Script To Screen: “Aliens”

The final struggle between Ripley and the Alien from the 1986 movie Aliens, screenplay by James Cameron, story by James Cameron and David Giler & Walter Hill, characters by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Plot Summary: The only survivor of the Nostromo, Ripley is discovered in deep sleep half a century later by a salvage ship. When she is taken back to Earth, she learns that a human colony was founded on the same planet where the aliens were first found. After contact with the colony is lost, she finds herself sent back to the planet along with a team of warriors bent on destroying the alien menace forever, and saving any survivors — if any remain.

Here is the scene from the script:

INT. CARGO LOCK 196

The Queen spins at the sound of door motors behind her.
The parting doors REVEAL an inhuman silhouette standing
there.

Ripley steps out, WEARING TWO TONS OF HARDENED STEEL.
THE POWER LOADER. Like medieval armor with the power of
a bulldozer. She takes a step…the massive foot
CRASH-CLANGS to the deck. She takes another, advancing.

Ripley’s expression is one you hope you’ll never see…
Hell hath no fury like that of a mother protecting her
child and that primal, murderous rage surges through her
now, banishing all fear.

RIPLEY
Get away from her, you bitch!

The Queen SCREECHES pure lethality and leaps.

WALLOP! A roundhouse from one great hydraulic arm catches
it on its hideous skull and slams it into a wall. It
rebounds into a massive backhand. CRASH! It goes
backward into heavy loading equipment.

RIPLEY
(screaming)
Come on!

The Queen emerges as a blur of rage, lashing with
unbelievable fury. The battle is joined.

Claws swipe, tail lashes. Ripley parries with radical
swipes of the steel forks. They circle in a whirling
blur, demolishing everything in their path. The cavernous
chamber echoes with nightmarish sounds…WHINE, CRASH,
CLANG, SCREECH.

They lock in a death embrace. Ripley closes the forks,
crushing two of the creature’s limbs. It lashes and
writhes with incredible fury, coming within inches of her
exposed body. She lifts it off the ground. The hind
legs rip at her, slamming against the safety cage, denting
it in. The striking teeth extend almost a meter from
inside its fanged maw, shooting between the crash-bars.
She ducks and the teeth slam into the seat cushion
behind her dead in a spray of drool. Yellow acid foams
down the hydraulic arms toward her. The creature rips
at high-pressure hoses. Purple hydraulic fluid sprays
…machine blood mixing with alien blood. They topple,
off balance. The Queen pins her. Ripley hits a switch.
The power loader’s CUTTING TORCH flares on, directly in
the thing’s face. They roll together, over the lip of
a RECTANGULAR PIT, A VERTICAL LOADING AIRLOCK.

INT. LOADING LOCK 197

They crash together four meters below, twisted in the
loader’s wreckage. The Alien shrieks, pinned.

Ripley pulls her arm out of the controls of the loader
and claws toward a panel of airlock actuating buttons.
She slaps the red “INNER DOOR OVERRIDE” and latches the
“HOLD” locking-key down. A KLAXON begins to sound. She
hits “OUTER DOOR OPEN” and there is a hurricane shriek of
air as the doors on which they are lying separate,
REVEALING the infinite pit of stars, below.

All this time the Alien has been lashing at her in a
frenzy and she has been parrying desperately in the
confined space. The airlock becomes a wind tunnel,
blasting and buffetting her as she struggles to unstrap
from the loader. The air of the vast ship howls past her
into space as she claws her way up a service ladder.

INT. CARGO BAY 198

Newt screams as the hurricane airstream sucks her across
the floor toward the airlock. Bishop, torn virtually in
two, his pastalike internal organs whipped by the wind,
grips a stanchion and reaches desperately for Newt as she
slides past him. He catches her arm and hangs on as she
dangles, doll-like, in the airblast.

INT. LOADING LOCK 199

The Alien seizes Ripley’s ankle. She locks her arms
around a ladder rung, feels them almost torn out of
their shoulder sockets.

The door opens farther, all of space yawning below. The
loader tumbles clear, falling away. It drags the Alien,
still clutching one of Ripley’s lucky hi-tops, into the
depths of space. Its SHRIEK fades, it gone.

With all her strength Ripley fights the blasting air,
crawling over the lip of the inner doorway. She releases
the OVERRIDE from a second panel. The inner doors close.
The turbulent air eddies and settles.

She lies on her back, drained of all strength. Gasping
for breath. Weakly she turns her head, seeing Bishop
still holding Newt by the arm. Encrusted with his own
vanilla milkshake blood. Bishop gives her a small, grim
smile.

BISHOP
Not bad for a human.

He winks.

Here is the scene from the movie:

As much as we may think of Cameron as a director, I have always been impressed by his writing. With Aliens, he pulled off a nifty trick, taking the original film, which is arguably a horror movie, and turn it into an action film. He grounded the sequel with a strong emotional center: Ripley getting in touch with the maternal aspect of her psyche. Of course, in this final battle, he pitted one ‘mother’ versus another. But the takeaway from this post: Check out how visual the writing is. Strong verbs. Vivid descriptors. The script’s words convey a dramatic set of action images, comprising a memorable finale to the story. A great reminder: Movies are a visual medium. Our writing needs to reflect that on the page.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a weekly series on GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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