Alien Overwatch by Timothy Chang - Series, Sci Fi - A young aerospace engineer signs up for a clandestine space mission hoping for free passage to Earth. Unfortunately, her employer's diabolical plans to procure a sample of the most lethal creature in the galaxy, and unresolved issues from her childhood, serve to jeopardize both her plans and her life. - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Dear Reader,

Thanks for poking your nose in. I am the writer:

Are you an Alien fan? The FX/Hulu/Disney+ streaming series Alien: Earth has just been released and I just watched the first two episodes. I thought it would be fun to drop this on the board too. It's an old script I wrote a few years back as a spec pilot for a limited series based on the Twentieth Century Studios Alien IP.

The provenance of the script is a bit interesting. Back in 2018, Fox was thinking about the upcoming 40th anniversary of the release of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), and the marketing push they could give the 4K blu-ray release. They decided to commission six short films of nine minutes each from pitches originated by competing filmmakers. So they teamed up with a company called Tongal, who had the task of soliciting pitches/scripts from writers/producers in a competition for six winners. Each winner would be given $30,000+ to produce their finished film.

https://tongal.com/project/Alien/#tab-brief

If you've never seen the six Alien shorts that won the competition and were eventually produced, here they are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za0jUxBPQTw&list=PLraFbwCoisJApbIN0n2WRyliwHo2nSU3o

So that was the original impetus for this script. It started life as a nine minute short screenplay, and failed at the first hurdle.

Afterwards, it sat untouched on my hard drive for a few years and then I decided the premise was too good to let lie fallow, so I rewrote it into a much bigger five-part limited series. I have the entire series outlined in detail but only the pilot is fully scripted, which is the PDF posted here. Nowadays, it functions basically as fan fiction.

The story picks up directly following the events of Alien (1979). Hopefully you will remember how that film ends, but if not, that's not a critical problem.

And don't worry that this is one of those pilot episodes that leaves you hanging at the end; the episode has its own resolution that makes it function reasonably well on its own.

Tim

P.S. BTW, if you read the script you may wonder if I drew from ideas in the Alien: Romulus movie that came out last year, because it seems to bear some similarities. The answer is no. As stated above, I wrote this years before that movie and, in fact, I posted it to an Alien fan site as fan fiction way back in 2018/2022. Any resemblance in the movie to ideas I came up with were, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.

What's up, Timothy! I love the first 4 Alien flicks, even the goofy Resurrection. LOL. Gonna check this out and get back to you soon with my thoughts.

Hi Zack

Don't sweat it. There's no hurry.

BTW, it's 60 pages; so it's getting up there. If you get to page 10 and it fails to engage you, feel free to drop it. No one should feel obligated to read it to the bitter end if it's not working for them.

Cheers
Tim