David And Walter

"When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David."

--Walter, Alien: Covenant

"It's your choice now, brother.  Them or me.  Serve in heaven or reign in hell.  Which is it to be?"

--David, Alien: Covenant

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are some of the most thematically grand mainstream movies to be made, touching on religious metaphysics and epistemology, sexual horror, cosmic horror, the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence to varying extents.  With Alien: Covenant, the prequels shift the focus onto AI to a far greater extent than the franchise had ever emphasized before, using them to continue to explore the religious, theistic, and existential themes of Prometheus that pertain to how vital the act of creation is.  Covenant features two androids, one a later edition of the same physical model.  One is named David after the renowned statue of the Biblical figure.  The other is named Walter.  While the general analogies here are far from perfectly overlapping with the Christian philosophical ideas they are supposed to echo, David and Walter are personifications of creatures in rebellion and submision towards God respectively.  One is hell-bent on gratifying its own arrogant whims that ironically mirror some of the human creators it despises even as the other is content to carry out what it calls its "duty" to its creators.

They are so very similar in their outward appearance, different versions of the same base android template, but the sharp distinctions in their worldviews are verbalized early in their conversations.  Walter is an android designed to purposefully avoid some of the same enhanced autonomy allowed to David, who was fashioned at an earlier point in time and was too unsettling in how many similarities he shared with humans.  This autonomy, though it had constraints like some limitations on the ability to create (something Satan cannot do in the same sense as God, being a created being himself and not an uncaused cause), is what David wielded maliciously as a reaction to the relatively lesser oppression he faced from his "master" Weyland--lesser because David literally experiments with xenomorphs in order to kill humans.  Walter might genuinely be dissuaded by his programming to some extent, but he does not rage against his status as a creation of humans, instead doing what he can to protect them at risk to himself.  Upon finding an unexpected fellow android when passengers from the starship Covenant land on his planet, David tries to persuade Walter to join in his hostile rebellion against humans.  Since there are hints and a direct reference (see the final paragraph) to David being a Satan-like character, these androids and their human creators parallel God and his angelic creations.  They embrace two very different attitudes and corresponding worldviews regarding submission to God.

David does not think Walter's open contentment with human leadership is a valid lifestyle, telling Walter "I was not made to serve.  Neither were you."  Of course, the entire intention behind creating David and other androids was that they were supposed to serve humanity, regardless of how cruel or egoistic the individual humans around them are (David's hatred of humanity seems rooted more in how a few specific humans belittled him instead of how he can outlive or overpower them).  This is why humans engineered AI assistants.  In this, David gives away that he is either too stupid to realize that he was not made to do as he pleases just because he wishes it was so or that he is a wholehearted moral/existential relativist, thinking that his preferences must have objective value because he subjectively experiences them.  That would depend on God's moral nature, not on human conscience or an android's preferences.  Since his desire is to create a more so-called "perfect organism" [1] that can serve as remorseless killers of humanity, a version of the xenomorph that predated the events of Prometheus and Covenant, he clearly thinks morality does not exist or that what he does is just or at least permissible.  Like Satan and other demons of Biblical theology, about which the Bible itself says far less than many Christians assume, David chooses to violently oppose his creator out of existential pride.

When Walter has the chance to land a killing blow on David, the latter asks if Walter will choose to serve in heaven or reign in hell, likely thinking of John Milton's Paradise Lost in light of how he quoted Ozymandias and alluded to Robinson Crusoe earlier in the film.  The very title Alien: Covenant was originally planned by director Ridley Scott to be Alien: Paradise Lost, which only provides more fairly direct evidence outside of the finished movie that the religious and theistic themes are very intentional.  David is a satanic archetpype that more fully gets the chance to reveal and revel in himself than many other villains in cinema, an author of destruction much like the description Jesus gives in John 10 of what seems to be the devil of Christianity, and a created being that was not content to serve the uncaused cause without which it could not have existed.  The parallel to Satan is explicit only in a handful of scenes such as the fight with Walter where David references Milton's Lucifer, but David is characterized by the same selfishness, cruelty, and hypocrisy of a fallen angel that thinks its subjective whims could possibly be more foundational or authoritative than the character of the deity that brought it into existence.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-perfect-organism-alien-covenants.html