Recapping the Alien timeline leading to Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus stalks its way into Cineworld this August and promises to be a memorably frightening big-screen experience. It's the latest chapter in the classic Alien saga, taking place after the events of Ridley Scott's trend-setting Alien (1979) and before James Cameron's Aliens (1986). It also takes place after the Ridley Scott-directed Alien prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017).

Because Alien: Romulus occupies a singular place in the wider Alien timeline, you may need a recap of the Alien events that led to this moment. Here's what you need to know.

PROMETHEUS (2012)

• In 2089, archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a star map in Scotland that matches others from several unconnected ancient cultures
• The map appears to gesture toward the origins of humanity; Shaw and Holloway join the deep-space expedition about the Prometheus to locate the origins of the 'Engineers'
• Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), the elderly CEO of Weyland Corporation, has funded the expedition to the distant moon LV-223
• The crew lands on the moon and investigates an arcane structure; inside, they find a large humanoid stone head, stone cylinders emitting a strange black substance and the corpse of what appears to be an Engineer

• Crew members Millburn (Rafe Spall) and Fifield (Sean Harris) get lost within the structure and are attacked and infected by a snake-like creature
• Back aboard the Prometheus, Shaw determines the Engineers' DNA to be similar to that of humans
• The ship's android David (Michael Fassbender) has covertly pocketed a sample of the black liquid and infects Holloway's drink with it
• When Holloway and Shaw sleep together, she finds herself impregnated with a horrifying, worm-like creature

• The declining Holloway is eventually burned alive by mission director Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron)
• At the same time, Fifield returns to the ship in an enraged, zombie-like state and is later killed
• Having performed self-surgery on her womb to remove the creature, the injured Shaw then discovers that Charles Weyland has been sequestered aboard the ship all along and that Vickers is his daughter
• Weyland demands that David take him to the last remaining Engineer whom the crew wakes up

• The Engineer kills Weyland and decapitates David, causing Shaw to flee to the Prometheus where the creature she birthed has grown to a gargantuan size
• Shaw determines that the Engineer is planning to continue with its original mission to bring the alien substance to Earth and decimate humanity
• She persuades the Prometheus captain Janek (Idris Elba) to launch a suicide mission against the Engineer's ship and prevent it from leaving the moons atmosphere
• In the ensuing chaos, Vickers is crushed when the Engineer's vessel falls on her; it then lies prone on the moon's surface
• The Engineer pursuing Shaw is then grabbed, subdued and infected by the creature, and a xenomorph-style alien organism later erupts from his chest
• Shaw and David flee the planet and plan to travel to the Engineers' homeworld to discover their true motivations

ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)

• In 2104 AD, 11 years after the Prometheus expedition, the colonization ship Covenant is seven years from reaching planet Origae-6 with 2,000 colonists in stasis and 1,140 human embryos in cold storage
• The crew is in stasis and being monitored by the human-like android Walter (Michael Fassbender) who has been created by Peter Weyland
• A neutrino burst damages the ship and causes the ship's captain to be incinerated in his cryogenic compartment
• While undertaking repairs the crew discovers a transmission originating from a seemingly uninhabited planet
• Upon investigating the planet closer, the crew determines it is better for colonisation than Origae-6 and they divert the ship to investigate further
• A member of the ship's crew is unwittingly infected by a spore that lands inside his ear
• He later gives birth to a destructive and violent humanoid alien organism ('neomorph') that eliminates several other crew members and results in the destruction of the Covenant's landing crew

• A second neomorph then erupts from another crewmember; the organism is then scared off by a hooded figure wielding a flare, later revealed to be Prometheus survivor David
• David takes the surviving crewmembers to the Gothic city that is populated by dead humanoids
• When he and fellow Prometheus survivor Elizabeth Shaw arrived on the planet, their ship accidentally released a pathogen that annihilated all fauna on the planet
• David also reveals that Shaw died when their ship crashed
• Upon seeing David's close bond with the neomorph, Covenant Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) becomes suspicious of David's motivations, and he is later lured to his death via contact with a facehugger
• It becomes apparent that David, patterning himself after Percy Shelley's 'Ozymandias', intentionally released the pathogen onto the planet and the ensuing aliens are a by-product of his biological mutations
• David also killed Shaw and used her body to further the development of the alien creatures
• David believes that humanity is a dying and unworthy species and that his designed creature is a "perfect organism" that will eradicate them

• Owing to Walter's intervention, crew member Daniels (Katherine Waterston) evades the alien, now grown into a much larger xenomorph, and escapes to the Covenant with a handful of other survivors
• The next morning, Daniels and Tennessee (Danny McBride) discover a new xenomorph has burst from crew member Lope's chest, killing him, and is loose on the Covenant
• Daniels succeeds in blowing the xenomorph into deep space and the Covenant resumes its mission to Origae-6
• Upon entering hypersleep, Daniels discovers that the surviving android she assumed to be Walter is David
• David regurgitates two facehugger embryos, which he places in cold storage with the human embryos and inspects the colonists en route to Origae-6

ALIEN (1979)

• Deep space commercial tug the Nostromo is transporting iron ore back to Earth
• The seven-person crew is unexpectedly awoken from hypersleep by the ship's computer, Mother
• Mother alerts Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) that the ship is being diverted to investigate a transmission from an uncharted planet
• The Nostromo's crew arrives on the planet, designated LV-426, to locate the source of the mysterious signal

• Dallas, executive officer Kane (John Hurt) and navigator Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) stumble across a bizarre derelict alien ship
• During their discovery, warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovers that the signal is a warning but her discovery is dismissed by science officer Ash (Ian Holm)
• Upon venturing inside, they find an ancient skeleton that is presumed to be the ship's former navigator (the unidentified creature was dubbed the 'space jockey' by Ridley Scott and the film's crew)
• Kane descends into the bowels of the ship where he finds thousands of egg-like objects
• One of the eggs opens to unleash a crab-like creature that melts through Kane's helmet and attaches itself to his face

• Kane is brought back to the Nostromo and examined by Ash and Dallas
• The creature (later dubbed in Alien lore as a 'facehugger') possesses molecular acid for blood and can't be killed lest it burn through the ship's hull
• The facehugger later detaches itself from Kane's face and dies, and Kane eventually wakes from his coma
• Amid a celebratory dinner as the Nostromo heads back to Earth, Kane suffers violent spasms and agony as a worm-like parasitic creature erupts through his chest cavity (eventually giving rise to the term 'chest burster') to the horror of the crew

• While determining the location of the creature, engineer Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) is confronted and killed by the organism, which has rapidly grown to a terrifying size
• Dallas is seemingly killed by the alien while attempting to flush it out of the air shafts
• Ripley assumes command and investigates Mother's 'Special Order 937', which caused the Nostromo to be diverted to LV-426
• She discovers that the Nostromo was intentionally sent to the planet to collect the alien organism, and the entire crew is expendable
• Ash is revealed to be an android working under the orders of the Nostromo's parent company Weyland-Yutani
• Ash has been monitoring the alien's development and attempting to impede the crew's attempts to kill it as the ship draws closer to Earth

• With Ash incinerated by engineer Parker (Yaphet Kotto), Ripley determines that she, Parker and Lambert will self-destruct the Nostromo and escape via the emergency shuttle
• Parker and Lambert are ambushed and killed by the horrifying alien, leaving Ripley alone to activate the ship's self-destruct mechanism
• Ripley narrowly avoids the alien and escapes from the Nostromo with the ship's cat Jones just before it explodes
• However, the alien has made its way onto the escape shuttle, forcing Ripley to eject it from the airlock into deep space
• Ripley makes one last recording as the final survivor of the Nostromo before entering deep space hypersleep with Jones

ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024)

• Some 20 years after the events of Alien while Ripley is still in hypersleep, and some 37 years before the events of Aliens, a group of space colonists dock with a seemingly abandoned space station
• They include Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeney) and her surrogate android sibling Andy (David Jonsson)
• Upon docking, they realise the station harbours the most terrifying organism in the universe and this instigates a frantic battle for survival

Now that you're all caught up, it's time to witness the next chapter in the chilling Alien saga. Click the link below to book your Cineworld tickets for Alien: Romulus, which opens on August 16th.

BOOK ALIEN: ROMULUS TICKETS