Alien: Covenant: the latest news, trailers, and images from Ridley Scott’s latest film

In 2012, the science-fiction / horror film Prometheus brought Ridley Scott back to the film franchise he launched in 1979 with Alien. There have been many Alien sequels, spinoffs, and multimedia franchise additions over nearly 40 years, but Scott’s return to the series was big news. It raised fans’ hopes that the series could return to its earliest, most chilling roots. But Prometheus left a lot of questions behind. Many of the biggest ones were just exasperating plot holes: how does a geologist get lost in a cavern system he just electronically auto-mapped? Why is the best xenobiologist money can buy stupid enough to try to pet a snarling alien in the middle of an obvious threat display? Why does a woman bred for brilliance try to run away from a giant falling object in the one direction guaranteed to get her crushed?

But others were franchise questions. Before Prometheus’ release, Scott claimed the film shared Alien’s DNA, but was a standalone story. But he retreated from that stance, and when the film hit theaters, it almost explained so many things about the nature of the “Space Jockey” in the first film, the origins of the xenomorphs, and the origins of humanity. The near-answers kept fans talking over the series’ questions up until Alien: Covenant came along and seemed to explain, much more clearly, how Prometheus and Alien are connected. Covenant doesn’t answer the “Why are these people so dumb?” questions Prometheus raised, but it does help fill in other gaps. And while it’s a problematic film in many ways, its questions are much more interesting than the ones coming out of Prometheus.

There is a simple truth at the heart of the Alien movie franchise: being chased by a monster is terrifying. Nobody likes being eaten alive. But the real terror of the series isn’t the prospect of being murdered by a runaway xenomorph. It’s the idea of being violated, and forced to give unnatural, fatal birth. Dan O’Bannon, screenwriter of the original Alien film, was specific about mining horror from the idea of men suffering rape and pregnancy. “I’m not going to go after the women in the audience,” he said in the making-of documentary The Alien Saga. “I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs.”

Over the course of six films, various directors and screenwriters have played with this theme in different ways. But Alien: Covenant, which opened May 19th in American theaters, is the first film since the original that puts the sexual violation of men back at the center. As a father who’s had more than one nightmare in which I realize I’m going to have to somehow give birth to some very large human babies, I was squirming in my seat during Alien: Covenant — and I loved every minute of it.

Alien: Covenant is now in theaters, and it helps steer the franchise right back into the space-horror territory that captivated audiences when the first Alien film hit back in 1979. While 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars showed filmgoers that science fiction could go beyond cheap B-movies, Ridley Scott’s film was a separate revelation, proof that screen science fiction could also produce quality horror-dramas. His creepy, Freudian Alien captivated audiences, and became an instant horror classic.

But Alien didn’t come out of nowhere. Its filmmaking team was inspired by a whole range of works, both intentionally and otherwise, in constructing its fantastic world and horrifying creatures. Alien also broadly inspired a number of other works after it hit theaters. Here are eight stories you should pick up after blowing through the Alien films one more time.

The latest installment of Ridley Scott’s space-horror franchise, Alien: Covenant, hits theaters today. The series is coming up on its 40th anniversary, and over the course of its lifetime, it’s taken some interesting turns — and some downright unfortunate ones.

The franchise is already in a strange place, with the latest films sitting somewhere between prequels and sequels. And as with any long-running franchise, numerous entries can led to a complicated timeline. With the latest film coming out, it’s a good time to look back at the scope of the series, where it started, and where it’s currently landed.

When Ridley Scott returned to the Alien franchise with 2012’s Prometheus, one of the primary criticisms was that the film wasn’t really, well, Alien-esque. Rather than build upon the sci-fi / horror formula he had created in 1979, Scott went in a different direction with a film that was much more concerned with questions about the origins of humanity and our place in the universe. It was an intentional shift, with Scott even saying at the time that the film shouldn’t be taken as a direct prequel to his previous work, but that didn’t do much to curb audience expectations.

For his new sequel to Prometheus, Scott has made the decision to go back to his roots. From the title to the marketing, Alien: Covenant has been framed as a direct descendent of the original, with one thing in mind above all others: scaring the hell out of the audience. The visceral footage previewed at SXSW earlier this year only seemed to underscore the idea that this was going to be a brutal, gory Alien, much closer to the film that fans wanted five years ago than the ponderous, often convoluted story they got.

So much of the Alien mythos boils down to a single scene. Even if you haven’t seen the original, you know the beats: a casual meal interrupted by the victim’s sudden collapse. There’s confusion, then dread, some crunching sounds, then a tiny alien popping out of the victim’s chest, accompanied by an insane amount of gore.

It’s rightfully iconic, and judging by the reaction to this week’s VR version, much of the Verge staff is still traumatized by it. When the question came up — who wants to try out a VR thing where you’re an alien bursting out of someone’s chest? — there were surprisingly few takers.

20th Century Fox has released a new clip from Alien: Covenant and it shows off how the film connects to the last entry in the franchise, Prometheus. While the movie’s trailers have gone to great lengths to make viewers forget about Scott’s disappointing side film, this clip shows that Prometheus will have a role to play in this year’s film.

This is the second prologue that we’ve seen for Alien: Covenant. In February, the studio released a clip that introduced us to the colonists bound for this film’s planet, which happens to also be home to the android known as David, who we last saw as a disembodied head in the last film. It serves as a foreboding look at what we can expect from the next entry, including a callback to one of the franchise’s most iconic moments.

On the opening night of the SXSW film festival, Ridley Scott hosted a screening of his 1979 classic Alien along with a special bonus: a preview of footage from the upcoming Alien: Covenant. Normally, I don’t think there’s a ton of value in writing up preview footage, particularly in a review-style format. It’s always the best of the best, handpicked to get people as hyped as possible, and let’s face it: even the worst movie can have great moments.

The 20 terrifying minutes of Alien: Covenant that screened warrants a bit more discussion, however. Made up of three discrete sequences, the footage covered what appears to be at least two pivotal moments in the film, along with a revelation that upends the entire Alien mythos as we’ve known it for the last 38 years. And did I mention that it was almost unbearably tense?

The last Alien: Covenant teaser was a subtle hint at the dangers the movie’s colonists would face on their new world, taking the time to make a reference to the iconic dinner scene in the original Alien. The new trailer, released today, has none of that subtlety — it seems like it’s basically the whole movie condensed into a two-minute clip.

That means that if you want to go into theaters on May 19th this year and be surprised by Ridley Scott’s next take on the Alien series, you might want to steer clear of this trailer. But for the too-curious among you, the clip will show you a world that seems strangely like our own Earth, albeit with some minor (and deadly) tweaks. The trailer also gives us one of the best looks yet at the Alien (or Aliens?) that will be terrorizing the human colonists, showing them in both facehugger and fully grown form.

A four-minute prologue for Ridley Scott’s next film, Alien: Covenant, hit the web last night, showing off how the film will borrow aesthetically from the original Alien, and ignore its more immediate predecessor, the critically maligned Prometheus. The prologue introduces us to the crew of its titular spaceship, and culminates with a nod to the chestburster scene in Alien.

For memory’s sake, here’s the original sequence:

Has enough time passed since the disappointing Prometheus for us to be excited about a new Alien movie again? That’s questionable, but this new clip of Alien: Covenant suggests that the movie is making the welcome decision to lean on the 1979 horror / sci-fi classic for inspiration. Titled “The Last Supper,” the four-minute video serves as a prologue to the events of the movie, introducing the colonist characters who have joined the Covenant mission to find a new world.

The Last Supper in question appears to be a nod to the iconic dinner scene in the original Alien. Just like that scene, jovial proceedings on board the ship give way to panic when one guest has some digestive distress, but Alien: Covenant doesn’t give the game away that fast: spoilers, but it’s a bit of food, rather than a gestating chestburster, that’s causing her hacking coughs.

Judging from the trailer we saw last month, Ridley Scott’s upcoming Alien: Covenant is going to be a gory return to the franchise’s horror roots — and audiences will be able to step into its world with a new virtual reality experience, as well. 20th Century Fox has announced it is developing a VR experiences based around the film, following the pattern it established with its experience for Ridley Scott’s last film, The Martian.

To be directed by David Karlak, the project will be a collaboration between Scott’s RSA Films, the virtual reality production house MPC VR, and the Fox Innovation Lab — Twentieth Century Fox’s in-house VR and immersive experience division. Described as a “dread-inducing journey into the depths of the Alien universe,” the project will be released this year, though further details on platforms and distribution strategy haven’t been announced as of yet.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus had a lot of potential: it was Ridley Scott’s bold return to the franchise that helped make his career, with an intriguing cast and incredible visuals. Ultimately, it was a disappointment, which means that Scott’s next foray into the Alien franchise will have to work all that much harder. The first trailer for the film, Alien: Covenant, has just dropped, and it looks as though the franchise is going back into safe territory: horror.

The trailer opens with a woman running down a hallway, before telling another that she can’t let her out of a locked room. In that locked room? Someone infected with one of the deadly xenomorphs. The trailer goes on to show off a starship reaching the planet, the explorers coming across one of the alien starships, and some very familiar egg pods, all set to a creepy cover of Nat King Cole’s song Nature Boy.

Ridley Scott used to be the poster child for never doing sequels, but after bending that rule with Prometheus and breaking it by co-writing and producing the upcoming Blade Runner 2, it seems the legendary director is now determined to make as many Alien films as possible. Alien: Covenant will not, as previously announced, be the second film in a prequel trilogy that started with Prometheus; it will in fact be the beginning of its own trilogy.

“Prometheus was borne out of my frustration that on Alien in 1979 — I only did one as I don’t normally do sequels,” Scott said at a press conference in Sydney, in comments picked up on by The Hollywood Reporter. “I was amazed that in the three that followed that no-one asked the question ‘why the alien, who made it and why?’ Very basic questions. So I came up with the notion of Prometheus, which starts to indicate who might have made it and where it came from.”

If there’s two things we know about Ridley Scott right now, it’s that a) he’s really into making Prometheus sequels, and b) he’s really into changing his mind about titles. While he had previously said that the first sequel to his 2012 film would be Alien: Paradise Lost, 20th Century Fox has now announced the film will be called Alien: Covenant. (Scott himself let the news slip early to Indiewire.) According to the official synopsis, the film will follow the crew of a ship called Covenant, who find what they think is a mysterious, uncharted paradise. On the planet’s surface they discover there is only one inhabitant: the android David (Michael Fassbender).

Like Prometheus, it seems like this one is going to be pretty subtle.

The reaction to the 2012 Alien sort-of-prequel Prometheus has been, at best, polarizing. But director Ridley Scott confirmed yesterday that sequels to the movie are coming, and in an interview today, he revealed the name of the first: Alien: Paradise Lost.

The news came in an interview with Hey U Guys, in which Scott says the epic poem by John Miltion has a “similarity” with the film. When asked about potential sequels, Scott said, “Well actually, really it’s going to be Alien: Paradise Lost, so Prometheus 2 is not really going to be — it’s going to be Alien: Paradise Lost now.”

It looks like Ridley Scott has even bigger plans for the Prometheus franchise than anyone ever realized, extending beyond the promised sequel. In an interview with German film site FilmFutter, the Alien director said he has plans to delve into the origin of the Xenomorph across maybe even four films.

When asked how he planned to address the original film’s many loose ends — what happened to the Engineers? when will Weyland Industries become the villainous Weyland-Yutani Corporation? what became of that weird proto-Xenomorph at the end of the movie? will Damon Lindeloff stop being so awful? — Scott said the answers will come, but slowly.

Ridley Scott just can’t leave space alone. In a recent interview with Empire, the The Martian director stated plainly that his next project is the sequel to 2012’s Prometheus. “I was starting to look for locations for my next movie,” he told the magazine, “which was Prometheus 2.”

For those who don’t remember, Prometheus served as a kind of pseudo-prequel to the Alien franchise. Starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender, the film delved into the origins of intelligent life on Earth as well as how the iconic Xenomorphs can into being. While the movie itself was a bit of a mess, it was still a financial success, paving the way to a new franchise running parallel to the Alien mythos. That’s great news for fans who’ve wanted Scott to return to that universe for years. However, it also means people clamoring for the Neill Blomkamp-directed Alien 5 will have to wait a while longer.