Legendary director Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in “Alien” with “Alien: Covenant,” the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that he promises will bridge the gap to the first film, a gap nobody perceived until he pointed at it.

“Alien: Covenant” will act as a semi-sequel to “Prometheus,” a semi-prequel to “Alien” and a semi-truck flattening your affection for this franchise.

In “Prometheus,” we learned that humans were created by a race of albino bodybuilders called the Engineers. At some point in the history of the universe, the Engineers apparently decided to kill all humans. The reason for this attempted genocide, according to allusions made by Scott in interviews, is that the Engineers were mad at humans for killing Jesus.

If true, this would be the worst plot twist since the ending of the “Planet of the Apes” remake, which featured a statue of Aperaham Lincoln.

Much of the plot of “Prometheus” concerned black goo devised by the Engineers for purposes that remained as murky throughout the film’s 124 minute running time as the goo itself.

The goo seemed as adept at creating underwhelming monsters as it was at generating arbitrary scenes.

At the end of “Prometheus,” Elizabeth Shaw and David the Android headed off to the planet of the Engineers, which they fully expected would be a technological, societal and environmental utopia.

In the new film, however, the Engineers’ planet is revealed to be the biggest disappointment since the Battlestar Galactica arrived at Earth in 1980 only to find it polluted by former “Brady Bunch” cast members and stock footage from the movie, “Earthquake.”

The “Covenant” of the title refers to a spaceship and surely is not meant to evoke the new covenant that Jesus established in the New Testament.

The Covenant is inhabited by six sets of couples, an arrangement designed to encourage colonization, pointless arguing, quick slaughter of the most annoying characters and aliens punishing people for having illicit intercourse.

The crew lands on the Engineers’ planet only to discover that is has largely become a barren, hellish wasteland, or – as it is referred to in the credits – Australia.

In “Alien: Covenant,” the black goo has become plant spores inside seedpods because why the hell not?

Alien DNA is scattered exactly the same way an innocent child scatters the seeds of an aged dandelion. In the new film, however, there are only aged dandelions of death.

Fox wisely abandoned the tag line: “Nature hasn’t been this evil since ‘The Happening.’”

In prior films, alien infants were known as chestbursters because of their method of egress from the human host. In “Alien: Covenant,” Scott will introduce backbursters, a nickname that should be self-explanatory.

Given the dwindling options, we are forced to consider the very real possibility that the next film will feature the debut of the assbursters.

“Alien: Covenant” opens tomorrow.