Alternate Alien 3

"We open in a wooden cathedral. We think it's the middle ages. There are monks working behind the scenes, going upstairs through alcoves, then up ladders through attics and lofts. We follow one monk, who emerges through a gantry and looks out through a trap door across the encrusted surface of his enviroment, a little plain that curves, with a lagoon and a shallow atmosphere. The monk sees a star in the East. It gets closer and closer. Other monks come up the ladder and more people join them over a period of days and weeks. And the star gets closer, until it smashes into the lagoon. The monks believe it is some sort of omen, that it is going to save them in some way. Of course, we know it is something quite different."

"The monk we first see, John, goes over to the crashed spaceship in a coracle, this ancient little vessel made of hide. Everything is destroyed inside. He and the other monks find bedchambers with the glass broken. They find trails of blood. There's no sign of Newt, and they find Ripley. She's asleep, but the shield to her sleeping chamber is broken. They take her by coracle and by ladder down to where the senior bishop is. He's kind of a real reactionary, and rules with an iron rod. The bishops and the monks interrogate her, and she only has one ally, this monk called John, who's a little more open than the rest. There's a weird physical frisson between him and Ripley. Then things start going wrong."

"There are these monastic toilets. Six or eight long-drop toilets with dividers between each closet. Here the monks catch up on the local gossip. But the Alien - which has come from the spaceship and then down into the wooden vessel - is circling through their sewerage system. One guy is in the middle of a conversation, then whoosh! The Alien gets him from below. One by one, the Alien sucks them down into the sewage."

"The monks ecome frightened. Ripley, as a woman, has become to them a kind of evil presence. She is sent down to a cell, where she starts to hallucinate. It's kind of morning sickness. She has been inpregnated by the Alien. The hallucinations are very much likeBosch visions, apocalyptic visions of fire and death. The Alien attempts to taunt her, and they achieve this strange intimacy. And Ripley can't tell what's real and what's not real."

"It's a year or two later. The flames have been put out. The wheatfields have grown back. You see a line of monks, wearing their cowls and habits, and they are working away, stripping the plants for the weat. We move down the line and you see one face, and then another, and then your realise that one of the monks is now Ripley. You just see this lean face that has been through all these things. And she has finally found her own sense of community through thses men and this isolated place. She's found her own sense of peace."

This was the original Alien 3 story by Vincent Ward. Which he's said "I still have this film in my head, I can still see it really strongly. Who knows? we may still see it yet"