'Alien: Romulus,' Space Commies, and the Hollywood Doom Spiral

What goes around comes around again. And again. And again...

‘Alien: Romulus’

Sometimes the web’s black-box algorithms serve up something interesting: Audible recently recommended I listen to an audiobook adaptation of cyberpunk maestro William Gibson’s never-filmed “Alien 3” script, complete with voice acting by Lance Hendrickson and Michael Biehn (who played Bishop and Corporal Hicks in James Cameron’s “Aliens,” the second film in the series). I’ve always been a fan of “Alien” and its deadly creepy-crawlies, so I clicked it on.

Gibson originally wrote the script in 1987, and from the first moments you can see why the studio decided to reject his draft: the story’s core is a deep-space territorial dispute between capitalism (as represented by the predatory Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which spent the series trying to get its hands on the titular creature) and communism (i.e., a bunch of rag-tag Russian and Chinese spaceships, manned by true believers with hilariously thick accents). Ripley, played so memorably by Sigourney Weaver in most of the f…