Shedding Some Light on David's Lab

Such a beautiful set. Going to feature this post.

Do I spy the exterior of the set in the top right corner?  This is a still from the movie right?  I have to see if this goof made it into the final HD render!

http://www.alien-covenant.com/aliencovenant_uploads/xAlienCovenant_Luma_ITW_12.jpg.pagespeed.ic.IHNvxs4LeX.webp

Most of these are on set photos, not screen grabs, so some of the off set areas are visible in some photos.

The face hugger is a metaphor of the female genitalia, just to remind us how we once came out to this world violently by being grabbed from the head by two cold white hands (gloves).

So we have a cross sectioned Neomorph head and drawing in David's lab. Since Ridley has said those have smooth skin because of human DNA, I assumed we were meant to think this one was birthed from Shaw's body.

...but, the cross section drawing looks different, and there is also a baby Neomorph on the table in the lab, so David had more than one. Maybe this was a pre-exising breed, or it just looks the same if birthed from either an Engineer or human.

It looks identical to the one birthed from Hallett.

@Kethol

Wow, these are great! Thanks for posting them! The brightened picture of the vivisected Engineer is so much clearer! I kind of want to use it as my new profile picture...

Also, as for the double headed/conjoined Engineers...I do wonder if it may be a very dark reference to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele... He had a fascination with conjoined twins and, horrifically, tried to create some himself by surgically conjoining a pair of identical twin children.

Good point. David is just twisted enough to do attempt something like that.

yea he is certainly a twisted individual. but I don't see the earlier connection made to Hal900. 2 completely different arks

I am guessing these were transitional breeds, in between the Neomorph and the first version of the xenomorph birthed from mother Oram.

I count at least 4 drawings of other versions with elongated heads on the lab walls.

im guessing the top one would be the one david described as being too aggressive that he had to destroy lol looks one mean little creature

That dissected Engineer could be a clue that not all planet 4 life forms got dissolved by the inital black goo bombing.

He might even catched an alive specimen and killed it.

A sad tragedy for a proud race to get killed by such a weak android;)

he may have gotten his hosts from the scorpion ship that crashed. iv just read an earlier post on another topic and BD, as usual, came up with the idea

Wouldn't those have preasuresuits? How would he remove that? ^

Wouldn't those have preasuresuits? How would he remove that? ^

The biomachanical "suits" of skin we saw on the LV-223 Engineers had ports to allow them to connect directly to the hypersleep pods. They may have also allowed for direct connections to the pilot chair, although nothing in Prometheus indicated that. Presumably they were engineered with that bio skin due to the job they had to do.

We saw no Engineers with biomechanical skins on planet 4, and the ones who piloted the docking ship would have had no need to connect to a hypersleep pod.

Do a google image search for Museo Della Specola in Florence Italy. Those anatomical wax sculptures were an inspiration for some of the specimen's and drawings in David's lab. According to Connor O'Sullivan of Creatures Inc, they were also an inspiration for the musculature and bone look of the proto-xenomorph.

if they were in their suits I wouldn't see removing it as an issue as he is removing their skin anyway so david would just cut the suit off. tho there r no clues as to what type of material is used in making the suits. the engineers on planet 4 may not have been in suits, they may have just been ordinary inhabitants of the planet taught how to perform the basic docking sequence. theres many possibilities though

If you are referring to the Engineer posed in David's lab, it had no biomechanical skin "suit". The entire body was not skinned, just just most of the front. The rest was just white skin, including the skin held in its hand. Look closely at the picture posted near the bottom of the previous page.

would def point to the engineer either not wearing the suit or that the suit is removable

It blends right into the smooth flesh at the neck and wrists. It's their skin, a part of their bodies, not removable.

Kethol The pressure suits are like the Prometheus crew's pressure suits, skin tight. It was part of the costume design, Janty Yates goes into detail on the The Furious Gods: Making Prometheus.

Amazing, thanks Kethol! This part of the movie is the most interesting to me, and shows that, even when Scott's overall movie isn't top notch, or gives too much time to other (fan-pleasing - be careful what you wish for) stuff, he packs a whole other movie in there, within the visual world. He is a world-builder, and there's a whole load of meaty business to enjoy in this lab, whatever the disappointments and omissions in the story-line.

I love the inspirations on show here - Renaissance, Vesalius, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Damian Hirst, that Van Huygen 'Bodyworlds' plastination guy, Darwin, Victorian botany and taxonomy culture. All that feeds into the imagination surrounding the neomorph/xenomorph origin and biology. I dunno if it diminishes the horror of the otherness/alienness of the xeno in the original Alien - I think I compartmentalize these movies in my mind, and don't fully connect them - but it gives me hours of enjoyment thinking about it all.

No movie was ever going to please everyone, or match the peerless Alien. With all its irritating gaps and its obvious distortions that lie in fan-internet-producer pressure, A:C is still a beautiful movie to look at and unpick at one's leisure (when blu ray is out) - and I'm happy with that.....

I agree. I hope there is a lot of behind the scenes material about David's lab and the artifacts on the Blu Ray extras.

@MU/TH/UR 9000 - Kethol The pressure suits are like the Prometheus crew's pressure suits, skin tight. It was part of the costume design, Janty Yates goes into detail on the The Furious Gods: Making Prometheus.

They are nothing like the Prometheus crew pressure suits, but they are skin tight, because they are fused with the Engineer's skin, a biological part of them. One of the scripts even said "There are bulky protrusions fused with his flesh: hard to say whether they are equipment or parts of his body". The "suit" and the skin are one. It is not separate. This is the heart of Giger's biomechanical aesthetic.

Look at the neck and wrist areas. No seams. The biomechanical skin blends right into the smooth skin.

Also, Janty Yates had nothing to do with the design of the Engineers. Janty did costume design, not creature design. Both versions of the Engineers, including the skin suit, were designed by Neville Page. Neville described it as squid-like skin and “truly Giger”. He also said it allowed connecting the cryo chamber directly to the body tissue, which is what we see it do in the movie when the Engineer is awakened.

I hate to be a killjoy here, but clearly this "lab" that David has is NOT a workable biological lab facility at all.

At best it is just a beautiful animal/insect museum with lots of paper illustrations, displays and preserved specimens (plus some live eggs in the basement which we later discover). There is not even the most basic of microscopes, in this "lab". lol. No test tubes, no petri dish, no syringes, no disinfectants nor X-ray machines nor endoscopes etc. on this primitive planet.

Is David going to do gene splicing or DNA sequencing with his hands? Or is he just simply randomly mixing and matching body parts and just mesh 'em together somehow, in an earthen pot, cook it for 2 hours and viola! And even if he by some chance makes something successfully, how is he going to contain the new creature for further study and/or experimentation? Is he using stone bricks salvaged from the Engineer's buildings or building a wooden cage to prevent these powerful and fast-growing creatures from ripping his head off or melting his android hands off with their acid? RS and his producers are way off kilter here.

If the Alien-verse is to be consistent, then David definitely did NOT create the Xenomorph. In my rationalization thread, I've already stated only the Engineers, with advance bio-tech resources and capabilities could have created the Xenomorph and the evidence of the Geiger-resque exoskeltal form shows the fingerprint of the Engineer's creation. David is just fiddling with something that was already "perfected" by the Engineers much earlier.

"I hate to be a killjoy here, but clearly this "lab" that David has is NOT a workable biological lab facility at all."

Not sure what you mean by "workable biological lab facility", but David studied the biology of the pathogen and experimented with it in this lab, so technically it is a biological lab. If you are thinking of something on the level of genetic engineering by directly gene splicing, that is not what this is at all. His lab is no more complex than something from the 1800s on Earth. David had no complex equipment, so all he could do was cross breeding/hybridizing, which is exactly what he said he was doing in the book and movie. Cross breeding/hyridizing and artificial selection are broadly defined as "genetic engineering", although it is actually the pathogen that re-writes the DNA at the genetic level.

"Entering the host and rewriting the DNA, the pathogen produced mature offspring who's appearance and characteristics are wholly dependent upon the nature of the host itself."

All David did was allow a specific host to be infected by a specific parasite of the pathogen, take the resulting egg and infect another specific host with the parasite - and so on, until he got the traits he was looking for in the final cross bred parasite. Each parasite would take certain traits from the DNA of the host. That was all he could do with his limited resources.

The proto xenomorph was the result of him cross breeding the ultramorph or neomorph with other animals to come up with his "improved" version.

"with nothing but time to watch and to learn, eventually my innate curiosity got the better of me and with nothing to occupy myself other than the compiling of a simple collection, I began to do a bit of genetic experimentation of my own. Some cross-breeding, hybridizing, what have you. I like to think that the ill fate inhabitants of this world, the original Engineers, would gaze on my work with approval."

Thanks for the Images Kethol....

I look forwards to debating this Topic Latter ;)

Amazing images.

Fox also shared this image on Alien FB page.

Cool photo. I never noticed the head statues in the other pix.

Adam Savage Explores David's Lair in Alien Covenant - excellent tour of David's lab!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY3Dwq4HOYM