The extraterrestrial film tale is, in fact, more difficult than one may expect. It is impossible to keep track of the chronology of events, let alone determine a sequence to watch the movie, with multiple prequels and sequels set in separate timelines. In terms of chronology, the franchise starts with the film Prometheus.
As you may know, Prometheus was the deity that created humanity, and in the film, humans embark on an expensive quest to discover their creators, also known as the Engineers. The first forms of Xenomorphs were partly produced by these engineers, and later, a synthetic named David gave the finishing touches.
They became a demon that hooked themselves to humans after their inception and subsequent infection, and we willingly went to them at times. In this video, we will go over the events of each of the six alien films and go in-depth on each one. A good reminder is that we kept the video focused solely on the alien franchise, therefore there are no references to predators or Predator movies in the video. Let us go right to the point, shall we?
What is an Alien?
The birth and maturity of a Xenomorph is one of the most complex reproductive processes in nature. Xenomorphs go through four different reproductive stages before maturing into an adult. The Queen lays several eggs in a hive through a detachable ovipositor. However, she ditches the ovipositor only when she or her hive is seriously threatened. Facehuggers are the second stage and the parasitoid form of a Xenomorph’s life cycle, and their sole purpose is to impregnate their host orally, after which point they soon succumb to death.
Chest busters are the third stage of a Xenomorph’s life cycle and resemble a worm-like organism with razor-sharp metallic teeth and an agile, strong tail that can propel them with great momentum, giving them the ability to burst through the chests of the host. After ejecting out of a host, the chest busters grow incredibly fast into various forms of Xenomorphs depending upon the host. An adult Xenomorph is a ferocious and deadly living weapon that hunts its prey using otherworldly speed, strength, and stamina. For more information on the Xenomorphs, check out our video titled 8 Mind-Bending Mysteries Of Xenomorph Anatomy Unraveled – Reproduction To Origin Everything Explored.
Prometheus
Sometime in the prehistoric period, an Engineer was chosen to sacrifice himself on Earth. This humanoid alien stood above a waterfall as a vast black Engineer ship hovered away. The Engineer drank a black liquid and immediately started to disintegrate. Whatever remained of his disintegrated body began to cascade into the water. This hastened the evolutionary process on Earth as his DNA triggered a biogenetic reaction. Many centuries later, in Scotland in 2089, partners and archeologists Charlie Holloway and Elizabeth Shaw discovered ancient intergalactic maps that were known to bear resemblance with several extinct human cultures.
These maps are interpreted as an invitation from the ancient race of Engineers, who were the forefathers and creators of humans. Peter Weyland, the CEO of Weyland Corp, considers this a great opportunity and decides to finance a team of scientists and researchers to follow the maps and constructs the titular ship called Prometheus for the expedition. The expedition takes off in 2091, with the crew in stasis and David in charge. You should know that David was a synthetic with vast emotional and creative capabilities.
Many from Weyland Corporation were wary of the fast growth that David had shown. In fact, he once asked his creator why he should follow the commands of humans when they would perish, but he wouldn’t; this event is from Covenant. Nevertheless, Prometheus completed its journey in 20193 and landed on the moon named LV 223. On LV 223, the crew is informed that their mission is to find the engineers. However, Meredith Vickers, the mission director, issues strict orders that no physical contact shall be made with any alien life form. The ship makes its landing near a massive artificial structure, and a small team from the expedition goes to explore it.
Inside the structure, they find several peculiar objects, including many steatite ampules that stored a highly unstable black liquid, a statue of a humanoid head, and lastly, a huge humanoid alien that was believed to be an Engineer. Later, they find other bodies and conclude that the species went extinct. David discreetly steals one of the dark liquid carrying ampules for his personal research, but just about then, other cylinders begin to leak the stored liquid.
An impending storm forces the crew to return to Prometheus, but two of them, named Millburn and Fifield, get lost inside the artificial structure and are forced to spend the night there until the time the crew doesn’t rescue them. While studying the alien on Prometheus, the crew learns that it contains human DNA. Meanwhile, David begins his menace and infects Holloway with the liquid that he stole, unbeknownst to the latter. Later, Holloway and Shaw indulge in some canoodling and make love.
Meanwhile, Millburn and Fifield managed to reach a room with two Hammerpedes, alien worms from LV 223. One of the Hammerpedes latched on to Millburn when he tried to touch it. On the other hand, when Fifield tried to remove the creature, it fastened its grip only to break Millburn’s arm. In a desperate attempt to save his friends, Fifield severed the creature’s head, but the acidic blood melted the helmet faceplate of Fifield. However, the creature soon regrew its head and entered Millburn’s mouth via his suit. Meanwhile, the room’s floor was filled with black liquid; it touched Fifield and mutated him into a grotesque creature.
The following day, the crew discovers Millburn’s corpse and Fifield missing. However, David found another Engineer that was held in stasis close to a star map that highlighted Earth. Meanwhile, Holloway’s infection, courtesy of David, was spreading to his entire body. He rushed back to his ship, but the mission director refused him entry and suggested that he quarantine himself. But later, upon Holloway’s request, he euthanized him using a flamethrower. Also, Shaw realized that she is pregnant with an alien creature, despite being sterile. However, she successfully removed the creature from her abdomen using an automated surgery table.
In a strange turn of events, she discovered that Weyland has come aboard the Prometheus with the intent of asking the Engineers to give him the way that would help him evade death due to old age. A monstrous and completely mutated Fifield attacks and kills several of the Prometheus crew members, but later he himself dies. The captain of the ship, Janek, deduces that the black liquid is a mutagen used to create biological weapons. But the Engineers lost control of their own creation, which slew them all.
On the other hand, Weyland, David, and a few others awaken the Engineer, and David tried speaking to the alien. However, the Engineer decapitated David and killed everyone else, including Weyland. But, David survived the decapitation and informed Shaw that the Engineer intended to release the Black mutagenic liquid on Earth. To stop that from happening, they crashed Prometheus into the Engineer Ship. Shaw made it to a lifeboat only to find that the alien she extracted from her abdomen had grown in size but was trapped. Moments later, the Engineer attacked her once again, but she released the creature on the Engineer, which then thrust an ovipositor down his throat, presumably killing him. Shaw recovered David’s body and they became the only two survivors of Prometheus. The film ended with an alien bursting out of the Engineer’s chest.
While it’s a great film as far as the creative vision and sci-fi horror aspects are concerned, it misses the point of why the Alien franchise became a hit upon the release of the first film. We do agree that Ridley Scott wanted to make a prequel in a way that he saw fit, but it is the only film from the Alien franchise that did not feature a single Xenomorph. We are not debating the merits and demerits of the film, but we would have been happier if we saw a few Xenomorphs on the screen.
Alien: Covenant
In 2104, the colony spaceship Covenant was on its way to Origae 6 with two thousand colonists and eleven hundred and forty embryos. While the colonists were in hypersleep and around seven years from reaching their destination, Covenant got hit by a neutrino blast from a stellar ignition. The event caused major damage to Covenant and led to fires at various places. The ship’s crew was woken up from their sleep, but Captain Branson, who failed to come out of his cryotube, got incinerated. Although the damage was brought under control, 47 colonists and 16 embryos got destroyed along with Branson. The ship’s first officer and highly religious man, Chris, takes charge of the ship after his captain’s death.
Later, a pilot named Tennessee picks up a distorted transmission while he was spacewalking to fix the external portions of the damaged Covenant. The crew analyzes and decodes the message only to realize that it was a human who was humming John Denver’s song Country Roads. They trace its origin as a nearby planet that was perfect for human settlement and had even better figures than their initial destination Origami 6. The crew gets excited about the new possibility of habitation just a few weeks away, as none of them wanted to return to hypersleep. Chris begins to start his investigation about the viability of this new option.
They finally reach the unchartered world, and everyone apart from Upworth, Tennessee, and Ricks head to the planet in a dropship. At the surface, they discover a planet that’s rich in flora but devoid of any animals or even birds. Nevertheless, they begin their exploration, and in the process, a man named Ledward disturbed a few small plants while smoking. Numerous airborne particles infiltrated his ears from these pods, but he couldn’t entirely realize what had happened. Later, the team discovered a crashed Engineer Ship, the dog tag of Shaw from Prometheus, and the source of the audio transmission that Covenant had received.
However, once Ledward became rapidly ill, the exploration was cut short. Karine rushed him back to their ship, but a Neomorph Bloodburster erupted from his back, killing him. The creature then attacked and killed Karine too. In a desperate attempt to kill the beast, the pilot used a flamethrower, but the resultant fire caused an explosion in the dropship that destroyed it. Despite that, the Neomorph managed to escape. Meanwhile, another crew member named Hallett got killed by another Neomorph, which exploded out of his throat.
It is important to note here that Neomorphs are very similar to Xenomorphs, except for a few differences. For instance, the Neomorphs get inside a host through small airborne pores instead of facehuggers. Also, they seem to be less intelligent and more animalistic than their counterparts. Neomorphs are essentially the predecessors of the Xenomorphs.
Soon, the Neomorphs had grown much larger in size and attacked the crew once more, killing Ankor. The security team managed to kill one of them while the other one was shooed away by a mysterious hooded man. The crew was unable to contact Covenant for extraction now that their dropship was destroyed. Naturally, they had to follow this hooded man, who revealed himself to be David from Prometheus. He briefs the crew about the events that took place after the events of Prometheus. He and Shaw had come to the planet using the Engineer juggernaut ship, but upon arrival, the black liquid got spilled and contaminated the planet and annihilated its denizens. Later the ship crashed, and of which Shaw dies.
However, later we learn that David lied about his time on the planet and Shaw’s death. He had been attempting to create a genetically superior species of the monsters that had spawned due to the black liquid. Furthermore, he had managed to create eggs or Ovomorphs, one of which hatched and attacked Oram. The facehugger laid a chest buster in Oram, which later killed the man. The place becomes ground zero for a nasty blood bath, in which both acidic and human blood is spilled. Meanwhile, Daniels confronts David and correctly theorizes that she didn’t die in a crash.
David concedes that he killed her for his experiments and then attacks her. However, Walter intercedes and saves Daniels, who requests Covenant to send a rescue ship. However, a Xenomorph was in hot pursuit, but Daniels manages to kill the creature with the vessel’s crane. They finally reach Covenant, where they prepare to go into hypersleep. However, just before Daniels’s hypersleep pod got activated, she learned that David had come along Covenant instead of Walter. While everyone was in hypersleep, David placed two facehugger embryos in storage along with the embryos of humans. He transmits back to base that everyone apart from Walter and Tennessee had died in the neutrino blast.
Although the film doesn’t entirely bridge the gap between its predecessors, it manages to give a detailed explanation of how the Xenomorphs were created. At the end of Prometheus, Shaw mended David and the two of them came to the Engineer planet to find out why they wished to kill their own creation, the humans. However, David unleashed the Black Liquid on them to wipe out the Engineer population. He then started experimenting with the black liquid to create an iteration of the transformed but native creatures.
He was experimenting on a native species of wasps that laid eggs inside its hosts, and the larva, upon hatching, would devour its host from the inside. Does this sound familiar to you? Well, that’s where the Xenomorphs get their parasitic nature from. He presumably killed all the planet’s creatures to further his mad experiments and then finally killed Shaw, using her female reproductive organs to make her practically the first Xenomorph queen, and her physiology helped create eggs. But then, he was now left bereft of all living beings and especially hosts.
He was sending out signals to outer space so that someone would pick it up and come to the planet, and Covenant did come. Naturally, he now had his hosts. The crux of the film is that like the Engineers played god and created a species they couldn’t control, humans too created synthetics like David, a being that went out of hand and developed its own god complex.
Alien (1979)
Alien takes place 16 years after the events of Covenant and begins with a commercial towing spacecraft USCSS Nostromo returning to Earth with its mineral ore payload when it detected a transmission from a moon. In response to the mysterious signal, the computer awoke the seven-member crew of Nostromo from their stasis. The crew received orders from their superiors about investigating the transmission’s source. Along with Warrant Officer Ripley, the others head out to the moon. Lambert, Kane, and Dallas discover that the transmission had its source inside a derelict alien ship. However, inside the ship, they also found the carcass of a large alien whose ribs were exploded inside out.
On the other hand, Ripley concludes that the strange signals were in fact warnings instead of being a distress call. However, she failed to warn her colleagues. Inside the derelict ship, Kane comes across a huge chamber with many large eggs. From one of these eggs, a facehugger erupted and latched itself on Kane’s face. Lambert and Dallas carry an unconscious Kane to Nostromo, where Ash allowed them inside, despite Ripley’s warnings. After various failed attempts to remove the alien creature from Kane’s face, the creature detached itself and died. Wasting no more time on the moon, Nostromo resumed its journey towards Earth.
Just before resuming their stasis, Kane began to convulse and choke. Ultimately, an alien chest buster erupted from his chest, killing him, and it escaped to hide in the ship. The crew was basically a mining crew, naturally, they didn’t have the conventional weapons. So they used tools like nets, electric pods, and motion detectors to figure out the location of the creature. However, the creature soon transformed and matured into its full size and went on a massacre by first killing Brett. They couldn’t escape in the ship’s escape shuttle because it wouldn’t sustain the remaining crew members. Naturally, the only option was to kill the creature.
In a strange turn of events, the crew finds out that Ash was an android and knew all about the Aliens all along. The company sent him to retrieve the alien at any cost, even if that meant the crew lost their lives. In a desperate attempt for survival, the remaining members of the crew decide to take the shuttle and explode Nostromo through the self-destruct mode. However, two more members get killed by the Alien. When Ripley tried to reach the shuttle, she saw that the creature was blocking her way but it soon went away.
As Ripley prepared to enter her stasis in the escape pod, she noticed that the creature has come aboard the shuttle. She immediately put on a spacesuit and opened the hatch with the intent of blowing away the Alien, but it managed to hold on to the doorway. After much struggle, she managed to incinerate the alien with the ship’s engines and blasted it off into the depths of space. She sent out a distress call and then put herself and a cat named Jones into stasis.
Alien, along with Aliens, can be considered the best film of the franchise, but pointing out which is better would probably initiate a third world war. The way Ridley Scott directed the film and gave a fine blend of tense, dreadful moments and thrilling, explosive action sequences is what makes the film a masterpiece in its own right. H. R. Giger’s monstrous and masterful creations came to life in the most perfect form to thrill fans and critics alike. As the first film of the franchise, it will forever remain a classic.
Aliens (1986)
Fifty-seven years after the incidents aboard Nostromo, Ripley is rescued from her shuttle that was drifting around space. She is summoned before a panel of executives who completely discard her story of an Alien responsible for the destruction of Nostromo. In fact, her flying license is terminated. But she gets most agitated when she learns that LV 426, the moon on which her colleagues discovered the Alien eggs, was now turned into a terraforming colony. Later, Carter Burke and Lieutenant Gorman come to Ripley and inform her that all contact has been lost with LV 426.
They offered her a reinstatement of her license if she agreed to visit LV 426 as a consultant. She initially discards the offer because of her past traumatic experiences at the moon but agrees to come along when she hears that any alien life form that they encounter there would be killed. Furthermore, Burke assured her that there would be no attempt to capture any creatures whatsoever. At the warship Sulaco, she meets Privates Vasquez and Hudson, Corporal Hicks, and Sergeant Apone of the Colonial Marines. With them is the android Bishop, but she is hostile towards Bishop because of what the other android Ash did on Nostromo.
The crew reaches LV 426 and the armed crew lands on the surface in a dropship, only to discover that the colony has taken a hit and had been left abandoned. They find two facehuggers contained in tanks but no trace of any survivors apart from a traumatized girl named Newt. Upon searching the facility, they discover that most of the colonists have been cocooned by the aliens so that they would serve as hosts for new Xenomorphs. soon, they get attacked by Xenomorphs, who either kill most of the crew or capture them.
However, Ripley manages to save Hudson, Vasquez and Hicks. Hicks takes command because the commanding officer Gorman was knocked unconscious. He decides to rescue the survivors and destroy the facility from orbit. But a Xenomorph attacks the dropship that was to bring the survivors to Sulaco. Naturally, the dropship smashes into the atmosphere processor, destroying it and most of the equipment. In this film, Burke turns out to be the bad guy who wanted to benefit from the discovery of the Xenomorphs. However, Bishop alerts Ripley of a graver danger in the form of the possibility of the atmosphere processor turning into a thermonuclear weapon because of the damage it sustained. Bishop offers to pilot the remaining dropship remotely so that the crew could escape.
Later, Ripley and Newt find themselves trapped in the medical lab with two facehuggers that somehow got released. Ripley managed to alert the marines, who kill the facehuggers. They all held Burke responsible for the treachery, but before they could teach him a lesson, the Xenomorphs cut off the electricity and several of them ambushed from the ceilings. However, in the ensuing chaos, Newt gets abducted and is taken by the Xenomorphs for impregnation. But Ripley follows Newt with a combination of a flame thrower and a pulse rifle for a weapon and manages to reach Newt just before she’s impregnated.
However, they get confronted with a huge and exponentially large Xenomorph Queen who was laying eggs in the chamber. Ripley initially threatens the Queen of destroying the hive so that Ripley and Newt could make a peaceful exit, but when things go out of hand, Ripley burns the whole place, only to enrage the Queen, who detaches from her giant ovipositor to give the two humans a chase.
They barely manage to escape in the dropship, just in time to get out of the blast radius of the atmosphere processing plant. However, back on Sulaco, they find out that the Xenomorph Queen had come aboard the ship. She tears Bishop in half, but Ripley joins the fight with a Power Loader. After a fierce and thrilling battle, Ripley manages to expel the Xenomorph Queen into outer space. The film ends with Newt being saved by Bishop and Ripley and Newt settling down for their journey home.
What makes Aliens a great film is that the film’s pace and story are high-octane and tense from the beginning to the end. No sequence feels unnecessary or forced. Be it, Sigourney Weaver, as Ellen Ripley, Lance Henriksen as Bishop, Bill Paxton as Hudson, or even Carrie Henn as young Newt, all the actors gave their performances with grace and fluidity. The film did great as a sequel because it not only remained true to the source material but also expanded immensely on the lore and background. Interestingly enough, the film sought to develop Ripley’s character by giving her motherly instincts. In the 57 years of hypersleep before her rescue, she had lost her daughter. When she found Newt stranded all alone in an alien world, she immediately became protective of Newt. This trait is seen in the subsequent films as well.
Alien 3 (1992)
After the events that took place on LV 426, USS Sulaco heads back to Earth, but a stowaway facehugger managed to trigger a fire. This awakens Ripley and others from their hypersleep. They crash-land on Fiorina 161, which was a barren planet and served as a penal colony for several male inmates. The prisoners take control of the pod, but the prison dog gets attacked and impregnated by a facehugger. The prison doctor Clemens treats Ripley, but when she wakes up, she’s horrified to learn that no one else survived the crash.
She soon realizes that a Xenomorph could be the reason why she ended up on Fiorina 161 and requested Clemens to ensure that the corpses are cremated. Meanwhile, a Xenomorph erupted from the dog that was earlier impregnated. The creature soon begins to wreak its havoc on the inmates of Fiorina 161. But Ripley also learns that the Weyland Yutani Corporation has sent a rescue ship. In the infirmary, the Xenomorph kills the doctor right in front of Ripley’s eyes, but the creature spares Ripley for mysterious reasons.
Soon, Ripley takes charge of the situation and the inmates reluctantly rally behind her. She devised a plan to push the Xenomorph towards an abandoned nuclear waste tank and set it on fire once the Xenomorph was in the kill zone. However, the tank got lit on fire before time and the Xenomorph manages to escape its death. She soon develops chest pain and inspects herself with the escape pod’s medical equipment only to find that she has a Xenomorph Queen embryo or a Royal embryo within her. Full of despair, she finds the Xenomorph once again in the hopes of getting killed by it, but it spares her another time. She then gets into a deal with the religious leader Dillon, who agrees to fulfill Ripley’s death request only if she helped him kill the adult Xenomorph that was ravaging the facility.
Dillon and Ripley then make a desperate plan of using the inmates as bait to lure it to the pool of molten lead. Although the plan worked at the cost of several inmates, including Dillon, the creature leaped out from the molten lead and leaped towards Ripley, who then opened the sprinklers. The thermal shock led to the Xenomorph’s exoskeleton to crumble and shatter, finally killing it. Meanwhile, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s rescue team reached Fiorina 161 and they asked Ripley to come with them so that the embryo inside her could be removed.
However, she saw through the plan and realized that they were only interested in the creature. She had already sacrificed a lot for the corporation and now she sacrificed the last thing she had, her life, by throwing herself into the facility’s furnace. The Xenomorph Queen’s chest buster erupted right before her death, but Ripley held the Xenomorph to herself to meet its death with Ripley. In the end, Ripley’s distress call from the first alien film was heard one last time.
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Two hundred years after the events of Alien 3 and Ripley’s death on Fiorina 161, military scientists on a vessel named Auriga manage to create Ellen Ripley’s clone. They also extract the embryonic Xenomorph Queen and raise it for further study on Xenomorphs. The clone is marked with the numeral eight on her arm using a laser. However, the cloning process was not accurate, and the Xenomorph DNA got spliced with Ripley’s, giving her enhanced reflexes and strength, acidic blood, original memories of Ellen Ripley, and most importantly, an empathic connection between her and the Xenomorph Queen. Soon, a group of mercenaries led by Elgyn arrives at Auriga on their ship Betty.
They deliver many abducted humans in stasis that would serve as hosts for the Xenomorphs that the scientists had been cultivating. Annalee Call meets Ripley 8 and attempts to kill her, assuming that she might be used to make newer Xenomorphs, but she doesn’t realize that it is already too late. By now, the Xenomorphs have matured and are sentient about the acidic powers of their blood. They escape their confinement by killing one of their own to use its acidic blood. The creatures soon wreak havoc on Auriga and damage the ship. Ripley 8 and the others learn that the ship’s default command is to head back to Earth in case of damage or emergency.
Realizing that they can not let this happen, they decide to head for Betty and destroy Auriga and the Xenomorphs by extension. On her way, Ellen Ripley’s clone comes across the grotesque and gruesome results of the failed attempts of cloning Ripley, one of which begged Ripley for euthanization. Ripley obliged the request before burning the lab and its contents. On their way to Betty, the crew meets with several Xenomorphs. Interestingly enough, Call is revealed to be an auton or a more advanced synthetic than Bishop or David.
However, Ripley 8 gets captured by a Xenomorph. When Ripley is taken to the hive, she notices that the Alien Queen had developed a uterus and has given birth to a Xenomorph with pronounced human traits. The juvenile saw Ripley as its mother and killed the Queen. Ripley made her way towards Betty but the juvenile followed. In her last attempt to save the others, a tearful Ripley killed the juvenile.
If you wish to find out what happened after the events of this film, you should check out our video titled Top 10 Paralyzingly Brutal Xenomorph Crossovers – Explored In Detail. The comics take forward the story of Ripley’s clone and Annalee Call.
Future of the Franchise
Fans would be glad to know that the new Alien TV series is going to be set on Earth instead of confined spaces and abandoned or human-less planets. Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley is the man who holds the reigns to this one, and he intends to take the series in the direction of income inequality on Earth; that would be the basic theme. Although Weyland Yutani Corporation is the big bad profit-hungry organization behind the whole menace that takes place in Alien films, we never really get to see the faces of these characters.
However, Hawley’s show will fix this one and focus on how things unfold when calamity strikes. And it will largely focus on what happens when one fails to contain the Xenomorph infestation in heavily populated regions. However, there’s not going to be any Ellen Ripley, who’s probably the most outstanding character of the franchise and one of the best survivors of film history. While not much is known about the casting, we should expect the series to release sometime around the Spring of 2022.
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