10 Exact Moments Horror Movies Stop Trying

Say what you want about Prometheus, but it was a bold new chapter for the long-ailing Alien saga, setting up a whole new branch of the series divorced from Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, but with enough ties to the likes of evil mega-corp Weyland-Yutani and the series’ titular antagonists to feel of a piece with the franchise at large. With Ridley Scott behind the camera, we found life in another part of the galaxy, where humanity’s creators, the Engineers, designed a bioweapon to rid the universe of us, and the film ends with twisted android David (Michael Fassbender) and archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) journeying on to find meaning beyond this brutal encounter.

Prometheus left plenty to chew on, and a whole new intergalactic terrain to explore, but then Ridley Scott went and wasted this opportunity on his sequel, Alien: Covenant.

With the promise of the Engineers’ homeworld and the origins of the Xenomorph providing Covenant's basis, things are progressing well until the revelation that David, who has set up base on the Engineers’ planet, has been engineering the Neomorphs and other Xeno-related creatures the wayward human crew find. From here, it descends into the most stock of Alien movies: one evil android, a deadly crew of Xenomorphs on the loose, and the human explorers picked off to just one or two survivors.