The Alien franchise is no longer about an ugly ass space monster chasing around doomed passengers on a ship. Hell, it's not even about fighting the Predator anymore for whatever reason. No, now the series is a high-concept sci-fi epic about the creation of life. This change happened with the release of 2012's Prometheus (get the creation theme), a prequel to the original series, which shows a group of explorers following a map they believe will bring them to the ancestors of humans. Instead, they find an instillation with some sort of experiment gone wrong that has created some sort of horrible monster life. Long story short, in typical Alien fashion, they all die except for one woman, who escapes the planet with Michael Fassbender's decapitated android head. Fin.

Five years later, we're getting Alien: Covenant. The first trailer for the film showed a group of happy explorers going to visit a planet, only to discover the Xenomorphs from the original films. Now, it's unclear how, if at all, these films are connected except for one thing: Michael Fassbender's android David is reassembled and chilling with another doomed crew.

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Certainly anticipating that this film will be as confusing as the last, Ridley Scott has shared a number of short films to prime us for Alien: Convenant. The first one showed the new crew having one last party before setting off on their mission (and inevitably to their doom).

The latest one, though, is a little bit more useful to following this derailed franchise. It picks off immediately after the events in Prometheus, with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) escaping with David's head to the planet they believe is inhabited by the Engineers (AKA the alien idiots who probably created the humans and also the Xenomorphs).

"After we made contact with the Engineers, the Prometheus was destroyed. All hands were lost, but I escaped with Elizabeth in one of their ships," says David in narration. "I was badly injured in our mission. She put me back together."

He puts Shaw into a sleep chamber, arrives at the Engineers' planet (which looks bustling besides those pods that killed the rest of the crew), then it ends. Somehow he ends up with this new crew on a new expedition, and if you'll notice, there's a destroyed ship docking bay in the Alien: Covenant trailer that looks a lot like the one that works in this prologue. Is this all making sense?

From: Esquire US