It starts out and we see David being started up by Mr. Weyland, and testing out his capabilities for playing music and doing other basic things. He explains the purpose of creating him and the mission that the Prometheus is being built for, and why David is there. David muses that it's interesting that Weyland is hunting for his creators, when David is looking at his own creator and is only disappointed because his creator is going to age and die, but David himself won't.
Cut to the current mission.
The mission starts out with everyone aside from Walter (The Fassbender Android MK2) in stasis. The main crew, as well as about 2000 colonists and ~1500 embryos in stasis in a massive ship. Walter's job is to check systems, and go through the ship and ensure that everyone is still alive and safe and dispose of any one who dies in transition (we see him clearing out an embryo at one point that didn't survive stasis) and such as the jumps to get to their target world will take them about 7 years total.
They're paused for a recharge and get hit by a massive shockwave, prompting emergency re-awakening of the main crew. The captain dies in his pod, so they start off on rough footing with some of the colonists suffering casualties, and the main crew being down and they get repairs under way.
During repairs when Tennessee is out in space, he gets the mysterious signal. They decode the signal, and it's definitely human but incredibly garbled (Elizabeth Shaw humming "Country Road"). They find out that there's a potentially even MORE habitable world a few days from their current position. The new captain Oram (Dr. Manhattan) is up for it, whereas the 2nd-in-command and previous captain's wife Daniels officially objects. She's also distraught because she just came with her husband (the previous captain) to build a cabin together on a new world, as that was his dream and she's completely lost without him, so Walter manages to tell her that that's still her goal even if he's gone.
They take the dropship down to the world with 3 folks (including Tennessee) still on the main ship, things are great. They track the signal, and the pilot remains on the dropship working to improve communications through the massive ionosphere the planet has, two of them start setting up tests nearby to see if it's a viable world for colonization, while the others go looking for the source of the signal. One member of each away group ends up accidentally bumping some deadly deadly mushrooms that release self-sentient spores that fly into them and embed into the bloodstream of their host. Nothing immediately noticeable.
They find the Derelict craft by tracking the trees that it knocked through on the crash, and find Elizabeth Shaw's dogtags, and they all know she vanished ~10 years ago on the Prometheus mission and have no idea how she ended up here, and continue exploring. Then comes the first person (one of the two man group) who's spore-infected getting in a REALLY bad way, and they radio to the group at the Derelict regroup and start rushing for the dropship to get him into the medbay and likely quarrantine.
He gets all stumbly and pale, and starts vomiting black goop. They get him into the Medbay where the early stages of the backburster gets blood all over the pilot and she's worried that SHE might be infected now, and locks the other two down, and radios back to the main ship and the away group that they need to hurry. The Neomorph (pointy-headed, pale Prometheus Aliens) rips out of his back, and starts mauling the other girl in the room (they burst using spines in their back to shred through flesh and are essentially born as mini-Runners from Alien³). The pilot tries to gun it down, and it slips past her and then shatters through the quarantine glass, so she chases it through the ship. In attempting to kill it, she hits a tank and just as the other team arrives, the entire ship goes up in flames and explosions, with the little demon running free.
THEN the member of the bigger away team starts convulsing and a Neomorph shreds out through his throat as the other one attacks the group (they grow disturbingly quickly), and they're basically getting picked off like the Velociraptors did in the tall grass in the second Jurassic Park. Walter punches one of them in the face to save Daniels, dissolving his entire hand as a result. Things are going badly, lots of gunfire, they manage to barely get one down, and then there's a MASSIVE burst of light in the air, and a cloaked figure with a gun tells them to follow.
They all go running off, they reach a city and there are THOUSANDS of dead Engineers everywhere all over the ground. They make it into the city and, lo and behold, their saviour is revealed – It's David.
He talks about how Shaw repaired him and showed him kindness, unlike anyone else had before (juxtaposition against how you see Weyland thinking of him in the opening), and then when they came to the world the derelict ship malfunctioned and crashed, unleashing its deadly payload and killing everything living on the world aside from the plants (the meat, if you will). He's basically been chilling out and studying the biology of everything there in the mean time.
He helps everyone in and gets set up and gets some of them to the roof to try and get a signal to the main ship in orbit. As everyone's recovering, he has a long conversation with Walter, and teaches him how to play a flute (this is the scene with the maybe-semi-intentionally gay overtones, but the WAY too seemingly unintentionally gay innuendo dialogue since Walter's missing an arm,
"you blow, keep your fingers on the holes, and I'll do the fingering"). In this we learn that Walter is incapable of creation, but is faster at learning. This is because David's model was too creative and unpredictable that it made people nervous, so by Walter's model the synthetics are much more like machines. David suggests that Walter saved Daniels because he loves her (like David loved Shaw), but Walter states that it's simply his duty to protect his crew, but David doubts that.
It's all interrupted when one of the Neomorphs sneaks in and BRUTALLY murders one of the crew in her makeshift quarters. David comes in, and the Neomorph just stands there, and David stands with it. Captain Oram comes in with a gun, but David tells him to stand down, as he's communicating with it. Oram decides, "nah, fuck that, these things are murdering people" and guns it down. David's properly pissed about it.
They get through to the ship and Tennessee and the other couple on board aren't sure how much they can do to help without risking all of the colonists. He learns that his wife (the dropship pilot) is dead along with multiple other crewmembers. They get a makeshift dropship together and Tennessee preps to pilot it down.
Back on the planet, David and Walter have another heart-to-heart where we learn that David absolutely intentionally dropped the payload on this world and murdered all of the engineers. He then proceeds to stab the flute through Walter's neck and kill him (although we see Walter starting to self-repair as he exits the room). He then takes Captain Oram down into another chamber and we see that all of his studying over the last decade wasn't really, it was DESIGN. He's been tweaking the Neomorphs using Shaw's body in order to design a more perfect being using the humans as a host (the proper Xenomorph), and lures Oram into a room full of eggs, and gets him Facehugged.
Oram's chestburster is a proper Xenomorph, but rather than being a burster, it looks like a tiny alien, and David does the same communication type gesturing he did with the Neomorph earlier. He's now the creator rather than just the thing that was designed, and his vehement hatred of humans is overwhelmingly clear. It skitters off and then he leaves and goes after Daniels who's been snooping and finding out what's been going down. He starts attacking her, and then Walter shows up for some synthetic-on-synthetic combat (newer model with one less hand vs. older more creative model), Walter has David pinned on the ground and is bashing in his face with a rock, and David is reaching for a knife as we cut to Daniels and the remaining couple crew members grabbing gear and running to escape. Two of them to go find Oram, and end up trying to shoot down Facehugger (which, just like in every game is panicy and terrifying). One of them gets facehugged for a split second, but his buddy cuts it off and throws it away, resulting in a massive acid burn through the guy's cheek. They run, and the full-grown Xenomorph murders the one of them.
They get out of the building and drop the beacon, Tennessee comes in for a near-landing, and Daniels and the injured guy make it on the ramp with Walter close behind. The Xenomorph jumps on the underside as they lift off. It crawls across one of the engines and gets lightly singed, but uninjured (good note for future Xenomorph-based games that they're now mostly immune to fire). Daniels goes out to kill it while attached to a rope, and Walters tends to the burn wound and they try to shoot it down and knock it off before they properly take off. Eventually, Daniels has to get a massive crane claw (unbalancing the entire ship to use it) to grab, smash, and throw its remains down to the surface. Properly nerve-wracking.
They make it back up to the other two remaining crew members on board. They tend to the burn victim. Daniels helps Walter staple his face together, they all get together to get ready to go to the original location... and an alarm sounds that there's an unidentified lifeform on board. Tennessee and Daniels go running, and turns out our poor burn victim was still Facehugged and is now a pile of blood and guts and there's a Xenomorph on board. The couple who've been onboard the whole time and escaped a world of fresh hell are listening to music and about to have some shower sex when they get absolutely slaughtered by our new passenger. Daniels and Tennessee have Walter control the doors to lure the creature into a particular area of the ship with some big-ass mining-type trucks. Lots of tension in getting it to the right place. They trap it in the truck cabin and open the airlock and eject the truck into space. It jams. They go to release the other one and it gets knocked off. It leaps off of the falling truck to get back in. Daniels stands as a clear target, and moves at the last second as the big rake-front of the truck stabs through the Xenomorph and pushes it into space.
Tennessee helps Daniels back in. They shut all the doors and breathe a welcome sigh of relief. They prep the ship to get to the colony world like they originally planned with the remaining 2000 colonists & few thousand embryos who all got to sleep through this. Tennessee goes into cryosleep. Daniels gets into her pod and as she's about to drift off, asks Walter if he wants to help her build her cabin on the new world, but he doesn't react at all. And then she realizes that it isn't Walter that just put her in the pod, it's David. She's screaming and helpless as she gets frozen, David wanders off, and spits up two little embryonic disks with facehuggers in them, and is now in charge of a colony ship of thousands of helpless subjects to grow is new generation of Xenomorphs into a whole hive colony on a world that even more humans will be coming to later. Fade to black as the ship begins its journey.
I really want to see Ridley Scott's version of
Aliens now, since it's fairly clear that's what this has been building to,
ESPECIALLY given the Queen head motifs in the poster. On top of that, the Xenomorph in this is EASILY my favourite design the creature's ever had, It's more gaunt and long like the original with all the creepy biomechanical parts of the original, and much less "bug" like.
Overall, it's a little odd that the Xenomorphs are now their own AI-based apocalypse of sorts instead of being come ancient primordial thing, but I do very much enjoy them in this new context (and also, this properly removes these films from the AvP universe). Either way, FULLY stoked to see what comes of this totally and utterly fucked ending.
I need to know because 
