How About This Instead, Sir Ridley?

I saw Prometheus at the IMAX the other day. I haven't been this disappointed with a movie since The Phantom Menace. Nowadays if I don't like a film I can usually shrug it off easily, but this has stayed with me for some reason. I keep thinking about how good it could have been, if it hadn't been built from the ground up to be a basic formulaic blockbuster, instead of the deep rumination on life it was claimed to be.

It looked good, but the script was awful. I completely agree with the many forum posters who take issue with the sci-fi cliches, juvenile characters making idiotic decisions, trillion dollar missions being staffed with unstable incompetents who don't follow even basic orders, characters being able to leap about after major surgery, nonsensical technology - and so on. But deeper than that, the actual background to the engineers and the whole premise itself just didn't make sense. The engineers were just stupid thugs, and the whole theme of creationism versus evolution was a botched, childish mess.

I'm interested to explore ideas for what might make a better story, more fitting to the majesty that is Alien. Hopefully some might be interested. If not, I got a kick out of writing it. It's a good exercise. I had another idea for it, riffing on our creation of artificial life in the form of David, but this one seemed to be more in keeping with the psychosexual themes of Alien.

Anyway, if you've made it this far, perhaps you'll be willing to go a little further. Discuss.

:)

(Oh, and it wouldn't be called Prometheus. As my friend pointed out, why on earth would he name his ship after someone who gets his liver pecked out every day for eternity? He might as well have called it Titanic - though I recently read that's exactly what some bloke is doing with his new cruise liner. Go figure.)

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On a distant planet live an advanced race who have lived long enough to start mastering biological technology. Using genetic engineering, they have mixed their own DNA with that of other species on their planet to take control of their own evolution and move towards perfection. Many millennia ago they had changed themselves so radically that they no longer reproduced sexually, but via parthenogenesis. Because of this, their genetic diversity is low and they have exacting standards of genetic fitness, in line with their policy of advanced eugenics. Being mammalian, parthenogenesis means they are all female. Their emotions are basic, and they have lost all concept of sexual love.

During their reproduction, they pass brain-like matter to the egg, containing portions of their knowledge. The offspring could almost be said to be another version of the mother, and the concept of death through old age is not really an issue. Because of this the repository of scientific and technical knowledge they have is enormous. They have advanced technology, including interstellar travel.

They have observed and visited Earth during the course of human evolution. Our sexual reproductive cycle repulses the engineers. They find it instinctively disgusting, the idea of corrupted flesh and corrupted DNA. Consider how instinctively repulsed we might be by certain insects who lay their eggs in another species so that their offspring can consume their host alive from the inside. It is that physical repulsion the engineers have for us and our sexual exchanges.

Of course there are species on their planet that still reproduce sexually: they consider them vermin. But on Earth they find such a vermin species evolving to walk upright as they do, and evolving the intelligence they prize so highly. They view us as a biological mockery. The fact that we die so soon, passing on no direct knowledge in our embryos, only compounds their view of us as a sickly, nonsensical species.

But their repulsion is matched by a grim fascination with us. Without their direct intervention, they would evolve very slowly using parthenogenesis, but we are evolving quickly and naturally. Our culture appears to be rich and varied, being largely based on the entwined themes of sex and death, two things the engineers don't really understand.

Their first impulse upon visiting us, as our first societies are in their infancy, is to preach abstinence to us. We viewed them as gods, and took their dim view of sex to heart. In this way, they gave us the dubious gift of guilt-ridden religion. Our tales of virgin births and reincarnation were fuelled by a desire to be more like our superior visitors.

But within less than 25,000 years, we have ourselves started to master space travel, genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence and a host of other advanced technologies. The engineers start to think there might be something in sexual reproduction: they begin to direct their own self-engineering in this direction.

They contact us again: this time, we are on more equal terms with our gods. The engineers make a secret deal with one of our more elite science enterprises, headed up by a young man named Weylan. They help him develop into the world's powerhouse of technology and give him the key to interstellar travel. In return, many of Weylan's top scientists are working with the engineers on new forms of life, mixing DNA from the engineers, humans and other species on both planets in an accelerating round of experimentation in a deep underground base at an outpost moon somewhere between Earth and the engineers' world. During their experiments, they incorporate material from some of the more aggressive insect species on their planet, ones that lay their eggs in other species. Their experiments start to go in different directions as they produce more and more deadly creatures.

Some of the engineers and humans are working towards improving their own races: others start working towards bio-weaponry. At the same time, among the humans are spies from the Yutani corporation, intent on stealing specimens. And within the engineers emerges a core who cannot get past their disgust for human sexual reproduction and cannot distinguish between us and the aliens the experiments have created, with their parasitic reproductive cycle. As far as they are concerned, we humans and the killer aliens deserve each other.

The factions start to sabotage each other's work, and the experiments escape the lab. The entire compound is overrun.

In the chaos, one engineer manages to escape onto a ship: but unbeknown to her, it is full of eggs. One of the other factions has placed them in the cargo hold in preparation for something - who knows which faction and for what purpose? She is overcome by a facehugger and impregnated. With no drone aliens to constrict her in a hive, she awakes alone. She takes off in the ship: but as it is rising into the sky, the alien inside her bursts out. She is killed, and the ship crashes to the ground. The infant alien drone is killed in the crash, but the eggs are protected in the hold.