As previously mentioned, making the third Alien film was like pulling teeth. But pulling teeth out a xenomorph involves to separate sets of jaws, which just makes it all the more painful and time-consuming. Pitch Black's David Twohy was far from the only screenwriter to be given a shot at making the film work, with Fox apparently contracting everyone and their mother to have a go. One of their more interesting attempts at getting a decent script for Alien 3 saw them bringing William Gibson on board. Whilst only a couple of his screenplays have actually been produced, Gibson is a prolific, popular and influential science fiction writer, creating the subgenre of cyberpunk pretty much single handedly. It's probably the success of Neuromancer and the constant attempts to make it into a film that got Gibson hired to do an Alien 3 script, which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian". His film also shunted Ripley out of the picture, put in a coma, with Hicks and Newt fighting xenomorphs on a spaced-based mall, with the aliens now spreading through an airborne virus that was supposed to be like AIDs.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
