The original writer for the Alien prequels, Jon Spaihts initially penned a more Alien-centric prequel script. This wasn’t the direction that Ridley Scott wanted to proceed in, so Damon Lindelof was brought in to rewrite the script. The Lindelof scripts were responsible for Prometheus. Lindelof didn’t return for Alien: Covenant, but has recently seen the film.
Lindelof talked about his opinion (rather his lack thereof) of Alien: Covenant in a recent interview with Collider :
“I can’t respond to Covenant along the lines of ‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’, ‘It’s good’ or ‘It’s bad’ because of my relationship to that material. That said, anytime I go to a movie I’m going to the movie because I want to like it and I was able to do that with Covenant.
I really wanted to like it and therefore I was able to like it. I thought that Fassbender’s performance was off the hook. I love Ridley Scott’s filmmaking and there’s some incredibly beautiful filmmaking in that movie, so I programmed myself to enjoy the experience and I was successful in achieving my programming, I will say that.”
Lindeloff goes on to say whether or not Alien: Covenant was close to the ideas that he heard Scott kicking around during his time with Prometheus:
“I don’t know, I mean we weren’t necessarily talking about what the sequel to Prometheus would be as opposed to like where this journey was going to end up, and I think that the themes that Ridley was really interested in overlapped with themes that I was interested in, which is things that he had already explored in Blade Runner.
He had always explained Prometheus to me as the marriage between Alien and Blade Runner because he was interested in this idea of creation and that there were three generations of creation. You have man and his creation, which are the synthetic beings, the androids, the robots, replicants, whatever you wanna call them depending on which Ridley movie you’re in. And then what’s the next level of that, which is who created man?
So that search for God as it were to go and ask, ‘Why did you make me and to what end?’ was something that Ridley was interested in and was in Jon Spaihts’ draft long before I came along, and so that was the thing that I keyed into.
I think that one of the conversations that we had at the end of Prometheus is, Shaw and David have basically locked in on the coordinates of the planet where the Engineers came from. What does that place look like? Ridley called it ‘Paradise’. What happens when they land on that planet?
It doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten there yet in Covenant, Covenant felt like it maybe was a detour prior to them arriving at the place of origin so I don’t want to spoil any place that he might still be wanting to go, but the conversations that he and I had about where the story goes next were largely about the place where the Engineers were from and less the events of Covenant.”
The Alien: Covenant prequel novel, Alien: Covenant – Origins, might shed some light on a few of the questions that the film left. The book deals with the origins of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and the early stages of the colony ship ‘Covenant’. Check out the full synopsis below:
“As the colony ship Covenant prepares for launch, and the final members of the crew are chosen, a series of violent events reveal a conspiracy to sabotage the launch. Yet the perpetrators remain hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
The threat reaches all the way up to Hideo Yutani, the head of the newly merged Weyland-Yutani Corporation, when his daughter is kidnapped. Is the conspiracy the product of corporate espionage, or is it something even more sinister?
While Captain Jacob Branson and his wife Daniels prepare the ship, Security chief Dan Lopé signs a key member of his team, and together they seek to stop the technologically advanced saboteurs before anyone else is killed, and the ship itself is destroyed in orbit.”
The novel is written by Dean Foster and hits bookstores on September 26th.
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