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The Original Version of Alien: Resurrection Would’ve Featured an Alien Battle on Earth
Keeping Xenomorphs off Earth is priority number one.
The combined talents of director Ridley Scott, writer Dan O’Bannon, and artist H. R. Giger may have produced the most consistently terrifying extraterrestrial in all of fiction when they birthed the Xenomorph. To be caught in a confined space with one of them is an almost certain death sentence unless your name is Ellen Ripley. The only silver lining, the only solace that the victims of the Xenomorphs can hold onto, is that (with the exception of the Alien vs. Predator films) the universe’s perfect killing machines have never made their way back to Earth. But they almost did in Alien: Resurrection (airing on SYFY).
Alien: Resurrection Took Viewers to Times and Places They’d Never Been Before
The fourth entry in the Alien franchise takes place 200 years after the events of Alien 3. It’s two centuries later but powerful forces are still bent on finding a way to use Xenomorphs as weapons. To that end, scientists cook up a clone of Ellen Ripley using DNA taken before her death in the previous film.
Before her death, Ripley’s DNA had been contaminated by the Xenomorph Queen, and her clone wakes aboard the spaceship Auriga with an alien embryo growing inside her. The ship’s doctors safely remove it, but Ripley is left with enhanced abilities, acidic blood, and a psychic link to the killer aliens.
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When the laboratory Xenomorphs escape, because of course they do, Ripley is forced to endure yet another fight for survival in the deeps of space where, you might recall, no one can hear you scream. To make matters worse, when the Xenomorphs damage the ship, it triggers an emergency protocol and makes a b-line for Earth. We’re no exobiologists, but returning home is probably the worst thing you could do when you’re ferrying angry, untethered extraterrestrials.
Fearing the imminent demise of the human race, the ship’s android, Call (Winona Ryder), sets the ship on a collision course with the surface, hoping the impact will destroy the Xenomorphs. Meanwhile, as a result of all the genetic buffoonery at play, the Xenomorph Queen has developed a uterus and given birth to a Xenomorph-Human hybrid known as the Newborn. Sensing an affinity with Ripley and getting no love from its mother, the Newborn kills the Xenomorph Queen. Ripley rewards it by melting a tiny hole in the ship and forcing the Newborn through it.
In the end, Ripley and co. escape to the mercenary ship Betty before the Auriga smashes into the planet. That’s the way things ended when Alien: Resurrection hit theaters back in 1997, but screenwriter Joss Whedon originally had plans to bring the franchise home.
Alien: Resurrection’s Original Humanity-Threatening Ending on Earth
In the original script, Whedon imagined a series of different endings, all of which would have taken place on Earth’s surface. Our survivors still end up on the Betty, but rather than remaining in orbit, the ship crash lands on Earth with Ripley, two other people, and the Newborn still alive. Having landed in a forest close to the city, Ripley picks up a grenade launcher and goes after the Newborn one-on-one. Despite her enhanced strength and abilities, Ripley is nearly overpowered before Call comes to the rescue on a flying piece of futuristic heavy machinery.
The Newborn meets its end in the jaws of a flying thresher, its acidic blood sparking a forest fire. The movie would have ended with Ripley and friends watching the flames flicker over the biological and mechanical wreckage, but it wasn’t meant to be. And Whedon also penned Earth-based endings in a junkyard, the desert, and a maternity ward, according to Den of Geek.
Those terrestrial settings were eventually abandoned because of costs, it just made more sense to stay in space. And in the end, maybe that’s where Xenomorph stories belong. Besides, that’s the only place you can force your sad alien son through a hole the size of a golf ball.
See it for yourself in Alien: Resurrection, airing on SYFY Wednesday 3/27 @ 4:48 pm and 3/28 at @ 2:00 pm Eastern.
