#HTE

Breaking Down “Alien: Covenant’s” 3D-Printed Android Commercial

For the last Alien movie, Prometheus, the marketers cooked up a faux TED Talk from the year 2023. For the next installment of the franchise, Covenant, they’re broadcasting this faux commercial for Walter, “The world’s most advanced synthetic companion:”

Here we can see the android’s structure appears to be 3D-printed. And it’s missing a head thus far because…

…it seems that the head is manufactured in a separate machine or facility from the body.

After they screw the head on (I would so love it if the connection was threaded), it appears they bond it on by some type of light-based curing process.

Blink and you’ll miss it, but apparently the android is powered by an AMD Radeon chip, right down to the logo. I guess in the future they’ve expanded beyond graphics cards and into artificial intelligence.

After the head is installed, LEDs come on inside, presumably to provide feedback to the techs. Blinking blue lights mean “Now booting up,” flashing red lights would mean “Installation failed, please unscrew the head and try again.”

I don’t see any logos, but who do you figure wins the tablet war in the future, Apple or Samsung?

We can see that they pump the android full of the same white “circulatory fluid” we saw going all the way back to Ash, the android from the first Alien movie. One of the line items on the studio’s production sheet for this scene was definitely “milk.”

One thing I couldn’t figure out is what the supposed function of the 3D-printed facemasks on the tech is. We can see there’s clearly a person, or another android, inside; are these purely protective, in case the “patient” spazzes out? (And yes, I realize that the production designer probably just thought that they looked cool.)

While watching futuristic movies, Designer’s Curse means I must seek out anachronistic objects. By the year 3003, all of our engineering efforts have been diverted into androids. Zero advances have been made in the field of rolling cart casters…

…and boxcutters.

Lastly, I’m digging how they jammed the legal disclaimers into the end of the commercial. Of all the nationalities and occupations that may disappear in the next millennia, American corporate lawyers are not one of them.