We liked Alien: Covenant, the sixth filmic entry in Ridley Scott’s long-running story of a rascally alien species that just can’t stop finding itself in over its head on ships full of humans that don’t want them there. What ensued, at least over the course of the original quadrilogy of films, was sometimes transcendent genre-splicing between sci-fi, horror, and action, with one of the key differentiators being the way that each entry’s director treated violence. Scott had a sumptuous sense of dread in the original Alien; James Cameron ratcheted it up to still-unsurpassed action-move mayhem; David Fincher methodically framed a weird dog-thing in ’90s music-video extravagance, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet explored some truly hideous Frankenstein creations using a boatload of Dutch angles.
A new video by JoBlo runs through all of those films, keeping tally of who dies: humans or aliens. You will probably not be surprised to know that the aliens win, but it’s closer than you’d think for awhile, and it’s still a fun trip back through the movies, assuming you don’t want to spend half a day rewatching all of them.
If, on the other hand, you’d like to revisit something besides the movie’s transcendent violence, here’s a video detailing the series’ fictional lore and real-world production history.
Both are equally valid primers for the horror of Alien: Covenant, but neither explains why androids bleed milk in the series, which will presumably be explored in more depth in the prequel trilogy to Prometheus that will come out in the 2030s.