Before Damon Lindelof's rewrite, Jon Spaihts' original screenplay for Prometheus was far more reminiscent of a classic "Alien" movie than the quasi-prequel we ended up with. Spaihts has already explained a few of the ways his script echoed the early movies of Ridley Scott and James Cameron in an interview with Empire, but the scene that stood out for most fans was his take on the infamous "chest-burst". Here is his description of that scene, and some concept art to go along with it..
"I did have facehuggers in my original draft. David, as he began to get fascinated by the science of the Engineers, doesn’t deliberately contaminate Holloway with a drop of black liquid. Instead, Holloway hubristically removes his helmet in the chamber, is knocked unconscious, facehugged and wakes up not knowing what had been done to him, and stumbles back into the ship. In my draft, he returns to his cabin, is embraced by Shaw, who is delighted to see him having feared that he had died, and the two of them make love. And it’s while they’re making love that he bursts and dies. So that lovemaking sequence echoed my original lovemaking sequence where he explodes! It was messy.”
As you can see, that chest-burster looks a lot like the "albino octopus" that Shaw ends up having removed from her body in arguably the best scene in
Prometheus , so it seems that they always had that look in mind for the creature regardless of how it made its way into the world. Do you like how thinsg played out, or would you have preferred what is described above?
Prometheus is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.