An Alien: Covenant Short Film Takes Us Back to David’s Laboratory
Word of advice: never stare directly into the opening of an alien egg.
20th Century Fox has released a new short film to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Alien: Covenant DVD release. The short, which was made in partnership with YouTube Space LA, is titled David’s Lab – Last Signs of Life, and follows a nameless Weyland-Yutani astronaut as he explores the evil android’s abandoned laboratory on the Engineers’ homeworld.
In Covenant, we learned that David mixed the Engineers’ black goo pathogen with Elizabeth Shaw’s (Noomi Rapace) organs to create the first Xenomorph. It’s unclear how long after Covenant this short is supposed to take place. When we last saw David (Michael Fassbender), he had snuck onto the colonization ship Covenant, tricking Daniels (Katherine Waterston) into believing he was nice guy android Walter, and bringing with him two facehugger embryos and setting sail for Origae-6.
As the astronaut explores the lab, we see David’s sketches of his experiments to engineer a superior creature. It’s a well-realized recreation of the lab, what with all the alien skeletons, the gooey remnants, and of course the pulsating, living alien egg. The only voice we hear in the 10-minute short is the computer analysis system that the astronaut uses to scan the egg.
In the analysis, we discover that the egg is composed of a “carbon-based protein matrix” and that (surprise, surprise) there appears to be something moving inside of it. The poor astronaut peers into the open egg and the screen cuts to black, but we hear the tell-tale sounds of a facehugger attack. (Sidebar: what is it with Weyland-Yutani employees always leaning face-first into those eggs? Someone needs to call Human Resources and update their training manual.)
It’s a fun short, but probably only interesting to the most die-hard Alien fans. And it’s likely to be the only Alien content we’ll be seeing for some time. Ridley Scott’s planned third prequel film, Alien: Awakening, was shelved after the middling box office performance of 2017’s Covenant. Add to that Fox’s merger with Disney, and the future of the franchise is very much up in the air.
As someone who was not a fan of Prometheus or Covenant, I can’t say I’m sorry to see Awakening delayed. What’s far more disappointing is Neil Blomkamp’s canceled Alien film, which would have seen the return of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley to the franchise.
Rumor has it that Fox was hot on Blomkamp’s reboot, which would have retconned all the films after Aliens a la Danny McBride’s Halloween reboot, before Ridley Scott allegedly decided that he didn’t want a new take interfering with his prequels. I still there is a massive audience for a Weaver-led Alien sequel, and I still wouldn’t be surprised to see it come together in some form in the future.
After all, Weaver herself is game, and the Alien franchise is still popular worldwide. Come on Disney, what are you waiting for?
(via Syfy Wire, image: 20th Century Fox/YouTube)
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