Authority (2014 (the sequel to Annihilation (the book))) is like what if instead of Aliens, we got a sequel to Alien that was basically Michael Clayton but set at whatever vestigial government office is nominally in charge of dealing with the bullshit scifi industrial disasters Weyland-Yutani is constantly causing. Ripley is technically present, but doesn't want to talk to any of the other principal characters, and has fairly little screen time until the final 20 minutes of the movie, when things start getting weirder fast.
Does it work as a novel? Kind of. Does it work as a sequel to Annihilation? Absolutely not. But i do kind of have to respect the wild audacity of that kind of genre swing. And despite mostly not working it has some of my absolute favorite scenes in that series, none of which feel like they belong to the book at all.
ok i came up with the alien example as a joke but i do have a script outline in my head now
loosely:
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a career bureaucrat with a reputation for whipping broken systems into shape, let's call her York, has pissed off the wrong people at a job that actually matters and ended up getting chosen to come in as the Interim Supervisor to an oversight org that's supposed to be monitoring Weyland-Yutani, but they no longer have enough meaningful authority to tell them what to do or enough funding to keep the office running with anything but the barest of skeleton crews. the previous supervisor, Poole, is supposed to be showing her the ropes during his last few days on the job (he's retiring, and has presided over the place's steady decline)
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York gets to the place, a dreary set of floors in an enormous office space high rise, and the first half hour or so is just a lot of dingy office furniture, doors that don't work, coworkers who barely acknowledge her, and Supervisor Poole actively avoiding her to the extent of his abilities. Quickly it becomes clear that no one has been able to do any real regulatory work here in decades and they barely bother to keep records anymore. there's a whole server bank room of old records for a now-unstaffed department that no one will even go to anymore, because it's smelled upsettingly sour and metallic for 2 years and no one can seem to fix it. York tries to go in there once mostly out of defiance, and regrets it
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It turns out the reason Poole has pushed his retirement up is because there's actual work to do. Some kind of biohazard incident on a W-Y ship, normally would have been swept under the rug but the one survivor of the small crew is making the kind of trouble that makes you have to actually document. something about Poole's financial management hasn't been adding up this whole time, and York is starting to put together a pet theory about what actually doing the due diligence for once might reveal about the rest of his tenure here (the amount of money he could possibly be embezzling here is pathetically small, but his pay is absolute garbage wrt his seniority. this place is where people you can't easily fire go to die). looking into this is going to be the main thrust of the next third of the movie, and it's a lot of trying fruitlessly to navigate what's left of a government that is all but a vestigial organ for megacorps. York is actually trying, for some reason, and no one is happy about it, including her. in this whole process we see that York is very earnest but also kind of abrasive and not great at listening to points of view that aren't her own.
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from this point on, York can never actually find Poole anymore. she's pretty sure he's memorized her schedule and figured out how to avoid her so he can be present in the office without answering any questions
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periodically during the office investigation, York tries to see if she can get anything out of actually doing the current job- this biohazard thing. she reads up on the case files (stacks and stacks of dot matrix printouts in manila folders, she's drinking shitty coffee while poring over them, etc. she has to talk to the computer every time she needs a new file and it's a nightmare), and even tries to talk to the survivor a few times. being totally-not-detained in a nearby very-secure-hotel, this is of course Ellen Ripley
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York and Ripley never once have a successful conversation with each other. Ripley seems (understandably) paranoid and hostile, and York is singlemindedly fixated on figuring out what her predecessor has been up to at this office for the past few years. Ripley gets heated a couple times, then sees the look of panic in York's eyes and kind of freezes, tries to force a calm. then out of nowhere, in what seems to be a really strange attempt to humor York and shift the conversation to York's preferred subject (work), her next step is always to ask York a few oddly specific questions about the layout of York's office building. It always kind of loops back around to what Ripley wants to talk about though- the lab in the same building where some materials from the nostromo are being tested. the viewer maybe gets the idea at first that ripley thinks something is wrong with the materials, but York dismisses this and dismisses Ripley as a useful person to talk to, and the plot moves on to more office bullshit for long enough that you would think maybe that plotline isn't going anywhere. all of the dialogue with ripley is framed through York's really uncharitable reading of her & it's easy to get thrown off by it
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York, talking to a company psychologist assigned to keep track of Ripley, goes on some real armchair psychology bullshit about how she thinks Ripley is stuck in a loop of trying to fix something that went wrong at work for reasons that weren't her fault, that has derailed her life, but is already irrevocably over. she doesn't dwell on this for very long though because she goes right back to chattering about how if she can just fix this broken regulatory agency, everything will be ok and her career will be right back on track! York is not very self aware
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More office stuff. this is longer than the entirety of ripley's screen time so far put together. York is getting increasingly frustrated and increasingly disgusted, on a sensory level, with the office itself. the dripping ac vents seem to have a fouler smell, the server banks make weirder noises. it's like the building doesn't want her there, like it's growling at her, like it's a big drooling maw waiting to tear her apart. seeing her start to give up, her new coworkers soften a bit and start to talk to her more. they encourage her to take it easy while she adjusts to the place. she realizes she's exhaused, and settles in for a very defeated nap at her desk
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York is startled awake by a huge commotion in the office, gets up out of her chair to see Ripley tearing through the place, pursued by security guards. Ripley is absolutely tearing down the hallway like she knows where she's going. She is, in fact, following the directions she had coaxed out of York in their meeting. Beyond the point of trying to reason with anyone around her, Ripley is making straight for the foul-smelling abandoned server room. She tears open the door to reveal the body of supervisor Poole, clearly dead since just after we last saw him, and also clearly having been killed by a xenomorph and used to hatch a number of its young. To be clear, this wasn't the source of the smell (sometimes a room in your office just sucks real bad), but the smell did mean that no one got close enough to find the body. everything here is truly gruesome stuff that feels really out of place in this movie
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from the same vents that York was imagining were growling at her and drooling, we hear clearly now the sounds of multiple adult xenomorphs making their way through the office building. what happens next is absolute carnage, and the guards completely fail to contain it. there's some brief hope that maybe they can be sealed in the building, but it's too late by now. Ripley was right the whole time, and the movie ends on York and Ripley, having barely survived an encounter with one of the Xenomorphs, watching it escape the building, into the city below
the script hits god-tier with a minor tweak and the addition of a couple key scenes.
instead of being housed in a nearby totally-not-a-prison hotel ripley is "recuperating" in what appears to be a defunct psychiatric wing of the building. broken signage in the area has "we're here to help!" verbiage with a pretty clear "actually, we're going to drug and gaslight you" undertone. york clearly sees but doesn't acknowledge or ask about an empty cat carrier sitting near ripley's bed.
the scene that sets up york and ripley watching the xenomorph escape into the city is a series of events that puts the room ripley has been staying in at risk. ripley suddenly in a panic heads out at break-neck speed with very clear purpose to her action. although the purpose is rather unclear. she has york in tow. york harasses her. what could possible be this important with xenomorph(s?) tearing the place apart?
they make it to ripley's room and rescue jones. the moment york realizes what's going on her eyes fixate on ripley doing that anime thing where they have heart eyes that definitely aren't heart eyes. (they're heart eyes).
if part of the building needs to collapse or whatever so that ripley and york have a clear view of the xenomorph then fine, do it. whatever. the import part is the movie ends with ripley giving jones all the good scritches muttering an oath to slay the monster that dared to threaten jones. the whole time york's heart eyes just keep getting bigger.
this sets up the final film in the series. the revenge plot.
i don't care about the specifics of this one as long as it has a couple key components. alien is once again an action franchise. ripley is hell bent on killing this xenomorph with york on her tail. york is constantly in the way whilst doing her besht to be helpful and staring at the oblivious ripley with heart eyes the entire time. ripley repeatedly asks why on earth york is still following her around. she'd be much safer at a good distance. every time ripley points it out something happens before york can even attempt to respond.
after they finally kill the bastard ripley asks once more. seriously, why the fuck did you follow me through all of that you complete fool?!? the abrupt way she asks this time brings york to the verge of tears. as ripley looks at her expectantly it slowly dawns on her and she finally kisses the girl.
fin.
