"Alien" spawned several follow-up films, including 2012's "Prometheus," which Ridley Scott returned to direct. This prequel, which begins in the year 2089, features several callbacks to the original, including a fresh, high-tech take on that oft-referenced chest-burster scene. When identical star maps are discovered at the sites of ancient civilizations around the world, a CEO commissions the title ship and a crew to explore its point of origin, a faraway moon designated LV-223. They're put in stasis and arrive four years later to find the collapsed civilization of a race of beings known as "Engineers." There's also a mysterious inky goo everywhere, which one of the crewmembers, Holloway, unknowingly drinks.
Later, Holloway sleeps with another crew member, Shaw. Shortly after, he starts to exhibit signs of illness. and, upon realizing he's a lost cause and potentially contagious, he asks to be killed. Meanwhile, Shaw, who was previously infertile, is now extremely pregnant. As if she's seen an "Alien" movie before, she rushes to an automated surgical pod, seals herself inside, and chooses the correct procedure from a menu. The machine slices open her abdomen with a laser and removes a whitish, tentacled alien still in its amniotic sac. The creature bursts free in an explosion of fluids, and as Shaw screams at the monstrosity, the pod staples up her incision. Women being forced to deliver their own babies in emergency situations is its own horror, but "Prometheus" takes that trend to a stomach-turning new level.
