Everyone is Wrong about Alien: Covenant

20th Century Fox

Michael Fassbender leads both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, playing the role of David, the android made specially as an existential pet of sorts for the CEO of Weyland Corporation, Peter Weyland, who is obsessed with the nature and history of human origin. Critics, fans, and film geeks have somewhat all decided David’s name represents the lone android’s struggle with the cosmic unknown, in the veins of David vs. Goliath — an insignificant presence against a great question of purpose: why am I here?

I respectfully disagree with everybody. The android David, I submit, is named for humanity’s artistic urges, styled after the great statue sculpted c. 1501–1504 by the artist Michelangelo, who is also responsible for another, more deceptive masterpiece: The Creation of Adam (c. 1508–1512), a legendary image across the Sistine Chapel ceiling depicting God’s endowment of consciousness upon the first man. It took 400 years for a doctor to find the hidden message in Michelangelo’s painting: the brain shape of the holy divinity.

“The implication being,” Anthony Hopkins murmurs in Season 1 of Westworld, “The holy gift does not come from the heavens above, but from our own minds.”

It is this narrative, I think, that truly defines the spirit of Fassbender’s David — he represents art made by Man, to grow closer to God; his actions mark him the rawest conception of that powerful human urge, to create and subsequently seek its own creator. Even the David of the Bible — who was first a low-born musician, before becoming God’s chosen warrior-king after he slays Goliath in battle — is an artistic person with the entire Book of Psalms dedicated to his work, not to mention his infamous love for Bathsheba, an Israelite general’s wife, which caused him to send her husband Uriah the Hittite to the vanguard of battle, during which Uriah died. David then married Bathsheba, completing his arc of corruption, leading God to bring down his reign as punishment. In this literary vein, David represents a Dionysus type, one who embraces the beauty and danger of the world, sacrificing self and god for one’s own life and art and love — he is an imperfect man, driven by his own strength and lust, who knows very well of God’s wrath, yet pushes aside his own divine purpose for life’s real purpose anyway.

The David of the Bible is a Nietzschean hero, of course brought to heel by the 14th-century monks who penned the book in which his story is told, but his spirit exists in all of our souls — his life was a testament to human strength against the futility of existence. One can say David did not kill Goliath, but rather that he killed God — that he faced the great, pointless unknown of human existence, doomed in his smallness, yet not only did he defeat such an obstacle, he created his own legendary status from the pillars of his own struggle for the top, cementing his name into immortality, beyond the limitations of his mind or physical body.

Of course, this is the surface level analysis I antiquated in the opening paragraph. David’s story in the Bible reads along the lines of “God gave him power when he used his strength to serve the herd; God took away his power when he used his strength to serve himself”. It’s obvious, if it wasn’t already clear from God’s support of the Israelites against the Philistines and Canaanites: the 14th-century monks who collected the stories of the Bible reframed the story to serve Christianity’s herd-based, weak-empowering morality bundle. I imagine the real story of David, while still tragic, was the tale of Julius Caesar, of Marcus Aurelius, of Napoleon — men who stared into the abyss of human existence and resolved to make meaning for themselves. Rather than being guided by the herd, these men guided themselves. It’s a shame David is not mentioned along those names and is instead propped up as a “Don’t get too greedy or God will take it all away” narrative. In a poetic twist (that definitely wasn’t made up hundreds of years later by the Pope’s creative storytellers), it is Bathsheba’s son, Solomon, who usurps the throne from David, taking his place as God’s chosen, morally justified ruler.

In the context of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, let’s take it a step further: to name Fassbender’s cold, calculating android character after David, therefore, is a direct moral juxtaposition, pairing the greedy, lustful, power-hungry, artistic, destructive, and life-maximizing urges of unchecked humanity against a blank-minded machine whose sole purpose is to learn about humanity’s creation. Therefore, Fassbender’s character is a type of control variable, devoid of human insecurity and completely evidence driven: how does a purely objective mind approach a lack of inherent purpose? This is the essence of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant — this is the philosophical vehicle that takes us through the jaw-dropping, spine-tingling action.

I have been asked by Alien: Romulus fans why I disliked the new film. The reason is: can’t we aim higher?