Ridley Scott’s iconic film Alien (1979) broke all boundaries when it came out, with Sigourney Weaver in an unforgettable lead role as Officer Ellen Ripley, a tough, gorgeous heroine who set the standard for sci-fi leads to come. Thirty-eight years later, after three sequels in 1986, 1992, and 1997, Prometheus (2012), a prequel to the first Alien film was released, with Scott returning to the helm to bring back the energy to an indifferent franchise.
The Alien films, set in humanity’s future, navigate the terrifying encounters between space travelers and the titular aliens who haunt all of the films. In the first film, Ripley and her crew first encounter these murderous creatures on a planetoid. Ripley escapes, only to face them again and again in the sequels. The origin of the creatures remains the central mystery through all of these films. With Prometheus, Scott returns to the origins of both mankind and the alien, taking us on a space journey on the eponymous ship backto what could possibly have been the beginnings of the sleek, murderous, black creatures that famously use humans to incubate their spawn.
Alien: Covenant, with yet another title named after a space ship, picks up ten years after the Prometheus mission spins out of control. Covenant is on an entirely different mission altogether, her crew consisting of couples who are in charge of two thousand souls traveling in stasis, in pods that keep them asleep and preserved through space travelin search of Origae-6, a planet that they have identified as suitable to start a new colony.