'Alien: Covenant' Official Synopsis Reveals A Surely Doomed Ship, A Surely Doomed World And A Familiar Robot

It's been an interesting couple of months for the upcoming Prometheus sequel/Alien prequel. As The Martian continues to hang around at the box office and build some unexpected awards season momentum, director Ridley Scott has had plenty of opportunities to tease the upcoming film and he's said a lot of things. Like how it was titled Alien: Paradise Lost and how Spectre writer John Logan is currently rewriting the script. And then over the weekend, word surfaced that the film was being retitled and now, it's completely 100% official.

The next movie in the Alien series is titled Alien: Covenant and 20th Century Fox has released a title treatment and an official plot synopsis and everything. Interestingly, the shreds of plot align with much of what we've heard in the past year, but with a few key differences.

In space, no one can hear you read the new Alien Covenant plot synopsis after the jump.

First of all, here's the title treatment. While it may seem unremarkable at first, you'll note that this is the first sequel in this series to use the font design from the original 1979 film. Hmm, it's like Scott wants to make sure that audiences realize (consciously or subconsciously) that this is directly connected to the first movie in the series. You know, the one that he directed.

And can you blame him? The first Alien is one of the best movies ever made. Why not make that a selling point?

Of course, the real meat here is the official synopsis. As we've known for some time, Alien: Covenant (or Prometheus 2 or Alien: Paradise Lost) will see the return of Michael Fassbender's quietly sinister android David as well as a new ship packed with fresh meat. So, without further ado:

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN with ALIEN: COVENANT, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with PROMETHEUS — and connects directly to Scott's 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

There are a few points of interest here. First, the Covenant title comes from the name the ship that carries our new cast into the story, echoing how Prometheus took its title from the spaceship at the center of the story. Second, this synopsis makes it sound like Alien: Covenant will be told from the point of view of the Covenant crew, who get to land on a planet and discover horrors beyond imagination. Since most previous plot discussion has centered around continuing the cliffhanger at the end of Prometheus, this is an interesting development. What happened to David and Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw after they set out into space at the end of the previous film? How did David end up on this planet? And where did Elizabeth go? How much time has passed?

Most importantly, just how many lives will David ruin this time around? Remember when he poisoned not-Tom Hardy with alien fluid and caused the entire Prometheus mission to go belly-up?

That fact that we're curious to discover the answers to these questions is a good sign for Alien: Covenant, which begins filming early next year for an October 6, 2017 release.