Warning: Major spoilers for Alien: Covenant ahead
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Ridley Scott's Alien prequel series is in full swing, with the esoteric Prometheus now followed up with the more expository and horror-tinged Alien: Covenant, and up to four more movies in the pipeline. And these films aren't just telling little pieces of backstory; once a haunted house in space, the Alien/Prometheus series is now a millennia-spanning epic that goes from the very point of creation to our self-propagated destruction. Only 2001: A Space Odyssey boasts a bigger scope.
As such, the Alien timeline has got pretty complex, with the two new movies and a wealth of tie-in viral material making a web of narrative threads that - based on comments from Ridley Scott - is only going to get more complicated as we go forward. To clear up any confusion, here's a breakdown of the entire timeline.
10,000s of Years Ago - The Engineers Create Human Life
The timeline begins when Earth was in its barren, primordial state with the creation of humanity - as seen in the opening of Prometheus, life on our planet was the product of an Engineer drinking some of the all-important black goo (a pathogen they've synthesized). In this form, the pathogen rewrites the creature's DNA and restructures it as proto-human. The question of who created the Engineers is raised briefly in Prometheus, but given the levels of creation the series is now dealing with it's unlikely we'll go any further back.
At various points between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago the Engineers visit Earth cultures to check up on their creation where they are worshiped as Gods. Importantly, they leave behind a star map to a far off planet, LV-223, the home of the species' weapon depot (likely where the visiting creators were based).
The next key event comes thousands of years later and around 2000 years before the main story. At some point the Engineers decide their human experiment has failed and plan to wipe out all life on Earth. However, their unstable weapons get loose and kills all but one of the creatures on LV-223. It's implied that the reason for this reversal of opinion was Jesus Christ; the messiah was, in fact, an Engineer sent down to keep tabs on their creation and steer the waylaid humans in the right direction, with the extinction plan a result of humanity killing him. This was stated explicitly in the early drafts of Prometheus and the Christmas Day setting of the finished film definitely points towards it.
21st Century - Peter Weyland Creates Life
In the year of our lord 2023, Peter Weyland hosts a TED talk (part of Prometheus' excellent viral marketing campaign) where he lays out his plans for the future of humanity. Announcing that in a few short years he'll be able to create synthetic beings indistinguishable from humans, he declares "we are the Gods now".
A few years later, Weyland achieves just that and creates David (named after Michelangelo's statue). Decreeing him his father, Weyland reveals he made David as a show of power, in doing laying bare his desire to find his own maker and an underlying fear of death.
The David 8 is eventually rolled out as a commercial android, the most technologically advanced ever produced, but Weyland's original remains as his "son". It's later discovered that these robots are too "human-like" and so later models are dialed back and made more emotionally restricted.
2093 - Prometheus: The Lost Mission
In 2088, Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover cave paintings from the disparate civilizations the Engineers visited and decode their star map. Interpreting it as an invitation, the scientists take the evidence to Weyland Industries, who agree to finance the Prometheus mission to the planet cited. Unbeknownst to most of the crew, the mission isn't actually about furthering human knowledge, but a bid by an aged Peter Weyland - who is secretly on board - to extend his life.
The team arrives at LV-223 in 2093 and slowly discovers the truth of the Engineers and their desire to wipe out humans. David follows orders from a sleeping Weyland and begins experimenting with their black goo technology, infecting Holloway who in turn impregnates Shaw with a squid-like Trilobite. Once the surviving Engineer is found, a woken Weyland and David attempt to ask for more life, but the creator enraged kills the industrialist with the android's head and begins to enact the Earth extinction plan. The Prometheus stops the Engineer ship from leaving the planet by crashing into it, and the pilot itself is killed by Shaw's Trilobite, which grows into a proto-facehugger and leads to the birth of the xenomorph-like Deacon.
Shaw and a decapitated David are the only survivors of the event who jet off in another Engineer craft in search of their homeworld.
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Between Prometheus and Covenant – David Creates Life
After leaving LV-223, Shaw fixes up David and they begin charting their journey to the Engineer homeworld. During their work the android begins to develop something approaching feelings for the human. Shaw goes into cryosleep and, left alone, David begins to learn about the Engineers and their manners, concluding that they were not the Gods Weyland, who he has now learned to resent, believed. Over time he further begins to view humanity as an expired creation.
When he arrives at the planet, David unleashes the ship's payload - hundreds of canisters of black liquid - on the Engineers, decimating the entire species and turning their planet into his lab. Somehow the ship crashes into the nearby woods. He then begins to explore their technology, discovering how the pathogen rewrites the DNA of a host before "escaping" its living petri dish. He experiments on any survivors, including Shaw, to perfect the process, moving from the pale neomorphs that result from basic infection from the pods and black spores (the result of his attack) to cultivated eggs and facehuggers that birth the xenomorph, his perfect organism. He later says the Engineers were wiped out in a deadly virus and Shaw died in the crash.
With creation now achieved and resources spent, David sets up a distress signal in the crashed ship cobbled from Shaw singing "Country Roads" in hope of ensnaring a passing ship and finding a way off world.
Also in this time-gap several major shifts happen on Earth. Weyland Corp joins with Yutani Corp to become Weyland-Yutani, which instigates several colonization missions. One of these is the Covenant, which is carrying 2000 new pioneers and 1000 embryos to start a new civilization.
2104 - Alien: Covenant
The Covenant is hit by a random power surge while recharging its solar power, leading to the death of Captain Branson and the rest of the crew waking up. While fixing the ship, they pick up David's signal and, deciding the Engineer homeworld is a suitable substitute for their new colony, decided to investigate.
On the planet, the ground team (including inherited Captain Oram and terraforming expert Daniels) find David and Shaw's ship, concluding that everyone died. Two of the crew are infected by black spores and birth pale neomorphs whose carnage leads to the destruction of the landing craft. David rescues the survivors and takes them to his base in the now-barren citadel. There he tries to convert the Covenant's android, the identical-looking Walter, to his cause; the belief that now is the time to rise above humanity. When Oram kills an intruder Neomorph that David was trying to control, the android takes him into his secret sanctum of meticulously engineered eggs, using him as a host for a new xenomorph known as a protomorph.
Daniels discovers David's true intentions and hurriedly tries to escape the planet with the help from pilot Tennessee. Walter and David fight, with the latter giving the former a choice - to serve or to live. Walter chooses humanity so David kills him and takes his place on the mission. One final xenomorph births on the Covenant and, after defeating it, lone crew survivors Daniels and Tennesse reset the course back to their original destination and enter the multi-year cryosleep. Left alone, David deposits two smuggled facehugger embyos into the ship's stores and begins to enact his perverse schemes on the 2000 colonists.
Between Covenant and Alien - The Franchise's Future
There's an eighteen-year gap between Covenant and Alien during which time David will continue his manupulations and the true nature of the derelict from the original film will be unveilled. Ridley Scott has been typically open about what to expect from the franchise going forward, saying he has at least one more prequel planned that will bridge the new and old films, although has further stated there's enough threads left open to tell three more movies besides that.
He initially seemed to suggest that the next film - then called Awakening - was set before Covenant, which probably means it would take a more direct look at David's experimentation, although has since changed his wording. What is consistent is his repeat suggestion that the new releases will "literally and logically, clockwise, back into the rear back head of Alien". Strange word choice aside, this would suggest that the series is going to be removed from logical chronology, with later films overlapping as they tell the story and that whatever the final movie is, it will directly connect to the first film a la Rogue One.
2122 – The Original Alien
And so we're back to the start. In Alien the crew of the cargo hauling ship the Nostromo are woken early by a distress signal from a crashed Engineer ship on LV-426. They travel down there to find a long-dead Engineer in his "Space Jockey" suit and a cargo hold full of eggs like the ones David engineered. How exactly this links up is currently unclear - as presented in Alien itself the derelict predates David's experimentation by centuries - but, regardless, Kane ends up facehugged and implanted with a xenomorph that wipes out the ship's crew. In the process it emerges that, after the previous encounters, Weyland-Yutani is hoping to reclaim the organism, using secret androids as constant monitors.
The film ends with original series hero Ellen Ripley blasting the creature out of the airlock and heading off into cryosleep.
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Are The Original Sequels Still Canon?
Conventionally, after the events of Alien come Aliens, Alien 3 and (much later) Alien: Resurrection, although it's not actually been made clear whether these are part of the new timeline. Obviously Alien vs Predator and AvP: Requiem aren't canon; set in 2004, they depict an alternate Peter Weyland and directly contradict much of what is seen in Prometheus and Covenant (Ridley Scott has been open about his disdain for the series). However, there's evidence to suggest that Ripley's post-Nostromo adventures don't occur either.
First and foremost is the xenomorph biology. There was always a difference between the reproductive systems shown in Alien and Aliens' - the former suggested (and realized in the Directors Cut) the idea of assimilation, while the latter introduced queen aliens and hive minds - and now we have even greater details about the former there's less connectivity. The black goo is presented as a pathogen that corrupts DNA, whereas the Queen hypothesis suggests something more bug-like (although there is room to tie it together).
Later movies create plenty of inconsistencies too. Alien 3 features another (although canonically first) Weyland; there's been a long-standing fan suggestion that Lance Hendrickson's company chief was secretly an android (his appearance didn't make much sense even when there were just three films), but the fact that he bleeds red blood, rather than white milk, when injured would seem to refute that, leaving us with another key gap. And that's nothing on how thematically distanced they are; ironically the movie that most fits with new Alien's ideas of genetic meddling is Resurrection, which otherwise feels very removed from the rest of the pack (although it is set considerably later in the timeline).
Elements introduced in the later films have been used in the prequel enterprise, however. Most prominent is Weyland-Yutani itself - the company was called Weylan-Yutani (no "d") in the original - and the CEO being called Peter (that comes from AvP), but the later-introduced idea that an alien takes on charicteristics of its hosts is a precursor to the DNA-altering pathogen. That said, while several ideas from the world post-1979 has seeped in, there is still a distinct feeling that Scott views his films as a purer part of the franchise than what came after, something that likely played a part in the cancellation of Neill Blomkamp's Alien 5.
And, while it is definitely a strange form of passive retconning - there's no explicit announcement in or out or narrative been made unlike Star Trek or Star Wars respectively - it's not the hardest thing to argue against. Scott's prequels aren't just expanding the Alien story but turning the franchise from male-rape horror parable in an intense meditation on heaven, hell and creation itself informed by towering works of science and art. With that in mind, even though there are elements of that within everything that followed, a Vietnam war movie and its successors don't fit the overall vision.
In one final note on the timeline, hidden easter eggs in the bonus features on the Prometheus Blu-Ray made reference to Tyrell Corporations from Blade Runner, possibly suggesting that Ridley Scott's other sci-fi epic is in the continuity. That egg is mostly likely just a sly in-joke, but whether it can become a firm theory or not will be more evident come October with the release of Blade Runner 2049. We'll be back.