Alien Covenant - ALIEN TIMELINE EXPLAINED (All Alien Movies!)

hi I'm Erik Bosse and alien covenant is here along with some questions about how exactly this story fits in the overall timeline of the Alien franchise now I am a huge fan of the alien movies the first two are honestly my favorite films unpopular opinion I know and even as the franchise got weirder and some cases not so great I've always had a soft spot for the sci-fi elements in the backstory of all of these movies so in this video I'm going to explain the full complicated alien timeline including the non-canon alien vs. predator movies and why people don't consider them canon I come on is it just because people don't like them like things still happen we shouldn't just brush them off right the story is more interesting than that and quick heads up I'm going to talk about major plot details from all of the alien movies including a few minor things from alien covenants that I don't think are spoilers but you might think they're spoilers so if you haven't seen it yet and just want to go and completely blind you have been warned okay so when Ridley Scott announced that he was making an alien covenant he said it wouldn't be an exact sequel to Prometheus which remember ended with Elizabeth Shaw and David leaving lb 2 to 3 for the engineers homeworld instead alien covenant follows a separate crew in the same universe on a ship called the Covenant as they seek to establish a human colony on a new world and it all takes place that decade or so after the events of Prometheus so it's kind of a non sequel sequel but still a prequel to the original aliens now I know that's confusing so let's go back and chronologically work our way forwards through the whole timeline okay so Prometheus established the earliest events at 3.2 billion years BC that prologue theme showed the engineers leaving ancient earth as one of them stayed behind drinking this black liquid and dissolving into a waterfall and this sacrifice was considered the origin of all life on Earth and the promo site for Prometheus included its own timeline for the whale incorporation including the birth of Peter Weyland in 1990 and of course the company becomes this juggernaut of technology and whalen gives a legendary TED talk in 2023 that outlines his vision of building better worlds then two years after that and 2025 waylynn creates david the first generation android that would go on as a model for all the others afterwards david ate the one in prometheus and walker the one an alien covenant that also includes later android like ash and alien and bishop and alien okay so the decades pass and in twenty eighty nine that scene in Prometheus shows shaw in holloway discovering ancient cave paintings in scotland showing an engineer pointing to a star map and then four years after that and 2093 they arrive at lv two two three on a mission funded by Weyland and of course this brings us to the main events of the movie Prometheus which I don't need to fully recap here just know that everyone loved it and no one had a problem with it but the key reveal here involves the engineers so over the years they became unhappy with the monsters they created the human race so they plan to wipe us out with a bio weapons this black goo that infects us and turns us into even uglier monsters so when David awakens the surviving engineer that guy plans to head to earth to begin that process but he foiled when his ship is disabled and he gets killed and impregnated by the trilobite squid creature that Shaw had cut out of her womb earlier in the movie and this all results in this little cutie the beacon it looks like a xenomorph but it's not at least not yet it's probably an early stage but more on this later so it seems like Ridley Scott's idea here is that the Xenomorphs are a combination of a few ingredients bio weaponry created by the advanced race the engineers the engineers themselves and Shaw whose human womb incubated the trilobite and who unleashed it on the engineer everything about it that sets up some clever cyclical irony for both the engineers and the human race as co-creators of the instrument of their own destruction but this brings us to alien covenant which takes place about ten years later around 2103 and again I'm not planning on saying too much about this movie I don't want to ruin it for anyone but if you don't want to hear anything about alien covenant you can skip to this time okay so in 2103 the crew the covenant arrives on this lush beautiful world but this is also the homeworld of the engineers Shaw and David were headed there at the end of Prometheus and now the Covenant crew has on their ship and again the michael fassbender android that we see in this movie isn't David eight he's Walter and without saying too much covenant does go deeper into the history of this line of Android and it shows how really dated not Shaw was the actual main character of Prometheus and the events of the original alien film take place not too long after this in 2122 there's actually some fun references an alien covenant that imply how close in time the two movies are like the Covenant crew calls their ships central computer mother just like the Nostromo crew does in aliens suggesting that they're the same technology now it sounds like we may still see another movie or movies taking place in this 20-year gap between cabinet and alien Ridley Scott actually said that for more alien movies are in development some of these could also take place between alien and aliens while Ripley is in hypersleep or even later in the timeline but we now know that one of these four movies is alien awakening who said it would go prometheus awakening then covenant and my theory is that awakening will tell the story of the events that led from the deccan on lb 2 to 3 to the full minimal form that we see and come in okay so the rest of the main alien timeline is pretty straightforward these are the classic movies that started at all really the best sci-fi movies of all time and yes I'm including Star Wars in that because Star Wars is a fantasy not science fiction yes there is a difference the original alien is set in 2122 with the Nostromo responding to the distress call on lv-426 they find the derelict which is the ancient ship of the engineer which by the way wasn't called the engineer yet because Ridley Scott hadn't yet written this backstory instead this guy for years which is called the space jockey anyway this leads to came getting infected by a safe hugger the infamous chestburster scenes and ripley narrowly escaping with Jonesy and then James Cameron's alien takes place 57 years later in 2179 when Ripley is awakened from hypersleep and sent back to lv-426 on a rescue mission with colonial marines where it quickly becomes grave I ran until Ripley said get away from her you [ __ ] and fights the alien queen on if you can't tell I'm a huge super and then alien 3 takes place right after that with Ripley crash landing on the prison colony fiorina 161 or fury 161 she learns if she has an alien queen embryo gestating inside her so Whalen can get his hands on the xenomorph Ripley to the care she kills herself and the baby by jumping into a fire then the fourth movie alien resurrection codes even crazier jumping ahead 200 years 223 79 when the United systems military uses Ripley's blood collected from fury to clone her Ripley's DNA has fused with the xenomorph and now she has super strength in acidic blood so they extract the alien queen from Ripley and use it to breed even more Xenomorphs and as the morph human hybrid on the ship Auriga which in the end crashes into the earth supposedly killing all dziena more okay so that's as far into the future that the alien timeline goes but I've been leading out a big part of the cinematic history the two alien versus Predator movies and when it comes to the timeline people have stopped talking about these because they're no longer considered canon but why is that so when Ridley Scott returned to the Alien franchise basically said that when it comes to the movies only the movies with Ripley are considered canon and that Prometheus in these new alien movies would establish the Canon xenomorph backstory leading up to the Nostromo mission so Scott is basically pretending that alien versus Predator and alien versus Predator Requiem didn't happen actually Damon Lindelof the co-writer of Prometheus said that when he brought up alien versus Predator to Ridley Scott Ridley Scott give him this dirty look but really that's Ridley Scott's decision to make he's the guy who directed the first alien film from the vision of screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett and the studio that owns this property 20th Century Fox has basically given the reins to Scott to decide what is and isn't part of this timeline and I'm pretty okay with that still what was this alternate history from alien versus Predator so even though it's been overwritten by Prometheus let's still talk about it because it's pretty interesting so the alien versus Predator backstory was based loosely on the late 80s comic series alien versus redditor and that goes more into the history of the Predators a tribe of hunters known as lyosha and they end up dealing with their own xenomorph infestation actually teaming up with human and in the first alien versus Predator movie writer Paul WS Anderson used pieces of this comics backstory along with research into Aztec mythology and theories by Erich von Daniken's that extraterrestrials helped ancient cultures build pyramids so in alien vs. predator there's a history sequence that establishes the earliest point of the timeline as to 996 BC it shows the Predators on earth working with ancient human cultures they taught them how to build and they were worshipped as God now the Predators returned every hundred years using the humans to breed Xenomorphs that the Predators would battle in a sacred ritualistic combat and if the Predators ever lost the battle they would use their self-destruct mechanism to make sure nothing survived the idea being that this is why so many of these ancient cultures were lost to history so the main events of the movie takes place in 2004 in a pyramid at Antarctica and it ends with a chest burster popping out of the predator creating a pretty a lien which is a mix of both xenomorph and predator and that per day lien becomes the primary threat an alien versus Predator Requiem which takes place in rural Colorado and features some pretty disgusting violence to pregnant women regardless in my mind all this backstory with the ancient human cultures is pretty interesting and yeah there were definitely some parallels between this history in the new one that Ridley Scott established in Prometheus with the engineers replacing the Predators as the godlike beings who guided early humans but yeah the timeline is totally different now like Ridley Scott extended the earliest point of timeline from around 3000 BC to 3 billion BC and if you assume the engineer and the deacon to be the genesis of any carnation of a xenomorph which definitely seemed to be Scott's implication that pushes a xenomorph into the future popping up somewhere between 2093 and 2122 instead of running around in our present day and again that exact xenomorph origin point seems to be what alien awakening we'll be about now of course if you really stretch things there are some ways that these movies could all coexist like maybe the deacon wasn't the origin of the xenomorph and elsewhere in the universe they've been locked in this millennia old ritualistic combat with the Predators or also possible the Predators could have like gone back in time to ancient earth and brought a few facehuggers with them I mean I don't know crazier [ __ ] has happened in movie timelines before terminator dinner but really as much as I honestly loved the predator movies I don't want to be forced to contextualise the alien history in the predator universe like I think it's best to consider the alien vs. predator crossover movies as separate side adventures that you're free to enjoy or not enjoy personally I'd rather trust Ridley Scott's visions like bringing back that space jockey and ending Prometheus on this striking image of the deccan suggest that he's got a pretty good idea of the overall world of the story even if some of the characters in that worlds act pretty dumb sometimes I'm just grateful to look forward to the future of this franchise again like sure it might not ever be as great as alien and aliens but the existential themes and mythology of the engineers and the Weyland Android and heart-pounding suspense and horror which are still top-notch all these things make this series something that I will always be fascinated by and I'll probably be a really annoying fanboy to debate if you ever start hating on them okay that covers the up-to-date timeline of the alien movies Canon and non canon but keep an eye out for other videos that we might be doing on alien covenant on this channel like I'm curious to know what you think of the movie and what questions you have after seen it so if you like this video please hit like and subscribe the new rock stars you can also contribute to us on patreon thanks so much to all of our current patrons especially Daniel Hopkins you can hit me up on Twitter a TA box with any thoughts you have about alien covenant or any alien movie or follow new rockstars on Twitter at new rockstars for updates on our videos okay [Music] it's just burster it's lemon on my chest it's cute it's a teeny [Music] [Music]

Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 489,456

Keywords: alien, alien timeline, alien timeline explained, alien covenant, alien covenant easter eggs, alien covenant prometheus, alien covenant timeline, alien covenant xenomorph, prometheus ending explained, alien covenant connections to alien movies, alien vs predator, aliens, alien resurrection, avp requiem, alien michael fassbender, alien david, alien covenant david walter, alien chestburster scene, new rockstars

Id: hFJva2WBFjE

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017