Early Alien: Covenant Details Reveal Shaw's Arc, Engineers & More

Alien: Covenant creature designer Carlos Huante has shared unused story concepts from the sequel, including the planned return of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace). Ridley Scott’s Prometheus began life as a script called Alien: Engineers, which followed a team of scientists traveling to a remote planet in hopes of meeting the race that created mankind. Once they land they learn these beings – dubbed Engineers – grew to hate humanity and planned to wipe them out - only to destroy themselves with their own creatures, the xenomorphs. This script featured classic alien designs, but later drafts turned the project into more of a spinoff instead than a direct prequel.

Prometheus ended with scientist Elizabeth Shaw flying off to find the home planet of the Engineers, with only the severed head of sociopathic android David 8 (Michael Fassbender) for company. Scott planned a prequel trilogy around the adventures of Shaw and David, with Prometheus 2 showing what happened when she landed on the home planet. Those plans changed during development with Alien: Covenant ultimately placing focus on David instead. The film revealed the android went crazy and killed Shaw before wiping out the Engineer planet with their own biological weapons.

Alien: Covenant also brought back the classic xenomorph design, despite Scott previously stating he felt the monster was ‘cooked’ and shouldn’t return. Now in a new interview with HN Entertainment, creature designer Carlos Huante has detailed an earlier version that featured Elizabeth Shaw and detailed David’s twisted experiments on the inhabitants of the planet.

So in the first version of Covenant called Paradise, [Shaw] was hiding in the catacombs from David under the city and the story was that on her trip to the homeworld she got lonely and she had David hanging outside the ship, she didn’t want anything to do with him. But she still had to talk to him. Eventually, she ends up bringing his body in and reattaching him as they become friends during this trip. He ends up having affection for her in a friendship way.

Khang Le Alien Covenant Concept Art 2014 2 (photo AVP Galaxy)

Shaw would have teamed up with the survivors to escape in this early version of Alien: Covenant, which also featured a more fantastical alien landscape and more creatures, with David experimenting on the surviving Engineers.

But there were other creatures in there, there were supposed to be a bunch of experimental creatures…Neomorphs, the giant engineer creature, the many failed experiments of David, and the Primitive Xenomorph.

Huante’s feels this version of Alien: Covenant was toned down to make it less of a monster movie, and revealed the movie originally ended on a battle between the xenomorph and the hybrid neomorph creatures.

The first version of the xenomorph did show up at the end and the Neomorphs and the Xenomorph have a fight. There was supposed to be a monster fight at the end of the film as they are chasing the crew to get to the ship. So as they’re running to another ship they’re being chased by the Neomorphs and then this Xenomorph shows up and it’s fighting and killing these other creatures because it hates them, it hates everything.

It might have been budget concerns that caused this version of Alien: Covenant to be toned down, or perhaps Ridley Scott wanted to save this material for a third movie. The filmmaker has revealed his planned sequel Alien: Awakening would feature David on a new planet and explore the world he creates free from humanity. Huante himself appears disappointed in the direction the final movie took, including Shaw’s fate and feeling the Engineer planet was too traditional in design.

A lot of fans were disappointed with Shaw’s offscreen demise in Alien: Covenant, though an early draft of the movie detailed the journey she took with David to the Engineer planet. It revealed how she survived in space, how David came to earn her trust and how he ultimately killed her when they reached their destination. Rapace recently revealed she never knew where Prometheus 2 was going and wasn’t even sure if Scott knew himself.