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By, Jacob Krueger
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Alien Covenant: Setting Up A Trick Ending
Podcast Transcript:
This week, we are going to be looking at Alien: Covenant, by John Logan and Dante Harper.
One of the things that makes Alien: Covenant especially worth studying for screenwriters of all genres is that it’s a script that starts off really strong, but suffers as it reaches its conclusion from a really common malady of all screenwriters: the totally predictable trick ending that the writers are wedded to, that ends up undermining the real story that they’re trying to tell.
Now, sure, Alien: Covenant is a regurgitation of something that we have seen a million times before in every Alien movie: a simple structure where you take a bunch of really well drawn characters and slowly kill them off one by one.
This is the formula for Alien; this is the way it works. And this movie, like all the others in the Alien series, is built around the horror of being chased by a creature that is way more powerful than you.
So when I say it starts off strong, I’m not suggesting that they’re reinventing the wheel. I’m suggesting they’re taking that wheel, and rolling it in a slightly more complicated direction. Which is really the goal for any serialized screenplay-- to deliver the same thing in a slightly different way.
But though the script may be built upon the same old formula, it is also built from something deeper.
Like the original 1979 Alien movie, Alien: Covenant grows not just out of the commercial question of “how do I-- as Blake Snyder would put it-- tell a ‘monster in the house’ horror movie in space?” It grows out of a theme. Something that was genuinely terrifying to the original writer, Dan O'Bannon, that he wanted to explore in a personal way. Something true that he wanted to explore through fiction. And this was what separated the original Alien from other movies of that genre.
As Dan O’Bannon has noted in interviews, the idea that actually spawned the original Alien, was the horror of rape and forced pregnancy-- a horror that so many women have gone through in their real world lives, but that few men could viscerally understand. So instead of going after women in an exploitative way, as so many horror movies have done, he wanted instead to go after the men-- to make that horror visceral to men, in a way that would make them, “Cross their legs” and feel what that is like.
And you can see that the entire structure of the Alien franchise, from the structure of each individual script, to the horrifying visuals, to the rules of the universe, down all the way to the production design, the way the alien creatures burst from the chests (and later, in Alien: Covenant from the backs) of impregnated males, every single decision grows from that one simple idea. The deeply personal why that the writer is actually writing it.
So, you have a theme, and that theme is the thing that gives your script unity. It isn't necessarily the thing that the audience leaves talking about. Nobody leaves Alien saying, “Wow what an interesting theme about male insemination, male pregnancy!” No, they leave going, “Holy shit, a fucking alien burst out of this guy’s back!”
But they feel the theme. The theme gives the screenplay a feeling of unity. And the theme guides the creative imagination of the writer.
It’s this same theme that leads to another element that ties all the Alien movies together: the strong female protagonist. And we can see that once again in Alien: Covenant, the characters we relate to most are the women.