Volitions Advocate on 10/7/2017 at 18:48

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Alright, I'm a hopeless fanboy so I'm going to keep talking about it.

I was intrigued by the novelisation by Alan Dean Foster, so I thought, since I can't ever seem to get enough Alien, I'll go ahead and read his books. So I read the novelisations of Alien - Alien 3. They were mostly what you'd expect with just a few bits dialogue or a couple of extra scenes that would have been amazing to see on film. They followed the special editions of each of the movies though, which I found interesting. It took over 10 years between Alien 3 and the Quadrilogy being released before anybody saw the whole story, but if you had read the book you'd know all about how crazy Golic was and all that.

Other notable scenes in the books are when Dallas is taken by the alien. It was playing cat and mouse with him a bit more in an open area of the ventilation system where he was walking on a gantry instead of stuck in the vents like in the movie. Also, Parker saw the alien when he was on the lower deck getting refills for the flame throwers. He got Ripley and Lambert to close the inner airlock door so they could blow it into space, but Ash was listening and sounded the alarm, startling the alien before they could surprise it by closing the door. It lost its arm when it jumped back and the airlock closed on it, which melted through when it ripped its arm off to retreat, and the entire deck almost completely lost atmosphere. This necessitated their need for haste because the ship didn't have enough oxygen for them to remain awake and out of cryo for much longer.

There was the scene we've heard about that never made it into production where Ripley finds Burke in the nest when she's looking for newt. She gives him a grenade and leaves him.

In Alien 3, while Ripley, Aaron, and Dillon are looking around for a good spot to trap the alien, she actually comes face to face with its molted skin. Panics and clubs it with a torch. In the movie, this scene is combined with the scene where she tracks it down to goad it into killing her, except in the book it wasn't her imagination. It was an actual molt, not a pipe. That was pretty interesting.

She also talks with Dillon and Aaron about the lifecycle of the alien, specifically getting into the difference between a gestated queen leading eventually to egg laying verses a single xeno doing the work to create eggs all on its own. Which makes the implied life cycle in Alien: Isolation rather easy to understand, even if they don't talk about it. Honestly, Creative assembly was just preying on our pre-conceptions based on the movies. I'm sure if they spent that much time crafting Sevastapol, they must have gone through and read these novels as well.

I haven't yet read the Alien Resurrection novel, it was written by A.C. Cripsin instead of Foster. I wasn't as interested in it, but I will read it because the last books of hers I read were the Han Solo Trilogy, and I know shes a bit of a celebrated sci fi author. But I figured it wasn't really crucial for me to read while trying to figure out the plot holes and inconsistencies in Covenant.

So... I read the covenant novel, and it was pretty good, and some of the conversations David has with Orem and Walter are a lot more interesting than they were in the movie. I'm not spoiler tagging the rest of the post so if you haven't seen the movie, this will spoil the reveals for you.

After killing the Neomorph, Orem keeps David at constant gunpoint until the facehugger grabs him, but during the scene in David's labratory there are a lot more things and specimens than ever get shown in the movie. David explains that the pathogen constantly adapts to everything it touches, and that the organisms it creates continue to adapt and infect new life forms so that every new generation is a new leap in genetic alteration. So the little bugs he shows are very similar to the xenos, but they just haven't gone through all of the stages of infecting larger life forms to give rise to larger creatures. It kind of stops there while David tosses an ossified version of a facehugger egg about the size of a softball at Orem to tease him, because Orem breaks his bead on david with his rifle to catch it. Then he shows him a fully ossified facehugger egg with the face hugger perserved inside of it, stating that it got too aggressive for him to study so he had to euthanize it. He claims that he actually had nothing to do with the development of the xeno because he hasn't had the time or technology available to be as good at it as the engineers, but that he did dabble a bit in messing with them. Then he shows Orem the larger preserved specimens at the back of his lab, which, according to the descriptions in the novel, must be full grown xenomorph warriors. So Orem saw them even before being lured into the egg chamber.

When they go down there, David gives him some sort of ointment to spread under his nose because the atmosphere in the egg chamber had a lot of ammonia in it, and it was supposed to help with the smell. Once Orem finally decides to put it under his nose, his thoughts talk about how not only did it completely neutralize the smell, but also gave him a tremendous sense of well being. I think David drugged him, which is why he was so stupid with curiosity in the egg chamber. David also tells him that compared to the ossified egg in the lab, the ones down in the chamber were dormant and hibernating. Orem even accuses him of being immune to whatever they might want to do because he's an android, and David tells him that the ointment masks his presence from the aliens, obviously lying.

That whole sequence was a lot more interesting to read than to watch.

When Orem gives birth, David observes how violently the alien emerges, and he figures it's because human bodies are so much smaller than the Engineers' bodies, so the eruption is a lot more violent.

What I think happened, based on the novel. Is that David did not create the xenos at all. But he did experiment on them. I think that perhaps there were no living specimens, even that the engineers had been working on, just whatever David might have found in the lab. What he DID do, was work with the little bugs. Maybe allowing them to infect other bugs until he got a large enough specimen that matched what the Engineers had done to create the Xeno. I think that if David did anything at all, he simply helped the Xenos come to their full size through the evolution of the bugs that the pathogen infected and created. OR, that whatever tinkering he did, made it so that the xenos don't need to advance through so many stages and so many small organism to get to their full size. Whatever the case. David has the only living specimens of Xenos, and while he did not engineer them, he did bring them to life somehow with what was left on the planet. Either from the very few insect like fauna that survived the pathogen, or from what the Engineers left behind.

It's a much more satisfying story than what we saw in the movie.

I also don't think the Neomorphs are more robust than the Xenos, I think they're just smaller and harder to shoot at. Not to mention the firearms the Covenenat crews are using are not pulse rifles. Pulse rifles would not have been developed yet, and they have both armor piercing and explosive tipped ammunition. In the novel Daniels manages to pump a whole magazine in to the Alien, including shooting it in the skull.
Before that, when David was running out to the lifter after assuming Walter's identity, he pumps the alien with about 2 full magazines from one of their carbines before it collapses on the ground right in front of him. Of course it gets up about a minute later to continue the fight with Daniels as they are trying to lift off. In the novel, it dies because the crane's loader shears it in half with the big bucket on the end of the armature.

Consequently, the 2 neomorphs that we see in the movie, one is killed by Orem after some very level headed and well places shots at point blank range with relatively few rounds. And the other is eviscerated by the Xeno in the big courtyard as they both try to get to the lander while chasing Daniels. This is right before David/Walter empites the gun on it, without killing it.

I make no excuses for Brandywine or Ridley for giving us a movie full of holes. I don't think it should be on the fans to fill in the blanks by going through some sort of extended universe of mixed media releases, But having read through these books, and watching some extended production BTS bits on the DVDs and Blu Rays... The alien universe still makes a bit of sense to me. I'm still not a fan of how damn fast the xeno bursts, or how fast it grows in recent movies. But I think in Covenant they just do a really bad job of showing us just how much time they spent in the necropolis.

I've read somewhere that the definition of a nerd is somebody who concerns themselves with all of the minutiae of their fandom. I guess I'm a hopeless nerd fanboy.

Harvester on 11/7/2017 at 09:23

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Geez Ridley, I'm a fan of yours, but give it a rest, really.

Vivian on 11/7/2017 at 09:38

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Yeah, I guess he set the precedent. Ridley is definitely lucassing the shit out of this right now. Maybe hicks grandfather can turn up as well.

icemann on 11/7/2017 at 16:06

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And VA - There was no egg morphing in Alien Isolation. That was argued out across numerous pages last time round. They went with the standard egg laying treatment. Egg morphing isn't cannon. As you see when you play the game, they went the usual route with people stuck to walls, eggs placed nearby, egg hatches and facehugger goes onto human etc etc. All quite clear and present.

The back story was that there was a Queen but they didn't want to show it, because then players would have been disappointed that they didn't get to fight it.

Pyrian on 22/7/2017 at 20:51

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I wonder how many people didn't see Covenant in large part because they personally found Prometheus underwhelming? Franchises have a lot of momentum. A bad sequel can do well, yet still sink the series. There's more than marketing and reviews in play.