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For a movie set in Ridley Scott’s Alien universe, this summer’s Prometheus was relatively low on, well, aliens. But an earlier draft of the script, recently leaked online, has many more — including facehuggers.
The script — for a film at the time called Alien: Engineers — appears to be one of the earlier versions of the story penned by Jon Spaihts, before Lost scribe Damon Lindelof took it over. On Sunday, Spaihts appeared to have confirmed that the script is real on Twitter, responding to a question about the uploaded document with terse tweet: “That’s authentic.” In an an interview with Wired Monday the screenwriter said it was legitimate, though not the final draft he completed before the script went to Lindelof.
“I suppose it was inevitable and I’d been hearing rumblings for a while [that it might leak],” Spaihts told Wired. “It happens constantly, and frankly Fox did a fantastic job keeping the lid on this project from the beginning; it was under development for years, honestly, and they never leaked anything ever.”
The leaked script also includes many plot points the writer has said were in his original drafts.
(Spoiler alert: Major Prometheus plot points follow.)
Around the time of Prometheus’ release on Blu-ray, Spaihts told Empire magazine that he had written a slightly different — though just as traumatic — Med Pod scene involving Elizabeth Shaw (the character ultimately played by Noomi Rapace and named “Jocelyn Watts” in the leaked script) going into a medical pod to have an alien parasite removed from her abdomen. In the film version, Shaw escapes the pod following the surgery, leaving the creature behind. In Spaihts’ script, the parasite escapes and becomes monstrous, leaving Shaw, er Watts, trapped inside.
“By the time she emerges from the pod eight hours later, the thing is abroad in the ship and big enough to be a huge danger. That was the original conception of the med pod scene,” Spaihts told Empire. “My script underwent a number of major evolutions as we were working on it, and then Damon came in and made further changes still. But that sequence and its place in the story was one of the anchors.”
What’s very different in the leaked version of the script is how the alien parasites found their way into not only Shaw/Watts but also her partner, Charlie Holloway (named “Martin Holloway” in the script and played by Logan Marshall-Green in the movie). In the film, the android David (played by Michael Fassbender) exposes Holloway to the creature through a drop of mysterious black goo. In the early version of the script, David actually coaxes a facehugger — a facehugger! — out of an egg and places it on Shaw/Watts.
“I’m not what it wants. But you, with your warm wet breath… It knows you,” the droid says in the script, aware he is in no way a worthy host. Holloway, however, gets facehugged in the early script while the team is investigating the Engineers and has a chestburster moment — chestburster! — during sex with Watts. (Seriously, read it. It’s all as nuts as it sounds.)
Spaihts, for his part, is fine with the script being in the hands of fans, and he’s quick to point out that even if they’re excited to see his take on the tale, the credit still goes to the film’s director.
“The interest in the script speaks, more than anything, to their love of the film and the Alien universe,” Spaihts told Wired. “It’s really just an aspect of their fandom for the larger universe and owes much more to Ridley Scott than to me.”
Check out the whole crazy script below or download it here. Let us know in the comments what you think about the early script and how you think it stacks up to Scott’s film.
[via Bloody Disgusting]
Alien Engineers[#embed: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/112142280/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-1wb3la6niltq5jrntu7r]
