Paradise Postponed

The Alien series has taken us on a long and – to put it mildly – very strange journey since a hibernating circle of seven dreamers returning from a deep space towing mission were awoken by a mysterious signal from a storm-blown planet known only as LV-426.

- Michael Coldwell

Released back in 2012, Prometheus rode in on one of the most head-scratching movie publicity campaigns ever devised. In summary, it went like this: ‘This is not a prequel to Alien. Alright, it sort of is. Look, it’s about really BIG concepts, see for yourselves, OK?’ As risky strategies go, it was up there with ‘Star Trek Into Darkness is definitely not a rubbish re-tread of The Wrath of Khan!’ and yet it paid off to the worldwide box office tune of $403 million, proving that the sense of mystique created around Prometheus had worked out rather well.

As the final credits rolled over Elizabeth Shaw and her android companion David flying off in search of the Engineers’ planet in a hot-wired juggernaut spacecraft, one mystery had definitely been cleared up: Prometheus was indeed a prequel to Alien - we saw so many would-be versions of the creature it might as well have been called Alien: Prototype - but by no means a conventional one. Many were perplexed at the least popcorn-friendly major studio sci-fi movie in recent memory, a film that posed many intriguing questions and provided few easy answers. Here was a visually stunning prequel that dared to attempt something different and quite radical with its source material, promising to take the long way round to the Nostromo massacre via a sequence of further movies that explored themes of creation and destiny through a classical SF framework. But five years on, while these core themes are still at play in Alien: Covenant, it appears the original course for the series has been re-routed…