Whatsplaying.au supposedly got a copy of the script, penned by Lost's Damon Lindelof. I say "supposedly" but now that the site has taken everything down at the request of the studio, I'm going to assume everything they had was legit. So what I'll be describing is being pulled mainly from Slashfilm. In fact, I might as well quote them.
The story follows a group of terraforming aliens the script calls ‘Growers’ — these are seemingly of the race from which comes the original film’s ‘space jockey.’ There’s a strange sequence in which the Growers use a bit of mind control to instigate a homosexual encounter between Fin and Karik, two male human slave farmers. The aliens, you see, are a single-sex species and don’t understand the male-female breeding requirements of humans.
The title alien — the xenomorph — is a creature used by Growers as part of the terraforming process, and at a point in the script it develops into the creature we know and love. So we won’t see it in the form we know right off; this will be a payoff later in the script.
Into the group of Growers and human slaves comes a ship crewed by “the usual Alien misfits” complete with a female character that sounds like Vasquez from Aliens, and another woman named Truks that is reportedly the role for which Gemma Arterton was considered. Ridley Scott has also reportedly met with Lance Henricksen, though how the guy who fit into the established Alien storyline might work in this film, I can only conjecture. (I’d guess he’d appear only towards the end, as the xenomorphs are out of control, in a story thread that would point right towards the original Alien.)
The summation is that this script is “a deep movie — part science-fiction, part psychological drama, part, dare I say, romance.”
If all this is true, I'm seriously digging it already. Looks like we could be getting some of the best of everything that made the first two Alien flicks great. A lot of action with the arrival of the human combatants in the second half, along with some tense psycho drama in the first half.
