Trailer for ALIEN: EARTH released

FX has released the trailer for Alien: Earth, the first TV series based on the Aliens franchise.

The series is set in the year 2120 and opens on Neverland Research Island on Earth (this is two years before the Nostromo visits the planet LV-426 in the original movie Alien), where human-synthetic interfaces are being developed. A spacecraft has returned to Earth with five apex alien lifeforms on board, each capable of tremendous violence and destruction, crashing into Prodigy City. One of the creatures, predictably, is our favourite xenomorph, but the natures of the other three are unclear. To deal with the crisis, the Company sends in a team of synthetics to investigate further.

Alien: Earth is written and showrun by Noah Hawley, the much-feted creative force behind the TV series Fargo and Legion. It stars Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adrian Edmondson and Max Rinehart, amongst many others. Ridley Scott is producing.

The series debuts on FX and Disney+ on 12 August 2025, and will run for eight episodes.

New ALIEN movie starts shooting next week

A new Alien movie starts shooting next week, which is kind of surprising given how little fuss has been made about it.

The new Alien film is being produced by Ridley Scott, but it will actually be directed by Fede Alvarez (the reasonably well-received 2013 Evil Dead remake) from a script by his usual collaborator Rodo Sayagues. The two also worked on the 2016 horror movie Don't Breathe and last year's Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.

The film stars Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising, Mare of Easttown) and Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold), with David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu also on board.

Remarkably, we know almost nothing about the film, such as where it fits in the Alien timeline. The plot synopsis is decidedly vague:

"In this ninth entry in the immensely popular and enduring film series, a group of young people on a distant world find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe."

That does seemingly confirm the film has no crossover with Noah Hawley's incoming Alien TV show, which is set on Earth, possibly after the events of Prometheus but before Alien itself.

The synopsis is also interesting for listing eight prior Alien films: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Aliens vs. Predator (2004), Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007), Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). In its recent licensing and canon announcements, the two Aliens vs. Predator films were omitted from the Aliens canon (as suggested by Prometheus, which seemingly contradicts the events of the AvP movies) and Fox have indicated that regard the Aliens, Predator and AvP franchises as three distinct timelines and continuities.

The synopsis does sound a little disposable as a story concept, but it will be interesting to see what comes of it. The film is presumably targeting a 2024 release window.

ALIEN to get its first TV series from the showrunner of FARGO and LEGION

Fargo and Legion writer-director Noah Hawley is bringing Ridley Scott's xenomorph back to Earth.

Hawley is developing a TV series for FX which will bring the alien to Earth in the "not-too-distant future." It's unclear what this means, since the original Alien movies were set in 2122 and 2179, not too far in the future at all. Given Fox's ambivalent regard for the canonical status of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, and pretty much confirming that they do not consider the Alien vs. Predator films canon any more, it may be that the new film will be set after the events of Aliens and could see the return of the Sulaco survivors to Earth, possibly bringing xenos with them.

The alternative, a story bringing xenos to Earth in the much nearer future (perhaps tying in to Scott's Prometheus and Covenant films), would struggle with the continuity that no one has heard of the xenomorphs before in the original film.

The project is in development for a likely 2022 debut, with Hawley to write and direct and Ridley Scott in talks to produce. Scott is also developing a third film to connect Prometheus and Covenant to the original Alien, but this project has so far not been greenlit.

RIP Ian Holm

News has sadly broken that British actor Ian Holm has passed away at the age of 88.

Born in Goodmayes, Romford in the outskirts of London in 1931, Holm became interested in acting at school. He joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1949, although his studies were interrupted by National Service and a trip to the United States. He graduated from RADA in 1953 and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company upon its founding in 1960.

He made his screen debut in 1957 and became a regular, recurring face on British television. He attracted widespread notice for the first time in the 1965 BBC serialisation of The Wars of the Roses, in which he played King Richard III, and the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War, in which he played President Poincare. He continued to act on stage until 1976, when he suffered a massive bout of stage fright during a performance. Filled with anxiety by the event, he did not act again on stage for more than a decade.

Holm switched to acting exclusively on screen, starring as Napoleon in Napoleon and Love (1974), Wedderburn in The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974-75), Zerah in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Heinrich Himmler in Holocaust (1978).

In 1979 Holm appeared in his breakout role, that of the treacherous android Ash in Ridley Scott's Alien. This led to him being offered more prestigious roles, and in 1981 he played two of the more influential roles in his career. The first was as Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, for which he was nominated an Oscar and won a BAFTA. The second was as Frodo Baggins, the principle protagonist of a very lengthy BBC Radio adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Holm continued to star in films through the 1980s and 1990s, including roles in Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), Dreamchild (1985), Henry V (1989), Hamlet (1990), Naked Lunch (1991), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), The Fifth Element (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), eXistenZ (1999) and From Hell (2001). He won his second BAFTA for the TV series Game, Set and Match and also won over younger fans with his role on children's drama The Borrowers (1993). He was nominated for two Emmy Awards, for a PBS broadcast of King Lear in 1999 and the HBO TV movie The Last of the Blonde Bombshells in 2001.

Holm returned to Middle-earth in 2001, when he starred as Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson had been a major fan of the BBC Radio adaptation in which Holm had played the younger Frodo and specifically asked him to take on the role. The film was notable as it was the first time that Holm acted on screen with fellow Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen, whom he'd known socially through the scene for decades. McKellen was impressed by Holm's process, which involved carefully selecting a different emotional register for each take to give the director more options to choose from in the editing room, something McKellen had never considered before. Holm returned to the role in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), appearing in a framing device in the latter two movies whilst Bilbo's younger incarnation was played by Martin Freeman.

His success in the Lord of the Rings trilogy saw a late-career renaissance, and he appeared in films including The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Garden State (2004), The Aviator (2004) and Lord of War (2005). Facing health issues - he successfully fought off prostate cancer in 2001 and used a wheelchair during his last few years - he switched to voice roles, narrating the TV documentary series Horizon from 2005 to 2008 and playing Skinner in the Pixar movie Ratatouille (2007), as well as providing the narration for the TV documentary series 1066 (2009). However, professional courtesy saw him return to the role of Bilbo Baggins for the Hobbit trilogy.

Perhaps fittingly, Holm's last acting credit saw him return to the job that made him famous, by reprising the role of Ash for the video game Alien: Isolation in 2014.

Ian Holm was a mainstay of British television, theatre and film for half a century. Rarely the star, he was a reliable and committed performer who excelled as the hero, the sidekick, the mentor or the villain. He is survived by his fourth wife, five children and a grandson. He will very much be missed.

Alien: Isolation

It is 2137. Fifteen years ago, Amanda Ripley's mother, Ellen, disappeared along with her entire crew and her ship, the mining vessel Nostromo. Amanda has become a skilled engineer, but is still upset by the mystery. The Company recruits her to join a mission to Sevastapol, a Seegson Corporation space station. According to reports, the Nostromo's flight recorder has been found and taken to the station. Arriving on board, Amanda finds a station in chaos, different sections sealed off and the surviving crewmembers rendered paranoid and distrustful of one another. With androids running amok and systems failing, Amanda has her work cut out...before she discovers something else is on board.

Over the decades, many video games either inspired by or directly based on the Alien franchise have been released. Almost uniformly, they have taken either Aliens or Alien vs. Predator as their inspiration, featuring high-octane combat against the xenomorphs. Some of these games have been great fun (others not so much), but the one thing they've mostly had in common is feeling like generic action games with an Alien skin slapped over the top.

Isolation is the first modern game to take the original Alien as its inspiration. The main character, Amanda, is a resourceful engineer and fixer, but she is not a colonial marine and she is not a Predator equipped with plasma weapons and smart targeting systems. She is an extremely fragile human who finds herself up against not just other humans and deranged androids, but also a single xenomorph. Single xenomorphs may not be much threat to heavily-armoured and armed soldiers, but on a space station where the most powerful weapon is a rather old shotgun, it is a virtual god of terror, striking from the shadows at will to snag the unwary.

Alien: Isolation lays its claim to be the scariest video game ever made early on. After an introductory couple of levels largely free of danger, the designers release the xenomorph into the game space and let it and its AI do its own thing. Apart from a couple of cut scenes, the alien is allowed to traverse levels the same way the player does (except it has access to air ducts running through the ceiling and floor, which the player rarely does), responding to sounds, visual cues and threats with lethal force. As the player, you're trying to make your way through office spaces, engineering decks and medical wings, repairing damaged systems, recovering data logs or assembling equipment that is needed for your survival, with the constant threat of the alien striking at any moment.

You pick up a motion tracker early on which can tell you if the alien is nearby, although only if it is moving: on several occasions I saw no movement in the vicinity and walked confidently around the corner only to find the xenomorph lying in wait for me. As the game progresses you do gain other equipment, such as noise-makers which you can lob past the alien to try to get it to stop blocking a hatchway, and even a flamethrower which can singe it enough to make it retreat. There is no way to kill or even significantly injure the alien, though, and it remains a semi-constant threat throughout.

It's not the only problem in town, though. There are androids malfunctioning, which you can kill or sometimes trick the alien into destroying, but for the most part are best avoided. There are also other human survivors who can be killed in combat, but again this is undesirable because the noise of gunshots often lures the alien into the vicinity. Finding a bunch of clear arsehole survivors and luring the xenomorph into tearing through them can be satisfying, although less so when they're clearly people just trying to get by, like you.

For several hours, Alien: Isolation succeeds in its dual claim to be the scariest video game ever made and the best Alien game ever made (and perhaps the best single entry in the Alien franchise to date, barring only Alien and Aliens). You have to carefully weigh your options and choices on how you proceed, what tactics you will employ to avoid the xenomorph and how carefully you are going to approach you objectives. Even a decision like saving the game has to be considered carefully: it takes several seconds to save your game at dedicated computer stations, during which time you can be attacked. Save points are spaced out widely enough to encourage saving whenever possible, but the fact you have only two save slots means you don't want to waste a slot on one where you're just about to have your face gnawed off by the xenomorph (the game does create an auto-save at the start of every mission, thankfully). This even extends to reading plot-sensitive information on computer consoles or undertaking vital repair work. The game never pauses outside of the menu screen, making even the smallest decision hugely consequential.

This mix of horror and paranoia continues to be devastatingly effective for quite some time, helped by changes of pace such as missions focused more on the androids with the xenomorph sealed out of the area, but the paradigm of competing low-grade tasks whilst avoiding air vents surrounded by drool never entirely goes away. Which is when the game starts to become problematic.

At seven or eight hours of gut-wrenching terror, Alien: Isolation would have been an outstanding experience and it could have walked off with five full stars and a classic rating. But when you're past that point and still not even halfway through the game, it starts to become a little bit wearying. For a lot of players the game abruptly changes in tone when you hit The Moment. The Moment comes at a different point for different players (and a lucky few never experience it at all), but when it comes the game's tension instantly leaks out of it like a burst balloon. It might be when you walk around a corner and find the alien apparently trying to walk through a solid table. Or it might be when cowering under a table to find the alien trapped in an endless loop of climbing up into a vent and then down again ten feet away, again and again. In my case it was encountering the alien in a ventilation shaft with zero warning or ability to avoid it and instead of jumping in terror I uttered an exasperated, "Oh, come on," and hitting reload before it even attacked.

When The Moment comes, the xenomorph stops being a creature of terror and becomes an over-familiar video game obstacle, one that sometimes kills you completely arbitrarily rather than because you do anything wrong. After this point the game never really recovers, with players starting to brute-force their way through sections through repetition or going to the extreme of editing game files to remove the alien altogether (which seems completely against the spirit of the thing to me), or even quitting altogether. The alien's AI is superb but it's still video game AI which can glitch out or sometimes behave in a manner that will have you suspecting foul play (despite the designers' strenuous denials that the alien AI ever teleports or knows where the player is when it shouldn't).

There's also the problem that once the alien stops being a subject of terror, it becomes more of an inconvenience to enjoying the absolutely stunning, exceptional art design. The 1970s retro-styled Sevastopol Station is simply one of the best video game environments ever created, a clear rival to BioShock's Rapture or Half-Life's Black Mesa, a place where it's sometimes enjoyable just to walk around and enjoy the sights, which obviously you can't do when potential death literally lurks around every corner.

At around 20 hours in length, Alien: Isolation not only outstays its welcome, but it turns into a guy you barely know who shows up at the party, is a delight for a few hours, then has too much to drink and has to stay the night on the sofa, then next day has a breakdown and confesses they've been thrown out of their house and you are trying to be supportive but also kind of just want them to go somewhere, anywhere else. When the final credits kick in on Alien: Isolation, the feeling isn't of triumph but of survival, not of the long-departed terror of the alien but the encroaching weariness of the sheer size of the game (not helped by levels where you have to backtrack through areas you've already explored earlier on) and the realisation that once you get over the horror elements, it's really an extended number of fetch quests.

Ironically, Alien: Isolation (***½) mirrors the evolution of the Alien series itself: a brilliant, thrilling idea which is mind-blowingly effective but then keeps going and going long after it would have made more sense to stop, and the terror of the alien gives way to apathy due to overexposure. But for those first few hours, this is one of the best video games ever made, and you may find the game's atmosphere and power works much better for you in the longer run than it did for me. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Wertzone Classics: Aliens

Gateway Station, 2179. Rescued after spending fifty-seven years frozen in deep sleep, Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, is horrified when her reports of the lethal xenomorph that wiped out her crew are dismissed as mental delusions. She is even more horrified to learn that the planet where they found the alien is now home to a bustling colony. When all contact with the colony is lost, the Colonial Marines are called in to investigate with a huge amount of state-of-the-art firepower and Ripley is offered the chance to put the horror to rest...or unleash a new one.

Even in 1986, Alien was an acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction and horror cinema. The idea of creating a sequel to it felt like a risk, especially when the job fell to a relatively young Canadian film-maker with only a single proper movie to his name. Fortunately, the film-maker was James Cameron and the previous film on his CV was The Terminator, marking him as a promising director to watch.

Aliens more than fulfilled that promise. Arguably the strongest film in the franchise and much less-arguably one of the greatest action SF movies ever made, Aliens is that rare film which is near-flawlessly executed. The cast is fantastic, the writing is tight and the effects are impressive whilst informing and reinforcing the story and its themes of PTSD, cultural alienation, motherhood and family.

It's this attention to the film's psychological angle as well as the more superficial elements of action and explosions which makes it tick, and is something that Cameron exploits well in most of his films. Ripley was just one crewmember on the Nostromo, her late emergence as the main protagonist meaning we didn't get to know her very well. The sequel rectifies that in spades, revealing that she had a daughter (now deceased) and a home life which the xenomorph took away from her forever, as well as preventing her from ever getting a good's night's sleep again. Cameron also layers the film with a surprisingly robust layer of realism: Ripley for very obvious reasons doesn't want to go anywhere near the alien ever again, but just knowing that the ship and its thousands of eggs are still on LV-426 is enough to cause her to experience terror, justifying her decision to go back.

There is a robust intelligence to Aliens which is, quite simply, largely missing from most modern films and TV shows. The marines react fairly realistically to the situations they find themselves in, the characters react with logic to the tactical disadvantage they are in and the aliens' reluctance to attack the facility en masse is explained by their own limited numbers (there are only about a hundred aliens, as there were only a hundred colonists on the planet to be impregnated) and the steps taken to keep them in check, such as the sentry guns and the humans' weapons which can kill them with relative ease. Aliens delivers both a cathartic power fantasy - Ripley and her comrades blow away dozens of xenomorphs when just one wiped out her entire crew in the first film - but also a fragile one, as when the marines are picked off (mostly through logic than them acting like idiots) and the main characters suffer serious reversals. There is an integrity to Aliens' script and its respect for the intelligence of the audience that should be included in every basic scriptwriting class in Hollywood.

Which isn't to say that Aliens is all logic and themes. It brings a huge amount of action carnage to the table, with jaw-dropping set pieces following in at times dizzying succession. The marines trade quips and insults with lived-in believability. The cast, from Sigourney Weaver's multi-faceted Ripley to Bill Paxton's blustering Hudson to Michael Biehn's stoic Hicks and Lance Henriksen's earnest Bishop - is uniformly brilliant, from the bit-part marines who might as well be wearing red shirts up to the main stars. The production design, mixing Alien's industrial aesthetic with a sleeker, slightly more futuristic office chic, is impressive. James Horner's soundtrack starts off minimalist and restrained but later goes into speaker-straining bombast, but always in a way that reinforces the action. Even the film's sound effects are iconic, from the dread-inducing beeping of the motion trackers to the distinctive fire of the pulse rifles to the organic terror of an egg opening.

Trying to identify a weak point in Aliens (*****) is difficult. Arguably the Director's Cut addition of scenes set in the pre-carnage colony undercuts the later tension by showing the colonists finding the crashed ship, but seeing the fully-lit and inhabited colony in "normal" mode and Newt before she becomes a catatonic mess does add more pathos to events later on. Perhaps the idea that no human crewmembers would remain on the Sulaco when the operation starts is a little too convenient. These are really minor issues, though, and should not detract from the film's place in the canon of SF classics. Aliens is a masterpiece of both horror and SF action.

A note on edition: there are numerous editions of the Aliens movies available. Probably the best is the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray box set, which features both the original cinematic editions and extended versions of all four main-series Aliens movies, complete with tons of special features. This is available now in the UK and USA.

Wertzone Classics: Alien

In the year 2122, the deep space freighter Nostromo is diverted to Zeta Reticuli to investigate a beacon of unknown, possibly extraterrestrial, origin. The crew find an enormous derelict spacecraft, its cargo hold filled with eggs. A strange parasite attaches itself to one of the crew, beginning a nightmarish journey for the rest.

Reviewing Alien at this point is akin to reviewing the Bible, or Harry Potter: you've probably already digested it and can recite it line for line, or you've already decided it's not for you and you're probably not going to get round to checking it out.

For the minuscule number of people still on the fence, Alien more than deserves its reputation as a slow-burning masterclass in tension and pacing. Whether it's Ridley Scott's greatest masterpiece or not can remain the subject of hot debate (with at least Blade Runner making a convincing case not), but it's certainly up there in importance.

The film has numerous strengths: the industrial, low-fi sets and aesthetic were revolutionary for its day and remain impressive today. The characters are somewhat lightly sketched but the actors inhabiting them are so good that it doesn't matter, and they bring them to life with, in some cases, just a few lines of dialogue in the whole film. One of the film's more underrated aspects is that Scott doesn't let the camera linger on any one character too long, meaning that even identifying the film's protagonist and most likely survivor is extremely difficult (at least not without pre-knowledge about the franchise, which is almost impossible to avoid today), greatly increasing the film's tension.

The design of the xenomorph (courtesy of macabre artist extraordinaire H.R. Giger) remains nightmarish and striking, although it has to be said that the suit doesn't quite survive scrutiny in the high-definition era (particularly the chase sequence in the ventilation ducts). Fortunately, this was a concern of Scott's even in 1979 and the creature is wisely kept in the shadows and on the edges of the frame in most cases, so the "man in a suit" issue doesn't really come up.

The film is also very well-paced, with the tension building over the opening section of the movie and the alien kept firmly off-screen until the second half. The idea of the creature stalking the air ducts and hiding in the ceiling fills scenes with a near-visceral sense of dread, so powerful that Creative Assembly achieved tremendous success in copying the format for their 2014 video game Alien Isolation. Scott's use of lighting and camera angles is masterful.

The film does have a few minor blemishes. The model work is pretty ropy, which a few years earlier it could have gotten away with. But filmed a year after the release of Star Wars and having a comparable budget, there really isn't any excuse for the often-underwhelming establishing shots of the Nostromo (even more disappointing given how fantastic the design is), which at their weakest have a little bit of the feel of Blake's 7 to them. However, Alien is not supposed to be a special effects extravaganza and the low-fi feel to the effects does help with the old-school horror vibe of the film. I've also never been a fan of Alien's soundtrack: the main, stripped-back theme is fine but the incidental music throughout the film often feels incongruous (and well below-par for Jerry Goldsmith) and at times disrupts the film's atmosphere.

Minor criticisms aside, tremendous tension, expert pacing and finely-judged performances combine to make Alien (****½) one of the greatest science fiction horror hybrids of all time. There are a few cracks where it's starting to show it age, but overall this is a very strong movie.

A note on edition: there are numerous editions of the Aliens movies available. Probably the best is the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray box set, which features both the original cinematic editions and extended versions of all four main-series Aliens movies, complete with tons of special features. This is available now in the UK and USA.

Alien: Covenant

December 2104. The colony ship Covenant is on its way to Origae-VI to establish a new settlement. A neutrino burst damages the ship in interstellar space and kills several crewmembers in hypersleep. Awoken by the ship's synthetic, Walter, the crew effect repairs and discover a signal emanating from a nearby star system, from a planet that is a much closer match for colonisation. Arriving on the planet, the crew find signs of life...and an answer to a mystery from a decade earlier.

Alien: Covenant is Ridley Scott's sequel to his 2012 movie Prometheus, itself a semi-prequel/semi-spin-off from his 1979 horror masterpiece Alien. As the titles suggest, Prometheus was much more of a stand-alone movie sharing some DNA with the rest of the franchise but not focusing on the titular creature. Covenant instead brings back the traditional xenomorph and establishes how it was created, whilst resolving some of the questions left dangling from Prometheus.

The result is an interesting hybrid movie which feels like it's trying to do several things simultaneously. It's trying to be an action-horror movie in its own right, a sequel to the more weighty concerns in Prometheus and a prequel to the events of the original movie. Considering a prequel to the original movie, let alone two, was never narratively necessary, this was an controversial decision, but one that ultimately pays off.

Covenant has a familiar set-up: a starship picks up a distress call and diverts to investigate, finding a ruined alien ship harbouring something nasty, something which can infect humans and turn them into the incubators for monstrous creations. Things quickly go wrong and mayhem results. The film borrows its basic structure from Alien, although it does mix the ingredients up to keep things more unpredictable without descending into the sheer randomness of Prometheus.

What helps keep all of this intriguing is that Ridley Scott is, even at the tail end of his career, still a masterful director with a tremendous sense of visual power and a strong design aesthetic. The Covenant and the various locations in the film are all impressive pieces of design, if less striking than Prometheus. Scott can also build tension like few other directors. This time around he's helped by a script which doesn't rely on the characters being quite as monumentally stupid as the ones in Prometheus, based on the fact these guys are engineers and colonists having to work way out of their comfort zones, rather than the alleged first contact specialists and biologists of the previous movie.

The film is paced pretty well, with the action unfolding continuously from the landing on the planet to the final confrontation with the creature, and handles a distinct shift in storytelling when David, the android from Prometheus, shows up and effectively shoehorns a follow-up story from that movie into the middle of this more traditional Alien tale. Mostly propelled by Michael Fassbender's superb performance (as both David and the Covenant's synthetic of the same class, Walter), this actually works to the film's benefit, providing a shift of pace and perspective which changes things up and keeps things fresh even as we begin to move away from the focus of Prometheus (the Engineers and the black goo-ex-machina) and back towards the franchise's star creature.

The final part of the movie - the human crewmembers versus the xenomorph with the androids serving as wild cards - is a bit more standardand and you can feel Scott checking out a little bit in the final battle with the creature in the Covenant's hanger bay (which viewers familiar with both Alien and Aliens may find dully predictable), but it's all well-handled. Less forgivable is a blatant sequel hook which, given Covenant's modest box office performance, may have been a bit optimistic. As it stands there's still a lot of unanswered questions on how the events of Prometheus and Covenant lead into Alien, but some of the revelations in Covenant make this perhaps a more interesting question than it appeared from Prometheus alone.

Most of the cast are pretty good, with a surprisingly effective dramatic turn for Danny McBride and a strong leading performance with Katherine Waterston, with a good supporting turn by Billy Crudup. Fassbender with his dual roles steals the film, however, providing an icy new antagonist for a franchise that urgently needed one, having all but burned out the threat level of the xenomoph through over-exposure.

Alien: Covenant (****) is an effective action-horror movie which overcomes over-familiarity with some excellent performances and superb direction and design work, although the soundtrack is at best forgettable. Stronger than Prometheus, if not on the same level as Alien and Aliens, it shows there is some life left in this franchise. The film is available now on Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

RIP John Hurt

Acclaimed British actor John Hurt has sadly passed away at the age of 77.

John Hurt had many, many impressive and famous roles, of genre interest and not, in a career spanning six decades. He first rose to note in the role of Richard Rich in A Man For All Seasons (1966), followed by playing Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant (1975), the Emperor Caligula in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius (1976) and John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980), the film that brought himself and director David Lynch international fame.

Just before that he played the role of Kane in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), gaining the honour of being the first-ever victim of the alien monstrosity. Arguably, this is the single most memorable screen death scene in the history of cinema. In Mel Brooks's Spaceballs (1987) he reprised the role, with the killer line "Oh no! Not again!"

He also gained acclaim for his role as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and as a voice actor, playing Hazel in Watership Down (1978) and Aragorn, son of Arathorn, in Ralph Bakshi's animated version of The Lord of the Rings (1978). He also portrayed the voice of the Great Dragon in the BBC TV series Merlin from 2008 to 2012, and provided the opening narration for every episode. He also had a memorable turn in the Jim Henson series The Storyteller (1988) as the titular character.

A lengthy career on stage, television and in film followed, with him gaining a whole new fanbase when he played the role of Mr. Ollivander in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (2011). Additional roles followed in Hellboy (2004), V For Vendetta (2006) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

In 2013 John Hurt achieved an impressive distinction when he was cast in Doctor Who. He portrayed the "War Doctor", a hitherto unknown incarnation of the Doctor that existed between the Eighth and Ninth incarnations, revealed as part of the show's 50th anniversary celebrations. He has since reprised the role for three audio plays, with a fourth due for release next month. In doing so he became the twelfth actor to portray the role on television, and sadly now the fourth television actor to play the role to pass away.

John Hurt was one of Britain's very finest actors, noted for his varied, nuanced performances and his equal capability with drama, tragedy and comedy. He will be very much missed.

ALIEN: COVENANT trailer analysis

20th Century Fox have dropped the first R-rated trailer for Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott's upcoming new film in the Alien franchise. This movie acts as a sequel to Prometheus and a prequel to the original Alien.

Set in 2104, almost eleven years after the events of Prometheus and eighteen years before Alien, the film sees the starship Covenant sent to colonise a distant, habitable planet that the Weyland-Yutani Company has discovered. Upon arrival, the landing party is infected by some kind of spore and mayhem results. The Engineer starship from Prometheus is soon found on the planet and it is confirmed that the android David and Noomi Rapace's character of Elizabeth Shaw will both return from the earlier movie.

Hazarding a guess, I'd say that David and Shaw reached the Engineer homeworld and discovered it had been wiped out by the "black goo" genetic engineering experiments run amok. David and Shaw sent out a distress call that the Company received, resulting in them sending a rescue mission under the cover of being a colonisation expedition. I suspect the real mission will be known only to Walter, the David-type android on the Covenant, and maybe the captain.

The movie appears to have deviated from the original plan. Ridley Scott's original Prometheus II concept would have picked up shortly after the events of Prometheus and followed David and Shaw to the Engineer homeworld, with a later film more directly linking to the events of Alien. My guess is that 20th Century Fox decided to skip that movie and what we're seeing with Covenant is more the plot of the originally-planned third film. The fact that the familiar xenomorph is in this movie (along with a spine-shredding variant known as the "neomorph") adds to that possibility.

If this movie does well, there would appear to be scope for one more prequel movie (leading directly into the events of Alien, explaining what that Engineer ship was doing on LV-426) and then presumably we'd get Neil Blomkamp's Alien 5 project, which has been put on hold whilst Ridley Scott does his thing.

The Cats of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Many years ago, the great and incomparable Terry Pratchett uttered a truthism: 

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realise what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."

He also said:

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."

It does explain a lot.

Cats have been human companions for almost ten thousand years, and only dogs have been human companions for longer. This is probably why science fiction and fantasy authors tend to assume that in the future there will still be cats around, and even fantasy worlds with a ton of non-human races will also have cats showing up. Anthropomorphised cats - usually alien and fantasy races based on cats, but sometimes magically-transformed actual cats - are also commonly found in the genre. So I thought it'd be interesting to put together a greatest hits collection of cats in science fiction and fantasy (and yes, we do dogs as well).

Greebo, the lord and master of all feline activity in the Kingdom of Lancre.

The greatest - and certainly smelliest - cat in the history of genre fiction is Greebo, the cat/familiar of Nanny Ogg, one of the witches of Lancre. Greebo is old, scarred from a thousand battles and incapable of backing down from anything. Greebo is an unrepentant sex pest of a cat, having fathered definitely hundreds and potentially thousands of kittens across the kingdom. Possessed of an uncanny intelligence and the combat nous of a barbarian warlord, Greebo is noted for having killed at least two vampires in battle, near-mortally wounded an elf warrior, surprised a she-bear and chased a wolf up a tree. In fact Greebo has only lost an engagement once, when he chased a vixen into her den where her cubs were located. However, it is hinted that Greebo's mastery of battle is a result of him knowing when to fight and when not to: when confronted by Legba, the black cockerel of the voodoo witch Mrs. Gogol, he immediately backed down.

Greebo will not suffer to be touched by anyone other than Nanny Ogg, who, despite her normally formidable powers of observation and good judgement of character, remains convinced that he is a fluffy and friendly kitten rather than a furball of nightmares who is still wanted for crimes committed across the Disc, incurred when the witches travelled across the continent to Genua and then back again. In Genua Greebo was briefly transformed into human form. In this form he was six feet tall, well-muscled, with a mane of black hair and clad in form-fitting leather, along with an eyepatch over his bad eye. He exuded a kind of "greasy, diabolic sexuality". Fortunately he was returned to cat form before tremendous damage was wreaked on the population of Genua.

Greebo once furthered the cause of quantum science when, through experimentation, confirmed that a cat, upon being left in a box for an extended period of time, could in fact exist in one of three potential states: Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. Upon the box being opened, the quantum waveform collapsed into one outcome, to whit, Greebo bit the face off the elf opening the box.

Greebo, of course, is the true star of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and plays a substantial role in Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum and Wintersmith.

 

Having lived for circa 60 years, Jones might be the longest-lived cat in history in the Alien continuity.

Jones, the rat-catcher of the deep space mining vessel Nostromo, is a survivor. In fact, in the current Alien canon, he's sole crewmember of the Nostromo not to get killed by the xenomorph (it even got Ripley in the end). He also has the sense to stay at home in Aliens when Ripley zooms off to engage the xenomorphs on LV-426. Neill Blomkmap's off-on again Alien 5 will apparently eject both Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from continuity but I suspect Jones will have long since moved on to the furry cat home in the sky.

Even Frankenstein knew that his slobby owner's plan to retire to Fiji to raise sheep and horses was moronic.

Frankenstein is a small black cat born on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Dave Lister, the lowest-ranking crewperson on the mining ship Red Dwarf, buys her to alleviate boredom. Horrified at the discovery there is an unquarantined animal on board, Captain Hollister orders Lister to turn over the cat so it can be cut up and dissected. When he refuses to promise to put the cat back together again afterwards, Lister refuses and is put in temporal stasis for the rest of the trip, forfeiting eighteen months pay (in the novel continuity Lister does this deliberately so he can get back to Earth faster). Unfortunately, a lethal radiation leak wipes out the crew and forces the ship's AI, Holly, to take the vessel into deep space until the radiation danger has passed...which takes three million years. When Lister wakes up, he finds himself quite possibly the last surviving human being in the entire universe. The only other living humanoid on board is a bipedal descendant of Frankenstein's kittens, known simply as "Cat", a vain and preening creature who can't maintain his concentration on anything other than sleeping or eating for more than five minutes.

Cats have played a key role in many SFF stories, but for Red Dwarf  (which returns for its eleventh season next month) they basically provide the very rationale for the show's existence and underpin its premise, which is pretty good going.

Kittenbus, the younger - and somewhat less nightmare-inducing - form of a Catbus.

The Catbus is an outrageously cute/despair-inducingly disturbing (delete as appropriate) form of conveyance from the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro and its short spin-off, Mei and the Kittenbus. It's a giant cat with many legs which has been hollowed out (urgh) and turned into a vehicle, with its eyes serving as giant headlights and a permanent, rictus-like grin jammed onto its face and unleashing a haunting "miaow" in lieu of beeping a horn. It reminds me a bit of that stuffed dead cat that got turned into a drone. Younger catbuses (catbusi?) are known as kittenbuses, but are only big enough for a single child passenger.

Slag, the ship's cat of the airship Ketty Jay, as realised by Anjakes on DeviantArt.

If there was one thing missing from Firefly, as I'm sure everyone knows, it was a cat. That kind of low-down cargo ship was crying out for a ship's cat to get all up in everyone's business. However, Joss Whedon was probably enough of an old hand at Hollywood to know that trying to get a cat to act on-screen is an exercise in futility. Books, of course, have no such limitations and Chris Wooding's excellent saga The Tales of the Ketty Jay (which is basically a steampunk Firefly in a totally non-derivative and equally-awesome kind of way) features a feline crewmember of the good airship. Slag is an old cat, fond of catching rats and loyal (in a relaxed kind of way) to his crewmen. Part of the genius of the books is that we regularly get chapters told from Slag's perspective and the cat actually gets his own character arc throughout all four books. Slag is an ever-present character in the series very few of the other cats in this list are, which an impressive and surprisngly non-mawkish achievement.

The cover designer clearly went to town on this one.

Pixel is a timeline-hopping cat who appears in the novels The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein. The cat has the inexplicable ability to pass through solid matter, apparently a result of its "inability to know any better". At one point the cat gains the ability to talk.

Sir Pounce-a-Lot and Anders (before going psycho), by Morteraphan on DeviantArt.

Ser Pounce-a-Lot is a cat who appears in the Dragon Age video games from BioWare. He debuts in Awakenings, the expansion to the original Dragon Age: Origins, as a small kitten. The Warden (the player-character) can give the kitten to his follower Anders as a gift. Anders raises the kitten to adulthood, occasionally producing it to talk to during idle moments. The cat can be deployed in battle as a means of healing the party mid-combat, although how logically this is achieved is never explained.

In Dragon Age II a rather grumpy Anders will confirm that he had to relinquish the cat at the behest of his fellow Grey Wardens after finding it distracted him. It is possible that this lack of feline affection contributed to his brutally ruthless decision to declare war on the templars at the end of the game. To the annoyance of fans, Sir Pounce-a-Lot likewise failed to reappear in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Some fans theorise that Dragon Age IV may feature Anders and Sir Pounce reunited as a battle-hardened adventuring duo stalking the wilds of Thedas.

Spot was a particularly resilient and hardy space-travelling cat who served with distinction on two of the Federation starships to bear the name Enterprise.

Spot is an interstellar feline and crewmember of the Galaxy-class starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). Spot is adopted by android crewmember Lt. Commander Data as part of his ongoing attempts to understand humanity. Data's attempts to train Spot backfired when he inadvertently discovered the cat had instead trained him to feed and pet her upon command. Spot was noted for her calmness under pressure, at one point being transformed into an iguana with no after-effects. At one point Spot gave birth to a litter of kittens. Spot was noted for her intolerance of people she didn't like, unprovokedly attacking both Riker and La Forge. Apart from Data, she was only affectionate towards Lt. Reginald Barclay. She and Worf developed a mutual dislike for one another, but following Data's destruction in the battle with Shinzon Worf reluctantly agreed to adopt the animal. Later he cited the then-aged cat as having a "true warrior's spirit" hidden behind a facade of lazy indolence.

Spot appeared regularly in Seasons 4-7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as the movies Generations and Nemesis.

Data once wrote a poem about the cat, Ode to Spot, which follows in its entirety:

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

 Spot's reaction to the poem is not known.

The Cat That Launched A Thousand Memes.

Lying Cat (a recurring character in comic book series Saga) is a very large feline and constant companion to the bounty hunter known as the Will. Lying Cat shares most common feline traits, but her size makes her formidable in combat. Lying Cat's most distinguishing feature is the ability to tell when someone is lying. Upon detecting deceit, the cat will simply growl, "Lying". This includes even when people are lying to themselves about some kind of emotional distress. One drawback to this power is that the cat will say it even if the person lying is her owner/partner, the Will.

Mrs. Norris and her master, a rare example of cat-and-human team villainy in SFF.

Mrs. Norris is the pet cat of Argus Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The cat is grumpy and ill-tempered, like its owner, and possesses a strong bond with him, apparently able to alert him to any misbehaving children in the school grounds. The cat was briefly petrified by the Serpent of Slytherin, but later made a full recovery (although some claim her mood was worsened by this incident).

Mrs. Norris is, unusually for SFF, an antagonistic cat. She appears in the Harry Potter novels and movies. Some fans theorised that Mrs. Norris had some kind of magical bond with Filch but J.K. Rowling confirmed she is merely a normal - if nasty - feline.

Balerion, a cat with all the attitude, self-confidence and unreasoning love of violence of Gregor Clegane.

Balerion the Black Dread was the greatest dragon in the history of Westeros, a terrifying monster that helped its rider, King Aegon Targaryen, conquer an entire continent.

Three hundred years later, its namesake prowled the halls of the Red Keep in King's Landing. Originally a sweet kitten owned by Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the cat seems to have not borne the death of his mistress (brutally killed during the Sack of King's Landing) very well. It had a torn ear (some fans theorise sustained during the Sack) and a disposition that was less "mean" and closer to "psychotically vicious". Perfectly willing to attack and kill even the largest crows and ravens in the rookery (to the despair of Grand Maester Pycelle), the cat is a legend in the Red Keep. He once stole into the dinner hall and snatched a quail out of the hand of Lord Tywin Lannister, a feat which earned the cat the respect of Robert Baratheon. The cat later evaded capture at the hands of Arya Stark (whilst being trained in water-dancing by Syrio Forel) and bullied the kittens belonging to Tommen Baratheon before being run off. At about twenty years old, the cat's belligerence shows no sign of abating.

Balerion, of course, is one of the more memorable animal characters of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. Although Rhaenys's kitten and the black monster of the novels are not 100% confirmed to be the same cat, various official artwork and George R.R. Martin's comments suggest they are.

Haviland Tuf, a man who distrusts humanity and prefers the company of felines.

Dax is the genetically-enhanced master feline of the interstellar seedship Ark. Created by Haviland Tuf, the cat is notably larger than most felines and has formidable psi powers, capable of detecting subterfuge and deception and alerting his owner to any risks present. Dax is the largest and most capable of a number of cats living on the Ark, most of whom defer to his superiority.

Dax is another feline of George R.R. Martin's creation, being a notable character in his 1986 SF novel Tuf Voyaging.

There are, of course, too many cats in SFF to count in one article. Other notable examples include:

• Mogget, from the Sabriel novels.
• Isis, Gary Seven's shapeshifting cat from the classic Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth!
• The Amazing Maurice from Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
• Rowl, from Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass.
• Mister, from The Dresden Files.
• Tailchaser from the classic Tad Williams novel Tailchaser's Song.
• Spangle, from Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward.
• Lady May, from Cordwainer Smith's Game of Rat and Dragon.
• Bast from Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
• Sir Pounce, also from A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.
• Mr. Bigglesworth, Dr. Evil's evil cat, from the Austin Powers movies.
• Baudelaire from Phantom 2040.
• Petronius Arbiter, also from the works of Robert Heinlein.
• Zap the Cat from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.
• Orion from Men in Black.
• Lylan from Lloyd Alexander's Castle of Llyr.
• The cigarette-smoking mutant cat of Transmetropolitan.
• Musty, the cat of the witch Rhea of Coos, in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
• In a similar vein, Churchill from Pet Semetary.
• And the cats of Earth when they appear in the Dreaming, in Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Cat-inspired races are also common in the genre. Notable examples include: the Kzinti of Larry Niven's Known Space novels, the (almost certainly Kzinti-inspired) Kilrathi of the Wing Commander video games, the Caitians of Star Trek (most notably regular crewmember Lt. M'Ress in Star Trek: The Animated Series) and the Khajit of The Elder Scrolls ("Khajit has wares if you have coin").

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Ridley Scott confuses everyone with PROMETHEUS sequel

Ridley Scott has made a series of somewhat odd comments about the upcoming sequel to Prometheus, his 2012 quasi-prequel to Alien.

Prometheus 2 is still due to go into production in February 2016 and will see Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender reprise their roles as Elizabeth Shaw and the android David. At the end of Prometheus they stole an alien starship and set out to find the homeworld of the Engineers and somehow stop them from destroying Earth. In the meantime, a horrendous and almost-familiar alien creature had come into being on LV-223, although with no food around and no more people or Engineers, presumably its chances for long-term survival are bleak.

Scott had previously said there would be a trilogy of films in this series and the last film would tie in with the original Alien, presumably explaining why the Engineer starship carrying hundreds of facehugger eggs ended up crashed on LV-426, as we see it at the start of Alien. The middle film in the saga would have the fewest connections to the rest of the Aliens universe, focusing as it likely does on the Engineers and their backstory.

Scott doubled down on this last week, confirming that Prometheus 2 would not feature the traditional xenomorph at all (not even in the very brief and ambiguous way the original did in its closing moments) and we'd have to wait until Prometheus 3...or Prometheus 4, although knowing Scott's sense of humour he may have been taking the mickey out of fans with that last statement.

Today, just to confuse everyone further, Scott announced that Prometheus 2 will in fact now be called Alien: Paradise Lost. Erm.

There are several explanations here. The most likely is that Fox has decided it wants to use a brand name to "universify" the Alien franchise in the same way Marvel have with their films and Disney has with Star Wars, with lots of films in the same universe even if some are connected only tangentially. Fox are also developing a new core Alien film with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn), to be directed by Neill Blomkamp. Although it has the working title Alien 5, this other film seems likely to jettison Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from continuity and pick up instead twenty years or so after the events of Aliens. Some of Blomkamp's concept art for the film shows an Engineer starship being dissected by humans (possibly from the Weyland-Yutani Company), so it might be that Alien 5 and Paradise Lost will yet find a way of tying into one another. Or it might just be a bit of branding, and we may even see the first film retitled Alien: Prometheus for some future re-release.

Some thoughts on how Prometheus and Alien tie into one another can be found here.

New ALIEN film confirmed

20th Century Fox have commissioned director Neill Blomkamp to work on a new Alien film. The director of District 9, Elysium and Chappie had hinted he was working on ideas for a new film in the franchise a few months ago.

The new project is proceeding simultaneously alongside Ridley Scott's Prometheus II. Scott had previously suggested that the sequel to Prometheus would move away from even the vague connections to the xenomorphs the original film had in favour of the mythology and backstory of the Engineers. Whilst Fox is okay with this - Prometheus grossed almost half a billion dollars at the box office - they also seem to want to continue the core Alien franchise at the same time.

Little is known about the new film, although in Blomkamp's concept art it appears he was considering a 'proper' Alien 5 with Sigourney Weaver and possibly even Michael Biehn reappearing in their roles as Ripley and Hicks. The fact that Hicks died (controversially off-screen) in Alien 3 has hinted that Biehn might be following Scott's idea that none of the films after Aliens should be considered canon. I can't see Fox entirely being happy with that (it would remove no less than four films from the canon) unless they thought it would make them a ton of cash.

If work is only starting now, it's unlikely we will see Alien 5 before late 2017 or early 2018 at the earliest. This would make for easily the longest gap in the main series since the franchise started in 1979. It remains to be seen if Blomkamp can breathe some new life into this increasingly tired foe.

Filling the blanks: tying PROMETHEUS to ALIEN

Ridley Scott's new movie Prometheus has won a fair amount of critical acclaim (though a more mixed general reception) and an impressive opening week's worth of money, but it's also left a lot of people pondering over the precise relationship between the movie and Alien, to which it acts as a sort-of prequel. Through careful research (i.e. googling interviews) the following clarifications can be made:

NOTE: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR PROMETHEUS, ALIEN AND ALIENS.

An Engineer ship crash-landing on the surface of LV-223 in 2093.

Time and Date
Prometheus opens in 2089 with the discovery of a cave painting in Scotland which points the way to the Engineer base. The ship arrives at this location in the final week of 2093, with the final moments of the film taking place on New Year's Day, 2094.

No date is given in Alien for the action, save that it happens in the 22nd Century (due to the presence of a crew uniform patch that says, 'Flag of the United Americas 2104 to present'). In Aliens Carter Burke orders the colonists to investigate the crashed Engineer ship on 12 June '79. Assuming Aliens happens in 2179, then Alien takes place 57 years earlier, in 2122 (and this was later confirmed in featurettes in the Alien Legacy boxed set). From a computer display at the start of Alien, the movie starts on 3 June.

Thus, Prometheus concludes 28 years, 5 months and 2 days before the start of Alien.

The planet LV-426 orbits, along with several of its moons, in 2122.

Location
The planetary body that Prometheus flies to is called LV-223. The planetoid that the Nostromo crew land on in Alien (and is later colonised by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation prior to the events of Aliens) is called LV-426, informally known as 'Acheron'. The different designations seemingly confirm that these are different planetoids.

Both planetoids are depicted as moons circling larger gas giants. LV-426 is one of at least four moons orbiting a red-hued gas giant. LV-223 is one of two moons orbiting a blue-coloured gas giant. Given that we physically see four moons in Alien (three moons and the gas giant are seen in LV-426's sky) and a comprehensive 3D starmap in Prometheus only shows two, the conclusion is that these are different gas giants (otherwise the gas giant changes colour and acquires two additional moons in thirty years, which seems implausible).

In Alien, LV-426 is identified as being located in the Zeta II Reticuli star system. Zeta Reticuli is a real star system located 39.16 light-years from Earth in the constellation Reticulum, consisting of two stars in a binary orbit. However, the two stars are extremely far apart (dozens of times the distance between the Sun and Pluto), meaning that each star could hold an extensive solar system of its own without gravitationally interfering with the other.

LV-223, along with its mother planet and another moon, as shown on the Prometheus's scanners in 2093.

In Prometheus, the destination star system is not identified. A distance of 327,000,000,000,000 km is given, which translates as 34.56 light-years. Given that Zeta Reticuli's distance has been estimated with a strong degree of accuracy (the error margin is only 0.1 light-years), this would seem to confirm that LV-422 is not only a different planetoid to the one in Alien and Aliens, but is located in a totally different star system altogether. Some fans have postulated that LV-422 is located at Gliese 86, a star just under 35 light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus. This is especially popular as an extrasolar gas giant was discovered circling Gliese 86 in 2000. Gliese 86 and Zeta Reticuli are located in the same general neighbourhood, only being separated from one another by 10 light-years.

This splendid theorising has been torpedoed by Ridley Scott saying straight-out that Prometheus takes place in the Zeta Reticuli II star system as well, however.

Thus, the two planetoids in Prometheus and Alien - LV-223 and LV-426 - are different planetoids but they are located in the same star system. Based on the evidence above, I'd still suggest they are orbiting different gas giants.

The USS Sulaco approaching LV-426 in 2179.

Engineer bases and ships
According to Prometheus, the Engineers built an extensive military installation on LV-223 more than two thousand years ago. This installation consists of approximately five large domed buildings, each huge in size. At least two of the buildings had large, horseshoe-shaped spacecraft located adjacent to them. The installation appeared to be a base for the creation of a biological weapon of mass destruction, apparently for use against Earth. This facility was overrun and its population almost completely wiped out by unknown forces (but likely a bioweapon they lost control of) approximately 2,000 years before the events of Alien.

In Alien and Aliens, an Engineer starship of similar design to those seen in Prometheus is found on the surface of LV-426. Initial assumptions were that it had crashed, but more recent interviews (at the 18-minute mark) have suggested it landed or was parked deliberately there. According to Ridley Scott, this ship originated at the LV-223 facility and was on its way somewhere else (presumably not Earth) with its cargo of facehuggers when its cargo got out of control. The pilot landed on LV-426 and was killed, within a couple of hundred years of the destruction of the LV-223 facility (so between 1,800 and 2,200 years before the events of Alien). The fact that the facehugger eggs could survive and remain viable for that time period is impressive.

A mural in the Engineer base on LV-223, suggesting that the xenomorphs were extant more than 2,000 years ago.

The bioweapons and the xenomorph
On LV-223 a black liquid stored in vase-like containers serves as a destructive bioweapon. It can animate corpses, turning them into monstrous killers, and transform little worms into large, snake-like monsters. Rather more bizarrely, it can convert human sperm into a parasite-like creature that, when given a female human body to gestate in, transforms into a squid-like creature which can grow to colossal (some might indeed say, totally fricking preposterous) size and then impregnate another type of creature into another host, a creature which more closely resembles the traditional xenomorphs.

On LV-426, the cargo of the crashed Engineer ship consisted of eggs which, when hatched, produced parasitic 'facehuggers'. These creatures would attach themselves to a human or animal host and place an embryo in their chest. After a period of gestation (typically several hours, or several days for a queen creature capable of laying further eggs en masse) this 'chestburster' erupts through the host's ribcage and grows to large size within a matter of hours. This creature is the traditional xenomorph. Unlike the black goo things on LV-223, the xenomorph's life cycle appears fairly stable and predictable.

Note that, based on both the information provided by Scott in interviews and the mural in the LV-223 facility depicting the traditional xenomorph, the traditional xeno appears to have already been in existence for some time when the base on LV-223 was wiped out. This would then seem to contradict the popular (and perhaps obvious) theory that the black goo stuff in Prometheus is some type of prototype that would lead to the familiar xeno in future films (though the appearance of a proto-xeno in the final seconds of Prometheus would seem to suggest that this was the direction things were heading in).

Based on all of this I would argue that the standard xenomorph was already in existence and the Prometheus bioweapon was an attempt to replicate it. Given the inefficency of the Prometheus creatures, with a confusing and bizarre life-cycle, it can be concluded that the Prometheus bioweapon was a miserable failure. Perhaps all of their 'normal' xenomorph eggs had been put on the LV-426 ship and they were forced to develop a secondary weapon when their main one was put beyond their reach (which seems extremely unlikely, but there doesn't seem to be too many other conclusions that can be reached)?


Conclusion (speculation)
The Engineers are an intelligent alien race who may have had a hand in the appearance of life on Earth. If not, they certainly visited our stone age ancestors around 35,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago a group of Engineers, possibly military in origin, established a base on LV-223, a moon in the Zeta II Reticuli system, 39 light-years from Earth. They created a bioweapon, apparently taking inspiration from an already-existing alien lifeform known as the xenomorph. They apparently decided to wipe out life on Earth for reasons unknown (possibly ranging from fear that their creations were getting out of control to one of their emissaries being nailed to a cross - this latter idea is extremely idiotic, so hopefully that's not the direction they are going in).

A ship took of from the LV-223 base carrying a cargo hold full of xenomorph eggs. The pilot ended up getting infected. He made an emergency landing on LV-426, a moon circling a neighbouring gas giant in the same system, but was killed. He activated a warning beacon telling his fellows to stay away. They respected that and did not go after him. Instead, they decided to use their own bioweapon (perhaps thinking they could control it better than the xenos themselves, or perhaps they had put all of their xeno eggs on the ship and lost them in the crash) against Earth, but it got out of control and wiped out most of the facility. The last surviving Engineer managed to seal himself in stasis in a ship away from the threat of the bioweapon but ended up oversleeping by 2,000 years, until he was awoken by the crew of the Prometheus and was then infected by the bioweapon and killed.

There are still plot holes you can drive a power loader through in this scenario, but this does seem to be a fairly likely chain of events given the information we have so far.

Prometheus

2089. During an archaeological dig on the Isle of Skye, scientists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago, prominently showing a star pattern in the sky. This same pattern can be found in cave paintings, stone carvings and other artifacts from ancient civilisations that never had any connection with one another. Shaw and Holloway, who believe that humanity was created by another species, convince Peter Weyland, one of the richest people in the world, to fund an expedition to the star system indicated by the pattern.

Christmas, 2093. The interstellar exploration vessel Prometheus arrives at LV-223, a moon circling a giant ringed planet. The crew discover a series of vast, artificial structures and begin an exploration, hoping to find evidence of humanity's creators. Initial findings suggest that the inhabitants of the planet are long dead...until the deaths begin.

Prometheus is a quasi-prequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, Alien. It's set in the same universe and concerns itself with one element from the other films, most notably the origin and identity of the dead 'space jockey' creature found in the first movie. However, contrary to expectations, it's not a direct prequel. There's still a fairly substantial gap (of almost thirty years and several star systems) between the way things are left at the end of Prometheus and where they are at the start of Alien, to be filled in by sequels (if Prometheus is a financial success) or by the viewer's imagination (if it isn't). The distancing of Prometheus from the rest of the franchise allows it to be fully enjoyed without any foreknowledge of Alien, which is a good thing.

Prometheus is Ridley Scott's first foray into SF since 1982's Blade Runner and is also, easily, his best movie since Gladiator. Visually, the film is stunning, rich in detail and thoroughly impressive. Scott's directorial powers have not been diminished by age, with some brilliance evocations of landscape and atmosphere. Nor have his abilities with terror dimmed: there are some moments in the film which are genuinely stomach-clenching, including at least one moment which made the audience I was with react with audible horror (and caused several to walk out). It's also rare in being a movie where the 3D element is successfully integrated with the rest of the picture rather than being an ill-considered afterthought. The effects are, of course, awesome as well, all the more effective for so much being achieved practically rather than CGI. The use of actual, massive sets rather than CGI backdrops also immensely enriches the visual style of the film.

In terms of performances, clearly this was always going to work well: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba and Charlize Theron are all on top form, delivering convincing and impressive performances. Especially noteworthy are Rapace, our convincing main character, and Fassbender, whose portrayal of an android with ambiguous motivations provides much food for thought.

In terms of pacing, the first half or so of the film works well. We're rushed through early scene-setting scenes and get to LV-223 almost ridiculously fast, with lots of backstory being filled in through a mission briefing sequence. This works well and gets us to the action quickly. Lots of odd elements are established early on (what is David doing in that secret chamber on the ship?) and developed in an interesting manner, with some intelligent foreshadowing of a later plot twist. Initial explorations of the alien planet are hampered by an awesome sequence in which the characters are caught up in a silica dust storm, which may be the film's most impressive visual moment (a later 3D holomap sequence is also up there in quality).

Then, of course, the movie starts to falter. The film's biggest problem is that it is forced to resort to 'movie logic' to keep the story on track. Having the alien planet reconnoitred by probes before Prometheus lands, or having the robotic sphere-things zipping around inside whilst the humans watch from a distance, would be far more logical and convincing than everyone just bundling inside the structure and running around like headless chickens, getting separated, disappearing, killed etc. For a bunch of scientists these guys are pretty inept. Shaw and Holloway's theories about humans being the result of alien genetic engineering are never backed up by evidence (when asked about how her theory is disproved by evolution, Shaw's answer is a moronic, "I choose to believe,") and no-one in the movie has ever heard of quarantine or slow, methodical investigations. There's too much reliance on short decontamination sequences which, predictably, end up not working, allowing mayhem to erupt.

Major characters are also apparently capable of running around and engaging in severe physical exertion minutes after undergoing major and traumatic surgery of the sort that most people would take months to recover from. The less said about the final 'confrontation' in the alien vessel's control centre (in which quite a few of our characters appear to have had full lobotomies) the better, and the musical score is also severely annoying. In some moments, it's okay, but in too many others the overwhelming bombast of the music is tonally inappropriate (I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't the guy who does Doctor Who's music).

There is much to enjoy about Prometheus. It's the best film in the Aliens universe to be released for more than twenty-five years, which is in itself an impressive achievement. It's visually stunning. The performances are excellent. The humanoid alien species (aka 'space jockeys' in the franchise's parlance) are an interesting creation and you definitely end up wanting to know more about them. There's a great deal of backstory that's left undeveloped and it'll definitely be interesting to find out more about why these 'engineers' created humanity and then decided it was a mistake. It's also great to see an adult-oriented, adult-rated film with a big budget which genuinely unsettles and scares the audience. The ingredients are certainly present for something that could have been brilliant.

Instead, the film is sold short by lazy contrivance, dubious movie logic and some poor plotting. Little in the final quarter or so of the film makes sense, the result of it trying to do too much with too many characters in too short a running time (Idris Elba gets sold rather short, despite some excellent lines and moments).

Ultimately, Prometheus (***½) is an overwhelmingly impressive visual spectacle and an effective horror experience, definitely worthy of being seen on the big screen, which is undercut by some severe logic and scripting problems which disrupt the viewer's sense of disbelief. The movie is on general release right now.