Last December’s teaser trailer established what director Ridley Scott and his phalanx of studio publicists had spent months proclaiming—that Prometheus is a story to be enjoyed on its own merits, despite taking place within the same fictional Alien universe. Now that everyone has come to terms with that, and agreed not to judge the film preemptively based on lingering feelings about Alien Vs. Predator, Scott and Co. can get down to simply telling their original story about mankind's search for the mysterious beginnings of life in the universe.
And as this new, dialogue-loaded trailer demonstrates, Prometheus is really only an Alien prequel in the Buddhist sense that absolutely everything is connected: Much like the inevitable rise and fall of ancient civilizations—whose mysterious shared pictograms prompt Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, and Idris “Tex” Elba to unlock the mysteries of their origins—when it all comes down to it, what is life but a never-ending cycle of stumbling in your tiny underwear through a spaceship, trying to escape the aliens that are trying to attack your face, while your fellow man is picked off one by one? So yes, strictly philosophically speaking, we suppose you could call this an Alien movie. But under that definition, what isn’t?