Script To Screen: “Aliens”
It’s Surrogate Mother vs. Alien Mother in this memorable fight scene.
It’s Surrogate Mother vs. Alien Mother in this memorable fight scene.
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:
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 Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.