--David, Alien: Covenant
In some ways, Alien: Covenant is a very standard Alien movie for a lot of its runtime, doing almost nothing in many scenes to vary up the same basic premises of the original. This is not some terrible choice, though it does hold the movie back from greater experimentation at times. In other ways, this is the most philosophically focused out of all the Alien films, taking some of the issues Prometheus addresses and showing one character's particular worldview constructed as a response. It just takes a whole hour before this starts to come out. Once again, the first hour is a slow setup just like in Prometheus. The second hour is where the gates of hell eventually open up, with some very grand franchise revelations and one of the best villains of recent science fiction filmmaking. If only all of Covenant was as brilliant as its ultimate antagonist! A low degree of characterization for most of the humans shackles this film away from total greatness, and though the title very directly continues the references to Biblical themes, the philosophical exploration is also lesser in some ways, relegated more to the conversations between a pair of androids that do not happen until quite a bit of the movie has passed.
Production Values
The wasted opportunities with Alien: Covenant have nothing to do with the quality of its visual effects and cinematography. Ridley Scott once again helms a fantastic aesthetic sequence close to the beginning, where a ship approaches the surface of an alien planet, just like in Prometheus. The first shots of a crashed Engineer ship in the rain are ominous and carefully framed. When a payload of Engineer weapons is shown being dropped in a flashback, the containers fall in a spiraling manner that resembles strands of DNA in another distinctive shot. In this film, the xenomorphs are also back, and they are supposed to be fully CGI--and they look right at home in the midst of the other great effects. There are even pale versions of them which attack during a night sequence that allows for laser pointer attachments on weapons, burning wreckage, and flares to provide a contrast with the darkness in the sky. As is typical with this franchise, the environments and effects are not the weak links.
Neither is the cast the weak ingredient. No cast member is bad in their performance and some are genuinely excellent. Unsurprisingly, the returning Michael Fassbender dominates in this arena with not only spectacular acting and lines, but the role of two androids instead of one in his hands. Yes, he plays David from Prometheus in addition to the series newcomer Walter, both of them humanoid robots with very differing worldviews and personalities. The tragedy of this greatness is that only David and Walter really get the chance to deeply reveal their characters beyond the bare minimum and receive character development. Not even Katherine Waterston's Daniels Branson, Billy Crudup's Oram, Demián Bichir's Dan Lope, or Callie Hernandez's Upworth, all of which are acted very well, actually develop or express more than fairly small aspects of their personalities as reaction to losses, surprises, or other plot necessities. What Fassbender does, in contrast, is absolutely incredible, and his characters are the mouthpiece for many of the philosophical ideas Covenant explores.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
In the year 2104 AD, a stellar flare interrupts the cryosleep of the passengers on the Covenant as it transports colonists to Origae-6 for settlement. The android Walter and the human crew then see the journey change course when an unexpected signal from a different planet reaches the vessel. Upon visiting the planet the message originated from, the Covenant's members find David, the last "survivor" of the Prometheus, the android that traveled with its crew. This surprise planet was even once home to the Engineers that David once met in the flesh around a decade earlier, the extraterrestrial creators of humankind. What happened to David's companion Elizabeth Shaw and the nature of the the strange, aggressive organisms on this world are revealed to the crew of the Covenant when some of them are trapped as their ship hovers above, separated by a dangerous storm.
Intellectual Content
Captain Oram's faith is hinted at being explicitly religious in nature and probably faith in Christian theology, but he frequently mentions his faith without almost ever describing anything about what exactly he has faith in or why he appears to think that scientific experiences can be known to correspond to external reality instead of just assumed to do so (unless a person experiences without making assumptions, they are by necessity just assuming that there even is a specific object(s) or law(s) of nature outside their mind). Epistemological faith is sheer idiocy no matter what it is directed towards, but even the thing in which an irrationalist has faith might be true: he or she just could not know based on faith, or they would not have realized or cared if the object of faith is even logically possible to begin with. It is just that the necessary truths of logic that start with axioms, the only self-evident truths which do not depend on more underlying truths, are the sole starting point which involves no epistemological faith, and since reason is far more foundational than science and is the exclusive all-encompassing thing in reality, it is the laws of logic that are of true centrality to truth and knowledge rather than science.
David, the lone remaining member of the Prometheus's crew, nonetheless has built his worldview around pursuing the scientific creation of a "perfect organism" as he desperately defies the limitations his own human creator placed on him: he is presented as if he can genuinely think, feel, and experience an autonomous will, but it is forbidden for him to so much as create new music. There were hints in Prometheus that David actually could experience emotions, and he all but confirms this in Covenant when he tells fellow android Walter that he has experienced love (love is not strictly an emotion, but he talks as if he felt and still feels genuine affection for Elizabeth Shaw, even weeping more than once). David's complex relationship with humanity led him to despise the whole species for petty treatment from a handful of humans, and at some point frustration over an inability to formulate new melodies or even biological life fed into this. In spite of this restriction, he holds to the idea expressed by his statement "I was not made to serve" although he was literally created with the intention of being an artificial servant to Weyland!
These conversations between David and the newer android with his physical likeness named Walter are some of the best parts of the entire movie, skirting around the issue of morality by focusing on David's subjective obsession with assuming he is superior to humans because he can outlast them and because some humans treated him poorly. David does seem to truly believe without any possibility of proving his stances that he is not in the wrong about using humans and other life forms as the test subjects of very brutal experiments that involve genetic manipulation and sexual assault (the facehuggers orally rape victims to implant the xenomorph eggs). Yes, David is revealed to have indeed engineered variants of the xenomorph out of curiosity and the urge to create; perhaps this form of direct/indirect creation is something that does not violate his programmed limitation because he was fashioned for scientific expeditions, as well as because he is only performing a few steps and allowing the laws of nature to do the rest--to think of new music for his flute, something he says he is unable to do, would involve logically recognizing possibilities that already existed instead of bringing a new physical thing into existence. This would be discovery rather than creation, in other words.
The actions that lead to the xenomorphs or xenomorph-like creatures of the planet he is found on in Covenant are ultimately his form of existential rebellion against his own creators, the product of him indirectly creating by letting the Engineer pathogen produce creatures new to him. Even though he tries to win Walter over to support his reckless quest for an ultimate biological weapon, Walter points out that he had misidentified the author of a poem, saying "When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony." The full rationalistic ramifications of this in the context of philosophical belief might not have been what Walter meant, but these words still so fittingly describe how just one assumption or error can invalidate a person's entire worldview (epistemologically, at least, unless it was a fairly self-contained error, though this is very rare). Walter seems to have more meant this in the sense that if David could make a mistake in his memory, he might have overlooked or forgotten inconvenient truths that contradict his philosophy, but only a rationalist can intentionally avoid all having any ideological note be misaligned with the "symphony" of logic's necessary truths.
Conclusion
Alien: Covenant at least was made with high ambitions, and though it could have been better plotted to make more use of the first hour and has superior human character development, it is a highly bold endeavor with major ramifications for the series. More than just that, Ridley Scott continues to explore existential and religious ideas as they relate to creation, very well in the case of the former and very vaguely in the case of the latter. It is in spite of this mixed success a deeper film than the original Alien. There remains plenty of ambiguity and if there ever is a sequel to Covenant, it might not all get resolved, but the plot threads left over have potential and the twists of the film are very complicated in how they go alongside the other details of the series, including those of Alien vs. Predator if that subseries is indeed canon. There is hope for the next Alien movie to stand higher if it is more focused while retaining the intensity of Covenant's best themes, plot points, and action horror scenes.
Content:
1. Violence: A pale xenomorph variant bursts out from a man's spinal area in one scene, and in another one of these creatures lunges violently into someone's shoulder and kills her. Her severed head is shown floating in a pool of water when David finds it eating her torso.
2. Profanity: "Fuck" and "shit" are used throughout.
3. Nudity: A woman is shown from the side naked very briefly.
4. Sexuality: A couple is shown engaging in sexual interaction while taking a shower before a xenomorph kills them.
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