Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a post-apocalyptic future, the passengers on a maglev train traveling from Los Angeles to London get more than they bargained for when an alien creature gets loose.
About: Giddy with excitement. I haven’t read the script yet. All I heard was aliens on a train and I was in. Jim Uhls (Fight Club) wrote the original spec script of this idea for Ridley Scott. Scott developed it for a while but eventually left and Roland Emmerich would come on. This draft, by Steven de Souza, was supposedly a bit of a departure from Uhls’ version.
Writer: Steven E. De Souza
Details: 133 pages (1990 draft)
Snakes on a Plane? PFFFT!
Please.
That is so 2003.
Try ALIENS ON A TRAIN!
Yeah, baby. Now you’re talking bout movies that get the adrenaline pumping. Me? Love aliens. Me? Kinda love trains. What do you get when you add love and kinda love? That’s more than double the love. Love and three-quarters. Think about the person you’ve fallen in love with most in your life. This is more than that. Well, it’s not more than that yet. I haven’t read the script. I’m about to. But I’m fully expecting that there’s no way I will not love and three-quarters this script. Its pedigree precedes it.
I mean how did this not get made?
There’s aliens!
On a train!
Not a steamboat.
Not a stagecoach.
Granted, those would be awesome too. But they’re nowhere near as cool as aliens on a train.
It’s the future: Los Angeles, 2015. Okay, it’s the future *for this script*. Obviously, the writers didn’t budget for a time machine to come to 2015 and realize that we weren’t yet apocalyptic. I mean do your homework, guys. Come on! Anyway, things are bad in their version of 2015. For starters, most of Los Angeles is covered in desert. On top of that, there’s barely any ozone left. So lots of sunburn and breathing issues.
But there is still a society and still a world economy. One of the most promising industries is maglev train travel. The world government outlawed planes due to ozone issues so trains have become the only way to travel long distances. One of those trains, the big maiden voyage from Los Angeles to London, is leaving today.
In the spirit of an Agatha Christie novel, we meet the many passengers who will be trekking on the luxurious train. There’s Hedda, who’s escorting her fertile 15 year old granddaughter, Lisa (fertility is a rarity in this future world). There’s suspicious doctors Scanlon and Ruby. There’s the rich a-hole, Reggie. There’s the train manager, always prickly Sari. And then there’s Russ Prine, who secretly works for the company and is taking the trip undercover to make sure everyone who works on the train is doing a good job.
Once the train gets going, we cut to Scanlon and Ruby’s room where we realize these two are not doctors. They’re escorting a big tube thing that happens to have an alien in it. Their only job is to inject it with some pain juice (that’s the only way I understood it) which would keep it from doing anything naughty.
Meanwhile, we have a little comedic subplot of Prine trying to make Sari’s life a living hell. He asks for numerous things he knows she doesn’t have (a certain meal cooked a certain way, for example) to see if she remains professional. Spoiler alert: she doesn’t.
As the conflict between them grows, Scanlon and Ruby forget to inject the pain juice and this tentacled scary alien creature breaks out of its coffin and begins killing people before disappearing into the train’s innards. Sari and Prine run into the creature, surviving it, and realize they need to do something FAST. Except they can’t because the train is currently in some section of the US that has no air due to ozone issues. Which means they’re going to have to find and kill this thing while the train is on the move.
Sari tells all the passengers to move up to the first two cars, giving her, Prine, and a handful of other volunteers, the rest of the cars to find and trap this thing. Of course, they have no idea what this thing is and therefore underestimate it. And when it damages the brakes, the train loses all ability to slow down. Which means they’re barreling towards London at 1200 miles per hour with no way to stop. What’s going to happen??? How are they going to get out of this??? ALIEN ON A TRAIN!
Just like I expected, this was a wild read.
It’s got something going on. I always wanted to turn the page. But it’s messy and my guess is that’s because it’s over-developed.
Over-development is a word of the past. It infamously resulted in a lot of bad films in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays, places like Netflix laugh at development. “Why develop something when you can just greenlight it,” is their motto. As a result, we get paper-thin movies like Project Power.
But back then they had the opposite problem. They’d hire writer after writer and have all of them doing endless drafts. Which resulted in one of three scenarios. The best scenario was that they eliminated all the script’s weaknesses, the movie got made, and it turned out great. Think Good Will Hunting or Gladiator.
The second scenario was that each successive rewrite would beat the originality out of the screenplay, giving us something with zero unique characteristics that was utterly bland. Think 1998’s Godzilla.
The final scenario is what’s happened here. With so many writers and drafts packing so many things into the script, the elements start to impede upon each other, competing for plot real estate. Think about it. There’s two movies in this script. There’s the maiden voyage of some post-apocalyptic intercontinental train (think the train version of Titanic). And then there’s an alien that gets loose on a train. I’m not convinced these two ideas can share the same movie.
Usually, when you have a cool concept, you want to treat it like Michael Jordan. Give it the ball and tell everybody else on the court to get the f*%# out of the way (as coach Doug Collins once famously said). This is not that. This alien is not only secondary but it doesn’t fit into the mythology. You’ve established we live in this giant desert now. When the heck did aliens show up?
Now, as it so happens (spoiler), it turns out this isn’t an “aliens on a train” script. It’s a “monster on a train” script. The creature is man-made. I get why they did this. BUT IT’S NO ALIENS ON A TRAIN! And that’s why I showed up. To see aliens. On a train. Ripping organs out of human passengers.
I bet the original idea here by Jim Uhls had aliens. Somewhere along the way, it became a monster. And this is what happens in development all the time. It’s one of the hardest things to manage for a writer, producer, studio, or whoever. Stories take on a life of their own. They want to do things you didn’t originally expect. So you have to decide if you’re going to give in to the new direction or stick to your guns.
I’m guessing that they couldn’t figure out why the aliens were on the train or why they would go around killing people so they came up with this storyline that better connected with the mythology (the creature, it turns out, was man-made to replenish the ozone).
I dunno.
I’m torn on which is the right thing to do. One part of me says, stick with the original cool idea you had. The further away you go from the original idea, the further away you go from the coolness. But then you hear stories like M. Night’s, whose original idea for The Sixth Sense was a psychiatrist helping a kid who painted paintings of things that hadn’t happened yet. The kid didn’t see ghosts. Bruce Willis was not a ghost. M. Night followed the story through multiple drafts before incorporating those two things. And that ended with, arguably, the most successful spec sale of all time.
But.
But.
But.
Aliens on a train!
I wanted aliens on a train!
Can someone contact Jim Uhls and ask him for the original spec script where we had aliens on a train? Please. That’s what I want to read.
Despite all that, this is still wacky in a fun way so I recommend it. Especially if you loved the high concept era of spec scripts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Steven de Souza has some wisdom for those wondering why some things get made and others don’t: “Movies get made not because the script is great, but because somebody likes the script at that point.”
