A Closer Look at the Bombing Sequence

Late to the party here. To the OP, nice captures, and I liked this scene but thought it was a bit odd to see the pathogen take effect immediately on contact.

@ dk

David says, in the "Advent" extension, that the pathogen "generates a unique reaction with every genome it encounters"

One effect is killing engineers quickly, with super fast parasite burstings.

Yog Sothoth Yes, it helps to explain and even excuse discrepancies- reminds me a bit of the different gestation times of the chest bursters during all movies including AVPR. I will just go with it and enjoy personally.

@ Thombach

Yeah, it does mention pathogens then talks about the singular "it". Hard to grasp what he means. Could it be that David is refering collectively to all the urns as "their pathogens", but each urn contains the same pathogen?

Nice catch Thombach! I completely missed he went from plural to singular there when I read it.

This is very deep thread and I am not reading everything, but here is what I think about the different urn sizes.

In the bombing scene in A:C, all of the urns organized themselves in the air in a circular pattern.  It was vary organized.  So, I think the different urn sizes is related to their organization before the contents get released.

It would make sense for the bigger urns to go to the outside of the formation and the smaller ones to go towards the middle because the bigger ones have further reach than the smaller ones.  Anything or anyone towards the middle (where the small urns are) have NO CHANCE OF ESCAPING.  If they run, they will only run into more black goo.  So, there is no reason to pour as much goo in the middle.  Now, the things or living beings towards the outside could actually run away from underneath the bombs.  So, there are bigger urns on the outside to have more spread when the explode.  This would hopefully, in war, kill the things or beings towards the outside.  

Of course, this is just speculation.

Aren't all the urns in the bomb bay exactly the same size? I'll have to check again but just watched it on a big screen last night. I could swear they were all the same. I'm still trying to figure out why they all explode like they hit an invisible shell in the sky before the black clouds start to swarm down.

What I thought was interesting is that the urns float into position before dropping. Nothing touches them.

I like how when they drop, they form a pattern like a DNA helix too.

@Thombach

You may be right, but, as far as we know, that juggernaut came from LV-223, so why would it be different?

Isn't the one found in Prometheus holding different urn sizes?

I can't remember that detail.

Also, Thombach, if you can, take a screen shot of the urns suspended in air if you can!

I would really appreciate it!  

The urns in the first juggernaut in Prometheus are all kinds of different sizes, but the ones we see in the bomb bay room of the ship David and Shaw took seem to be all the same.

The screen shots post so small that is is difficult to see, but they are floating. There is no carriage or rack mechanism to suspend and move them, but something moves them.

In that AVP podcast with Dane Hallett and Matt Hatton they seemed to think this was the urns breaking on the planetary shield described in the script.

The look of the storage room David is in by the opening looks like a place a never saw in Prometheus.  Maybe there is structural order to the way they must be released.  I guess the big ones are released first so that they have the space to float to the outside and then the smaller ones get released to fill in the middle.  That way the urns don't collide as they move around and get into position before exploding. 

Thanks for shots Kethol!

I just watched that scene again with the brightness turned up on my tv. All the urns are exactly the same size. I did notice the writing on them is different in one shot. The same shot in Kethol's first screen grab.

From what I can tell, the urns float off the vertical racks of urns stacked in the walls and float through the air to the center of the bomb bay. They line up in concentric circles over the hole in the floor until they drop and hit the shield barrier thing. I guess the urns don't really explode, they just break on the barrier, then the goo atomizes and the small particles slip through.

In the urn drop sequence, it does indeed look like they hit some kind of invisible barrier/shield, but I assume it's just a way of deploying the virus far away enough from the ship so it doesn't infect the crew.

It wouldn't make much sense to have a barrier over the city, if the juggernaut was going to land in the hangar bay below.

The hanger automatically opens as the docking ship and juggernaut approach each other, so I doubt there's any shield in place to protect the people below

And if there was, what a crappy shield it was! :P

It was probably an automated defense that went up as soon as the pathogen was detected. It did seem to stop the urns, as they were solid and broke on it, but once the pathogen atomized into smaller particles, it just passed through.

Here is what Matt Hatton and Dane Hallett said about the shield on the AVP podcast when they were asked if there was anything in the script that they wished had made the final cut.

MATT - Dane, do you remember when there was the whole thing of the…

DANE - Quarantine. Oh yeah, the satellite.

MATT - Yeah, yeah. The quarantine sort of net over the planet.

DANE - yeah, I forgot that.

MATT - I think a touch of that is still in there, where he (David) drops the bombs and they seem to spread over an invisible sort of shield, but then they break through, and that sort of thing…There was this whole thing earlier on where they (Covenant crew) had to fix the satellite to try and take that thing down so that they could get through this electrical storm thing. It seems like there are just parts of that now.

DANE - Just in case anyone didn't know what that was, in the script originally there was… the Engineers had created  this satellite that would protect any foreign bodies coming in or out of the planet. That's what was preventing all of the transmissions from getting through and that's also what stopped David from getting out clear SOS's, or whatever it was.

OK, another obsrvation about the black stuff.

In Prometheus we see it leak from some of the urns when the air is disturbed after 2000 years. David's sees the stuff is moving on top of the urn, forming into blob shapes. Just before David bags an urn to take back to the ship the black stuff is jumping off the top of the urn into the air, going crazy. Whatever it was doing, it seems to be able to move and shape change without needing any animal tissue to infect and mutate.

In the bombing scene the little black particles are swarming through the air in all directions before they even get to the Engineers. How? They have not infected the tissue of any animal to transmute into a flying organism, so how are they flying? Did they form into a flying or flapping shapes to move through the air?

This description of the motes got me thinking of this.

"Ever changing it its form--lurching and stabbing into new shapes - oily black and beautiful"

That is exactly how I would describe the goo on top of the Urn David was looking at.

@ Thombach

Well observed. Those urns are obviously designed to expel the goo when activated. When they start melting (for whatever reason), we see the goo basically squirting out slowly from the top of the urn, like ketchup, then running down the sides, onto those worms. Perhaps they were semi activated, which caused them to ooze out the goo, rather than explode totally.

Those black particals were not "flying". They were falling down from the sky and blowing in the wind like rain. Rain doesn't fall directly down, it is blown in all directions.

Motes are a different thing to goo. In the movie, we know they were tiny insects, that early script has them changing shape..but they are still different to the black goo. I've noticed a lot of differences between that script and the final movie as well, now that I've actually read it.

Sothoth, what size tv are you watching Covenant on? Also, DVD or Blu Ray?

Thombach, I thought the same thing when I saw that description of the mote from the script. The shape-change thing must have been an early idea of what they were supposed to look like.

The fact that the pathogen alone was able to move and form rough shapes on top of the leaking urns in Prometheus does give some clue as to how the black particles are able to fly and swarm in the Covenant urn-drop scene. They move incredibly fast though. It was like a swarm of locusts or bees they way they were attacking and coating the Engineers in a few of those shots.

David also says the later stages of the pathogen produced the insects, so the swarming things were definitely not those. I know you did not say that. Just pointing it out. "The original black liquid turned to lethal particles when exposed to air. Later stages produced parasites and invasive insects. From their eggs came, well..."

@ Thombach, Blu-ray, standard HD TV. I don't think there's anything more to this scene really. Just drops of black goo falling and hitting.

Drop a bucket of water from the top of a skyscraper...it won't fall straight down, some will blow back up slightly. *Shrugs* maybe our eyes see different things in the same movie.

@ Kethol

Correct, by "later stages" it means later effects within the victim. The goo causes a life form to spawn parasites, tiny insects in the mold's case, which then infect another host, creating our friend the neomorph.

Slightly off topic, but I find it interesting how that script has the xenomorph eggs coming from those fungal egg sacs. David specifically says he nurtured them, somehow adding different DNA to them, to create the xenomorph eggs.

I don't see how this can be canon. In the "Advent" material, David says that the local life forms didn't prove to be "very fruitful" in creating his "Wolf" (the Xenomorph). Then he says that he used Shaw as the main source for the xenomorph, while "tweaking" her mutated DNA, showing that he used various neomorph's DNA in this tweak, possibly using black goo as a catalyst.

The differences from this script are very interesting, in this and other areas.