#alien covenant david’s drawings

[daytripper438]

“What do you believe in, David?” “Creation.”

[woodenrice]

“I believe in creation”

[jjjjabberwocky]

No one will ever love you like I do

[bernadettebraun]

I feel like this meme "how ya doin fellow kids", but here's my old Prometheus art with pathetic Gustav Klimt references.

It was made before Alien: Covenant, so I just thought that Elizabeth would become a mutant that will finally repeat the circle: destroy her creator, David.

[feral-lore-creature]

In case anyone is ever confused as to WHY the Engineers we see in Covenant look different:

It's because they don't force everyone/everything to adapt to their progressive advancements in technology.

Their cities, despite looking ancient, are actually designed to be like time capsules, or marks of their history and development.

It's a cultural thing.

This is mentioned in the David 8 art book, by the way. PLEASE go buy it if you can. It's amazing.

[queenamidalas]

when in rome

[endeavornetwork]

Ash giving a briefing on boring stuff everyone knows because it's mandatory and in the protocols.

Walter slumping in his chair, hoodie up, hands in pockets.

Call slumping beside him because they're friends.

Bishop sitting to her left because she asked him to block David.

David.

[salamispots]

watched alien romulus, liked it, spoilers below :0

I...liked it? like there were some really nice things about it, like the opening scenes of the movie/maybe first half? and then idk the parts where they start interacting with the xenomorphs themselves didn't really feel that tense

-I DID really like the demon baby scene/buildup a lot

-like going down the ladder to find this normal sized baby and watching the foot/hand prints get larger and larger and the first reveal they show you is this weird thing crouching in the shadows and when it steps out it's like o H D:

-andy going up to the sister and when he turns around it's like all the sound cuts out and it took my brain a couple seconds to figure out what I was looking at but oufughdhgfjhg creepy very very good

-ALSO A+ for andy's dad jokes :'D and acting

-the characters are all young looking (not necessarily bad?) but they weren't as compelling compared to others in other movies

-sound design at the beginning when you're settling in is really nice, esp. when they're taking off to space; set design too is gorgeous

-the scene where they first enter the ship and somebody throws a flare/the camera tilts is neat haha

-the little slip in of david's theme/music when the other android's talking about the black goo goOD

-hmmm thinking about it or maybe just me imagining the gore/body horror scenes (for the most part) felt kinda held back? (not talking about the uh wall vagina egg or the xenomorph aspects haha)

-like the scene where the wall egg is dripping blood on the guy

-I think what makes me fond of prometheus and covenant is the fact that they run around on these weird/dead planets and the whole thing with the engineers

-noticed similarities/mashups from the other movies in this one which isn't necessarily bad but it did break immersion a little or made me like 'oh! third act pregnancy like prometheus or a cargo hold battle sort of like covenant, or alien resurrection where the alien gets sucked out into space through that tiny hole

-idk how I feel about the offspring design, will need to watch/see it again; it's a little goofy hahah (again not a bad thing) but I do like that they have the engineer/marble statue alien face and how the hips were a bit off/twisted

-the part where it was grinning was creepy; also when it was hovering over the sister with the mouth retracting I thought they were gonna do a very strange/fucked up version of breastfeeding but it doesn't look like they did? or at least couldn't tell

-edit: oH according to reddit it did happen dfghjf plus they mentioned when she draws her hand of her shirt with weird goo on it

-also slappy slimy facehugger proboscis >:'D

-some of the action scenes reminded me a little of the alien movie that had the underwater alien fight scenes haha

-will need to rewatch in general (movie theatre audio/words getting eaten up in the sound + no subtitles) it's good but I think covenant and prometheus still win out for me

edit: this also makes me wanna go back and watch the movies in chronological or timeline order haha

[gekata23]

David8

The other day I watched the new movie "Alien. Romulus" The already bad mood has become even worse - and depression is not far away... What can I say about Romulus? For me, this is not an interesting passing teen adventure film. If he wasn't in the Alien universe, then there wouldn't be anything to talk about at all and I definitely wouldn't have finished watching him. . What can not be said about Prometheus and the Covenant. But there is no need to compare here. In order to somehow fix my mood, I decided to draw my favorite character, David!

Я тут на днях посмотрела новый фильм "Чужой. Ромул" И без того плохое настроение стало еще хуже - так и до депрессии не далеко... Что я могу сказать о Ромуле. Для меня это не интересный проходной приключенческий подростковый фильм. Если бы он не был в рамках вселенной Чужого то и говорить не о чем было бы совсем и я бы его точно не досмотрела. . Что не скажешь о Прометее и Завете. Но тут и сравнивать не приходится. Что бы хоть как то исправить себе настроение я решила нарисовать своего любимого героя - Дэвида!

[daytripper438]

“No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.”

[cellarspider]

20/30 Special delivery

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We return to a movie that has never been to medical school, Prometheus. 

Here it is. The scene that everybody remembers because it gave a fair few people the screaming heebies. This is the movie's take on the chestburster scene–except for the less impactful, more literal version of the chestburster scene we’ll get later, I mean. This one, though, this one, they got it right.

Content warnings for gore, nudity, nude gore, exhaustive discussions of the place of chestbursting in franchise history.

But first! I saw a tag with a desire to see the scene with David and the star map. To spare everyone from watching the rest of the movie to get there, here it is!

[See previous post for lengthy description of the events. I didn’t talk about the music in this before though! It really adds to the sense of wonder in this scene. It reminds me of Daft Punk’s Overture to Tron Legacy (2010), another beautiful and flawed movie. Given the modern use of temporary music in editing that definitely sneaks into what directors demand of scores, there’s a chance this was a direct influence. In terms of the “oh wow, space!” feeling it gives me, I’d also mention the Star Trek TNG opening theme.]

Anyway! On with the horror.

In Alien, the creature’s life cycle was developed by writer Dan O'Bannon, who had two major ideas for its early appearances: sexual, reproductive threat directed at a male character, and Crohn’s disease. O’Bannon had Crohn’s, and he said that inspired the idea of a critter chewing its way out of a man’s guts. 

That personal connection has been lost through subsequent media, in part because the series has continued to use the same creature and the same method of killing, minor deviations like in Covenant and tasteless ones like AvP Requiem notwithstanding. The chestburster is a thing that can only ever really work once in a movie. The first time is relatively drawn out, made a setpiece of the movie, and is a horrifying plot twist for anyone who goes in blind. After that? Drawing it out may risk becoming meaningless gore or boring, so most movies have chosen to just have the little bugger pop out within seconds. It’s the sideshow before you get to the main event, despite being the iconic scene of Alien.

Prometheus’ equivalent scene wins back a fair amount of tension by altering the details of the event, if not the general arc of it. It certainly hammers on the reproductive horror aspect, but loses the original subversion of targeting a male character. Which is a shame, because male-targeted reproductive horror is still boundary-pushing. From the world of horror gaming, Outlast: Whistleblower produced some notably panicked reactions from male players when they encountered the emasculating, specifically reproductive threat of Eddie Gluskin. (Content warning for gore, death, forced feminization, misogynistic language, censored nudity.)

Regardless, we have The Chestburster Scene again, but now it’s in the back half of the movie, and happens to the main human protagonist.

I find it very odd that this movie is so self-consciously iterating over things that were first done in Alien. It’s like watching a devout Catholic pray at the Stations of the Cross.

Speaking of crosses

Before we get to the main event, there’s the first actual attempt at character work between David and Shaw in the movie, as we’re in the final act. David confiscates Shaw’s cross as she wakes up from her post-boyfriend-barbeque faint. “It may be contaminated,” he says.

Shaw’s christianity is one of the few character traits in the film that ties into one of the themes, and has its own arc. She’s giving up her cross to the person who killed her partner, a metaphor for a crisis of faith which is so blatant as to barely be a metaphor at all. And, given the general arc of how these things go, means she’s going to get it back at some point. The context for it is going to be confusing and disappointing, frankly.

And it’s especially weird given the other metaphor going on simultaneously: David runs some scans on her, and declares she’s three months pregnant. This is a non-virgin virgin pregnancy. She is Alien Mary. This, then, is the narrative reason why Shaw is infertile–so that she could be the Mary figure, and, more practically for the plot, have foreknowledge that something was wrong. 

Except it really didn’t have to be that way to make this work. While christian allegory and the creation of life are themes in this movie, Shaw’s infertility was handled with zero grace. And honestly, the movie could work without it–Shaw and Holloway did not have romantic chemistry, as far as I could tell. Lean into that! Just say they haven’t had sex in ages. This scene would actually flow better, because Shaw explicitly objects that she only had sex with Holloway “ten hours ago. There's no bloody way I'm three months pregnant.”

Which again hammers in how stupid fast this movie has been racing its characters toward their doom, but I’m immediately distracted by David pronouncing “it's not exactly a traditional fetus.”

It certainly isn’t. It’s an alien squid, placed there by the holy spirit of black goo. She’s all set to give birth to Squesus. 

I think that’s the only worse way he possibly could’ve said it.

David, frankly, gets some of his worst dialog of the movie here, because he is infected by The Plot for a bit. “It must feel like your God has abandoned you,” he says, after sedating her, “to loose Dr. Holloway after your father died under such similar circumstances.” Which leaves one momentarily with the wild mental image of Dad Shaw sacrificing himself to a flamethrower-welding corpo, but no, David means ebola. David found this out via that dream-watching tech that exists solely to be a mildly unnecessary plot point. Blessedly, this is the last time we see any mention of it.

It’s very strange, how the movie is stuffed full of plot and edited so tightly around the plot that characters barely have room to breathe, yet what it prioritizes as plot-relevant is so scattershot. This failing is also inflicted upon the part of the otherwise very effective Chestburster: The Prequel scene.

Shaw attacks the people who come to take her away to cryo, running in her underwear to the PAULING MED-POD the movie very loudly announced earlier, so that you wouldn’t forget it exists. She tells the PAULING MED-POD that she needs an emergency caesarian. The PLOTPOINT MED-POD informs her that it’s only formatted for male patients.

I’ve seen many people complain this makes no sense. It’s in Vickers’ quarters,  why would she have an expensive medical device that she can’t fully use? Others counter that no, it makes sense, because the med-pod was actually installed for Peter Weyland, thus justifying its male specificity. He’s a selfish bastard, he got it for himself, plot hole avoided.

…Except that doesn’t address the more fundamental problem: What does this add to this scene, to balance out the fact that the audience is now distracted by this information? It slows Shaw down a bit as she figures out how to cue up a foreign body extraction from the abdominal cavity, adding to the tension. But you don’t need that to be what draws out the scene. Maybe the PAULING MED-POD has a slow boot-up sequence. Maybe someone follows her there, and she has to fight them off, possibly killing them in her panic. A dead body in the room would solve an actual logical problem with a later scene.

It’s frustrating, because the pacing of this scene is actually excellent, as is its premise. Shaw has to forego anesthesia and make do with self-administered local painkillers, because the prosthetics and CG teams have done a bang-up job making her stomach writhe unpleasantly, making it very clear that whatever’s in there is mobile enough to be a danger to her, even if it’s removed. 

The pods instruments are mostly CG, but its combination of unhurried routine and abrupt, industrial roboticism adds to the uncomfortable nature of the scene. Sound design is also important here, with all sound effects well-chosen, and mixed to imply claustrophobic closeness and how trapped Shaw is.

The creature itself? Eh. It’s a slightly phallic squid, and squids were already slightly phallic to begin with. They added on a slightly vaginal mouth, which is also a lateral move--squid mouths already look quite a lot like an unworksafe orifice with a beak tucked away in it. Unless you're looking at Promachoteuthis sulcus, whose inner lip structures fold into patterns that look distressingly like human teeth.

Honestly, this is freakier than the actual prop. Good job, Promachoteuthis sulcus. You're only 25 mm long, and a delightful tiny terror.

...But the fact that Shaw’s stuck in the pod with her flailing squid-child is what actually adds another minute of fear and wince-worthy pain, as the almost comically brutal medical staple gun closes her incision and the pod slowly opens up.

She tries to kill it with what appears to be a soothing mist of decontamination spray. This is the one other stumble of the scene, because it’s just… I mean, look at it.

It’s just been spritzed with Febreze. There’s nothing that leaves you wondering if the thing’s still alive for later, you know it’s still alive.

But overall, a well-done scene. The standout horror scene of the movie, which is light on scares. That sparsity wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if the movie were going for slow tension, but with its strange blend of existential quandaries and unremarkable horror tropes, it takes a very strong, singular scene to feel like the tension has actually paid off. I don’t think it completely balances out the deficits of the rest of the horror, but it very nearly manages it, and does manage to be memorable.

Next time: An entirely underwhelming horror scene, and the movie takes another swing at having themes.

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Citations for alt-text rambles:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/30/memory-the-origins-of-alien-review-francis-bacon-greek-myth-dan-o-bannon-sci-fi-classic-film 

https://www.stanwinstonschool.com/blog/aliens-chestburster-mechanism-behind-the-scenes 

https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Seegson 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3314219/how-do-u-v-coordinates-work 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgical_staple (medical gore cw)

https://sites.uw.edu/pauling2020/ 

https://www.paulinamarket.com/

Overflow Ramble #1

A shot of the screen on Chekhov’s g–I mean the PAULING MED-POD, showing the text “EMERGENCY PROCEDURE”, and that it is “AWT VERBAL CMD”. The med-pod turns out to be a Weyland product, because all corporations in Alien movies are either Weyland, Yutani, or Seegson, if you’re particularly unlucky (cite 3). 

They made the mistake of putting more actual words on here, and so I’m squinting at the top right corner at “CARDIAC STRESS TEST”, “ELECTROCARDIOGRAPHY” AND “MECH ALGN TCH”, which means the pod appears to think she needs to have her heart checked or her wheels aligned.

But what I find funniest is that there’s coordinate sliders in the center bottom: X/Y/Z and U/W. You know where I recognize that from? 3D modeling. U/V/W are used as an alternate coordinate system in that context (cite 4). Somebody was designing this, thinking “well, we need more buttons. Where can I get more buttons?” and then looked at the horrid mass of options and sliders in their modeling software and realized they had the answer.

Overflow Ramble #2

A close-up of David’s hands, holding a sample container and placing Shaw’s necklace inside. Two details, one of them insane, the other just plain funny: First of all, this is a different set of hands than the one when David was messing with the black goo–there was a small but notable blemish on the fingerprint that wasn’t there, proving once again that hand and arm doubles are one of the odder things you don’t think about in film production.

Second: The container is turned so that the label on it is facing away. This allows you to see the necklace, but it also highlights a completely flat Braille label, reading “PN#ZTZouSthe#Z”, which is obviously very informative.

But the real reason why the label is facing away is because it almost hides the fact that the label says “PRODUCT CODE” on it, which means he may have just put Shaw’s necklace in an empty peanut butter jar.

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[lustmord]

Alien Covenant is a 'bad' movie because everyone in it has stupid bitch disease, BUT David is in it with his silly little human experiments and drawings <3, and he plays that gay flute with Walter so I think it evens out

[gaylittleguys]

ok 2/3 watched verdict: Prometheus was definitely the better of the two, but still miles behind the original. Both are basically just entirely different tonally and story-wise from the original that they really would have been better served being their own entirely different thing. It feels like it’s more interested in the synthetic/human/engineer creator/creation parent/child thing, and the aliens are just sort of thrown in there.

It’s really hard not to just compare it to Alien 1979 bc I love that movie and it’s really good lol. I liked both of the protagonists in the movies, for the most part they were both very compelling and interesting characters. I think it’s a very contemporary movie move to give characters a relationship to give them ‘depth’ (especially women.) but I don’t think it works here. I really didn’t care for Elizabeth’s partner in Prometheus, I think their relationship would have been fine as just coworkers and professional partners. I can see a parallel to other movies with men as protagonists having gfs/wives that do nothing but die to fuel their tragic backstory, and maybe there was a similar reversed intent here, but idgaf he was annoying. Also personally I find it more compelling to have a crew of characters in this sort of tense horror story to not have close (romantic) relationships, because inevitably it ends up being a case of one half dying for tension. If a couple shows up you KNOW at least one if not both of them isn’t making it out of there. As was the case for. Hm. Almost the entire crew in Covenant. :| Just make everybody coworkers that’s more interesting I beg you.

I think the philosophical questions raised in Prometheus were very interesting, even if it got a little muddled in the script. The above noted tensions were interesting and it’s not too far a jump from the reproductive horror of the original. Although taking it to its next, less visceral and immediate level. Covenant seemed to kind of dump a lot of it in favour of a more blockbuster-y action. Although the dialogues between David and Walter were interesting too, building off of some of the synthetic/human questions in its predecessor.

Buuuut also i think it’s not interesting to explain the history of the aliens and such. The mystery is what’s intriguing. If I may talk about the original again, the reason why I love it and why it’s stuck as a staple is because of its sense of tension and mystery. Even though I’ve seen it many times if still on the edge of my seat! I’m scared for the characters! These ones don’t come close to that tension. They’re so fast paced you don’t have time for the dread to sink in. And the mysteries of the world itself in the original draws you in! You see the inscrutable alien remnants from a long dead civilization and you wonder what it all means and who could have made all this. And I think those questions are more important than the answers. It’s such a letdown that it’s just like. Idk it was some big bald guys. That’s nothiiiingggggg. You see the big machine in the center of the ship that looks like a body becoming part of the controls itself in that beautifully horrifying Geiger style. And these new ones say. Well. A guy goes in there. Nothing interesting.

Although it may be bc I’m tired now and was only partially paying attention, but. Why was David selectively breeding more nursery xenomorphs. Just because he was bored?? I mean I get it I guess but. Ok. What an uninteresting answer.

Technically and visually they were both very beautiful, again Prometheus more so, and I thought the engineers ship was very cool looking. I did think a lot of the human tech was very generically scifi and I was missing the clunkiness of the original. But I’m also biased I love that era of scifi tech.

Anyway! They were ok and I will watch Romulus tomorrow.

[feral-lore-creature]

I got the David 8 art book, and it's absolutely amazing. It gives very small bits about the Engineers here and there. In both quality, and content, it's 100% worth the money. Amazing collector's item.

[theropoda]

but yes i did recently watch sum of the alien movies recently (plan to watch more, not done w all of them) so i can prep for romulus and can i say. davids sad little man cave in covenant is such a wet dream in so many ways. both from an in-universe perspective (basically a laboratory filled with taxidermied specimens and things in jars and bodies and anatomical charts and drawings and and and) and irl perspective (incredible set design as a result of an immense amount of artistic talent) it looks so cozy. Idgaf what horrible experiments happened there i want to go there. Like some fucked up museum exhibit. highlight of that movie

[driusha]