bit. What we got was an artful, baffling mess. Sure, it has some shining moments. But it opens with Newt, beautiful, innocent Newt, drowned alive in her pod, face frozen in a rictus of fear, almost the perfect manifestation of the betrayal of the promise Aliens left there as a gift for anyone making a sequel. Hicks was utterly mashed to paste by a girder, and Bishop’s ruined frame gives him a single scene in which his rubbery animatronic face gurns and burbles as he begs Ripley to euthanize him, which she does. Her last link to Aliens, snuffed out. Way to go, team.
But what if, in some bizarro, alternate universe, things had gone differently? What if, instead of a borderline cinematic prolapse, we had something else?
Enter William Gibson’s Alien 3.
An Alien Cold War
William Gibson, author of the cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, was the first of 10 – yes, 10 – writers to tackle the script for a sequel to Aliens. Series producers Walter Hill and David Giler asked Gibson to take a swing, with the intention of having his script deliberately set up a fourth Alien film. Gibson did this with aplomb, and made it through two drafts, which he wrote in mere months before leaving the project. From there, Hill and Giler spooled through a raft of ever changing drafts. In the end, what made it onto the screen was a bizarre mish-mash of ideas and a sushi-train of cruelty for our hero, Ripley, who spends the film doing little but enduring misery, torture and attempted rape before self-immolating in a tub of molten slag. So, you know. Not a great way to cap off the tale of Ellen Ripley.
But Gibson’s two draft scripts did something different. In 1987, the Cold War was very much alive, and so that very topical premise became a cornerstone of the script. Weyland-Yutani represents unfettered capitalist interests, right? So imagine there’s a Weyland-Yutani-funded station out there in space called Anchorpoint. The Sulaco is flying towards Earth, our heroes onboard, alive and well. But across from Anchorpoint is another station, run by the UPP, who are essentially an allegory for communists. What Gibson presents is a cold war, a natural evolution of the Weyland-Yutani-controlled galaxy of this franchise, and the Sulaco is drifting right between the two stations. And there’s a Xenomorph in there, growing and gestating in the life-pod of a very much awake Bishop. A light goes off. Someone is bringing her in. S#!t goes south very fast, and before long, Bishop, Hicks and Newt are trying to stave off something they thought they’d left behind. But what Gibson does, from the first pages of his drafts, is ensure that these characters who left LV-426 – even Ripley – are alive and well.
The scripts became legendary on the internet, and were turned into a graphic novel by Dark Horse in 2018. But when legendary writer, director and producer Dirk Maggs saw his chance to bring Gibson’s Alien 3 to life as a sprawling, epic audio play, he leapt at the chance.
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“I’m known for making stuff that sounds vaguely cinematic… or at least, sonically ambitious,” a gregarious Maggs tells me via Zoom from his studio. “And Steve Carsey, commissioning editor at Audible, takes me to the pub and says listen, we’ve got the rights to three Alien books, published by Titan. How about making them? And I’m a big Alien fan, so I say yes.”
The Return of Bishop and Hicks
What followed were 2016’s audio drama Alien: Out of the Shadows, 2017’s Alien: River of Pain, and 2018’s Alien: Sea of Sorrows. And after the success of these enormously ambitious Alien stories, Maggs was a natural fit for tackling William Gibson’s famous unmade threequel in audio form.
He’s also a dab hand at finding solutions to problems. For example, Gibson had to write around Sigourney Weaver’s probable absence in Alien 3 (the actress wasn’t a sure thing for the sequel early on). Still, he didn’t kill her off. She’s in there, but she’s in a coma due to a life pod malfunction. “Sigourney was busy, so we got an actress called Laurel Lefkow to play Ripley, and she sounded just ridiculously uncanny,” recalls Maggs. “I pitch-shifted her half a semitone, just to nail the note, but that was all.”
But while there’s no Sigourney in the audio drama version of Gibson’s Alien 3, there are two other names which make this a must-listen. “For this one, we thought, why don’t we see if Lance [Henriksen] and Michael [Biehn] will do it?” he says of the Bishop and Hicks actors. “And that was the gamble: whether the guys would even be interested. Because you don’t know how actors look back on roles they play! They could completely hate everything they’ve done, they could be having a Harrison Ford Han Solo moment. But no, they were well up for it!”
But what is it like being trusted with the stewardship of these characters when the actors who play them are standing in front of you? Maggs laughs. “It is weird! Because you suddenly realise… holy smoke, I’m James Cameron! You know, kind of. You’ve got to be tougher than Sergeant Apone to get done what you need done! But being professional actors, they immediately put their trust in you. And luckily I have three decades of experience in that mode!”
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Hicks and Bishop, however, are formidable characters. They’ve been built up for decades in the minds of fans, as have the actors who play them. And to say Hicks and Bishop were done dirty in Alien 3 is something of an understatement. “It was definitely unfinished business, as far as Michael was concerned,” says Maggs. “Michael was… angry about how Hicks just was found dead, and refused to appear in it – they used his photograph and his agent made them pay a lot for the use of it. And he was laughing about it now, but for all that you think actors can be automata, and just move onto the next thing… actually, it’s still very much a topic of sensitivity. He felt they’d gone in the wrong direction and he was disappointed, so he was glad to be there, glad to be playing Hicks! The challenge was finding Hicks again, and that took about… an hour. It’s 30 years later! But once he’d re-found it… wow.”
“There’s a Lot of Dialogue Here”
One thing that becomes apparent with this piece, once you’ve listened, and something that audio drama creators have to always be mindful of in general, is that visuals can’t be used to distract the audience. You don’t have actors’ faces conveying emotion. Things we take for granted, like slow tracking shots down corridors, or jump cuts, or montages, are all gone from the creators toolkit. Maggs has to use music, foley and dialogue to craft something akin to cinema in the mind of the listener. “One thing Lance said when he saw the script, and something a lot of movie actors say when they read my scripts is ‘Dirk… there’s a lot of dialogue here.’ And I say, I need to paint a picture, and I don’t have a reaction shot to do it with. I can do anything in audio, but to know how you’re feeling, I need you to say something. And then he was game.”
Alien 3 – this version at least – asks a fairly bold question: What if our heroes didn’t get utterly pole-axed during the opening of a third Alien story? What if this family stayed together? What if this was canonical? “This family unit they’d built at the end of Aliens was so… unique!” says Maggs, beaming. “It had come out of nowhere, and suddenly we’re into emotions and caring for each other.”
Lance Henricksen echoes this sentiment. “I’m grateful, in a way,” says the actor. “I wish Gibson had gotten his made. Because what we ended up doing… it was so nihilistic. I mean… by the end, she falls backwards into molten lead, before that she has sex with a serial killer doctor… and I’m wondering, what are they trying to do? Kill the franchise?
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“I mean, it’s crazy, a prison planet. The nicest guy there was an axe murderer!” Henricksen cackles. “But it was an exercise in pure activity. But what Gibson had done was make it even more… human. What he did instead was make a scary-assed fight-or-flight movie. Which I understand pretty well… I’ve spent half my life doing that!”
One of the true highlights of this production is Henricksen’s Bishop. “When I decided to do what I would do with Bishop, I was talking in my own mind, and I was using my childhood in a way,” says the actor. “Bishop is like… if you’re 12, and your parents are mean people or f#@ked-up people, you end up going, you know, I’m gonna outlive you so I can eventually forgive you for this bulls#!t. You know what I mean? Bishop started out for me as a cross between a really kind innocence and a training tool. Everybody around him wants a piece of him. And If I made a mistake… it wouldn’t be a good idea, because I’d be… disposable. It was an exercise, for me, in forgiveness and humanity.”
Filling in the Gaps
The story of William Gibson’s Alien 3, it should be noted, isn’t perfect. It seems a touch incomplete, as if it was almost where it needed to be when Gibson left the project. Maggs has a lot to say on this point.
“The actual Gibson script was definitely not a final draft,” he says. “It was a work in progress. And I felt that sometimes there we character issues – like Hicks and Bishop never really look back together. And they obviously had history! Bishop had been attached to the squad from before the events of Aliens. And I felt like we had to smush it into something more interesting, so I wrote new scenes. There’s a scene where Hicks has a conversation with Bishop which isn’t in Gibson’s script. Hicks asks Bishop if he was always this annoying before, and Bishop remarks that Hudson always found him amusing. And we kind of put that in because they were both talking so fondly of [their late Aliens co-star who played Hudson] Bill Paxton that I thought it would be nice to give a nod to Bill in this little reunion.”
William Gibson’s Alien 3 as brought to life by Maggs and company is full of this kind of storytelling triage. Maggs has a laser-keen eye for zeroing in on shortcomings and bolstering them up. Not enough Ripley? Write in a huge recap at the start of the audio play in which the events of Aliens are recounted by Bishop. No closure with Hicks and Ripley’s simmering sexual tension? Write in a brief scene where Ripley awakes from her coma to have a gorgeous exchange with everyone’s favourite member of the Marines. Not enough between Hicks and Bishop? During an extended action-heavy sequence in which the two separate to pursue dual agendas, Maggs has them nattering away like Holmes and Watson via commlink. Suddenly, two disparate threads largely devoid of dialogue become a deadpan but utterly wonderful buddy cop sequence where two fan favourites are acting like friends again. It takes a certain kind of brazenness, a certain passion for the source material, to be willing and able to play with it, dance around inside it, augment it. Make it, well, better.
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But what comes next? This rather epic, unexpected story, a glimpse at a canonical fork in the road that I’ll now be considering my third official Alien installment, ends on something of a cliffhanger. “Oh, there’s definitely a sequel in it! And if there was to be a sequel to this, we’ve got Hicks and flipping Bishop!” says Maggs. “I would adore walking through the next phase of this journey! This story is about saying we’ve got to stop fighting each other, [the Aliens are] a bigger evil, a tangible threat, rather than an ideological problem. I can imagine an epic story, and I’d love Audible, if they read this, to let us make it, to let us crack on!”
I suggest Maggs taking an Audible-helmed swing at Neill Blomkamp’s cancelled Alien 5, which would see Michael Biehn and Lance Henricksen team up with Sigourney Weaver and a grown-up Newt. “Totally,” he says, fire in his eyes. “Totally. What I’d like to do with one of these things? Finish the damned story.” Henricksen says sign him up. “I would love that, and I love [Maggs’] direction, because he’s about humanity. The humanity of those characters,” says the actor.
There are so many people who hate Alien 3, the film. And everyone I recommend this audio play to comes back a day or so later with a look in their eyes. It’s the same look Maggs has as he talks to me on Zoom, hands dancing about the place, ideas pouring out of him. It’s the look of someone who believes in second chances. That’s what Maggs has done here: He’s taken something fetal, something with potential, and used it to create a gorgeous alternate canon, a story that should have been told, and that now has been told.
You can listen to William Gibson’s Alien 3 on Audible now. You can also check out Maggs’ latest project, an ambitious 11-hour adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
Source: IGN.com Alien 3 Was Almost Good