In doing press for his just-released new dystopian thriller, The Dog Stars, the legendary director Ridley Scott has confirmed that he is, indeed, charting a course back to the Alien universe and is planning to direct a follow-up to his 2017 film, Alien: Covenant. That film was itself a follow-up to Scott’s original 2012 Alien prequel, Prometheus, and continued many of the narrative and thematic threads that began in the previous film.
The fact that Scott is officially returning to round out his long-in-the-making prequel trilogy is undeniably fantastic news, and one of the sparse quotes he issued alongside this confirmation makes it even more enticing. Scott teased that the third film will center on Michael Fassbender’s malevolent android David, who escaped into space at the end of the previous film, and will see the character building “a brave new world.”
Obviously, that’s a very loaded phrase to throw around in the genre of science fiction, but in the context of this Alien franchise, it brings a very real possibility to light: is Scott going to bring things full-circle and close things out on LV-426?
For the uninitiated, LV-426 is the planet on which the events of Scott’s original 1979 Alien occur. In that film, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo pick up a scrambled distress signal that brings them to LV-426. When they arrive, the planet appears to be little more than a wasteland, but they discover a crashed ship, the corpse of a “space jockey" (more on that in a beat), and an entire hangar bay of Ovomorphs (the eggs from which Face Huggers emerge). Things go south pretty quickly from there for the crew of the Nostromo, but the planet has long loomed large in Alien mythos.
When the marketing for Scott’s Prometheus initially revealed that the film would dig deeper into the story of the “Space Jockey,” now more properly referred to as Engineers, many assumed that the film’s third act would take place on LV-426 and set the table for Alien’s events in a very direct way. Early versions of the script apparently even did this exact thing, but Scott and screenwriter Damon Lindelof ultimately decided to go a different direction. Now, however, between Scott’s comments and the cliffhanger of Alien: Covenant, it looks as though Scott’s third prequel might loop back around to this story thread.
An entire element of Covenant is that David has utilized the technology and biology of the Engineers to form a creation of his own: the Xenomorphs. That film ends with David essentially hijacking a space cruiser full of people in hyper-sleep and bringing several Ovomorphs along with him, ready to find hosts in the ship’s unwitting population. Given all of this, David could very well wind up on LV-426, building that “brave new world” of his own, with the final prequel dovetailing into the original Alien.
While many signs seem to point this direction, I’d also be more than set with Scott just f--king off and doing whatever he wants with Fassbender’s character and the story he’s built around him. There’s no real need to connect these films so explicitly, as Prometheus proved years ago. So whatever you want to do, Mr. Scott, I will be well and truly seated for it.
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