When a film franchise has been around as many years (decades) as the Alien series, it's hard to keep the timeline straight. After awhile, you no longer can tell stories in the natural progression, so you start to skip around. Prequels are created, and then they get sequels, all possibly bridging back to the original film that stared it all. The Alien timeline is nowhere nearly as reworked as, say, the X-Men timeline, but there might be some confusion about which Alien movies a fan should revisit before plugging into Sir Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, which just dropped its new trailer. Thankfully, Alien: Covenant star Katherine Waterston has the answer:
It might be interesting, you know, to see Prometheus before seeing this. For sure. I don't know! I mean, if you've never seen any of them, it could be cool to watch Prometheus, watch this, and then go watch the first Alien.
I was lucky enough to sit down with Katherine Waterston at an event 20th Century Fox held in New York City where she screened footage from Alien: Covenant for select members of the press. And then she agreed to talk about Ridley Scott's movie, and where it fell in the overall mythology of the series.
And yet, she was very hesitant to get into specifics, and was super protective about spoilers. Her reply actually came in response to a question I asked her about Michael Fassbender's role in Alien: Covenant, because he was evident in the Covenant footage, but he wasn't playing David, the android he played in Prometheus. So Waterston was sidestepping my primary question, while also cementing how Alien fans should approach Alien: Covenant, and where it best fits in the narrative.
Watch her answer below. It's adorably evasive:
And this makes sense. Because even though, at the moment, Alien: Covenant has no bleed over (pun intended) from Prometheus, we have heard rumors that Michael Fassbender would be playing one android as well as David, his synthetic being from Prometheus. And back when Ridley Scott announced plans for Alien: Covenant, the idea was that it would be one of potentially three movies that would eventually lead INTO the 1979 masterpiece, Alien. So yes, on the timeline, it fits into a frame that exists between Prometheus and Alien. We just don't know yet how many movies will happen before we reach Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the creature who started this all.
Alien: Covenant opens in theaters on May 19, 2017, and head over to the next page to watch the trailer that just debuted online!
