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Great Scott! Three Fascinating Religious Characters in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant

Great Scott! Three Fascinating Religious Characters in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant

Last updated on: November 8, 2017 at 11:53 am by Paul Asay

Great Scott! Three Fascinating Religious Characters in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant 2017-11-08T11:53:44-06:00 Paul Asay

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David, the Egomaniacal Android

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant, photo courtesy 20th Century Fox

David, the Egomaniacal Android

When Oram, Daniels and the rest of the crew set the Covenant lander down on the mysterious planet, David’s one of the first “living” things they encounter. The android’s been hanging out on the planet for a good decade or so—ever since we moviegoers last saw him in Prometheus.

And he spent his time playing God.

Creation is a big deal for David (Michael Fassbender). We see that in the movie’s opening scenes—a flashback where David chats with his human “father,” Peter Weyland. “If you created me, who created you?” Weyland—perhaps giving voice to Scott’s own fascination with the divine—says that that’s really the biggest question there is, and the only real question worth asking.

But David tells us later that Weyland was “entirely unworthy of his creation,” and decides to take on the mantel of a god himself.

His delusions of divine grandeur are hinted at everywhere: He quotes Shelley’s Ozymandias (“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”) and plays Wagner’s “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” Most critically, he decides to try his own hand at creation. The aliens, it turns out, are his. And at times he even treats them like his own children.

“Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven,” David says, looking upon his diabolical creation.

David’s an interesting character, particularly given Scott’s cinematic canon. See, in Scott’s view, rebels typically win the day.

“It is sometimes said that an artist only tells one story in his life; Scott has consistently returned to the theme of an outsider defying nearly everything and everyone around him to rescue something uniquely precious to himself,” wrote Connor Malloy for The Catholic World Report in 2013. “This usually involves foregoing belief in the highest good, the summum bonum—God—in favor of one’s own value system.”

But here, David exposes the problems of being a rebellious, faithless outsider. Like many a Scott hero before, David defies and rejects his own authorities to rescue and preserve “something uniquely precious to himself”—his own overweening self-identity. He, like Satan, suffers from the sin of pride and falls into a hell literally of his own making. You gotta serve somebody, Bob Dylan famously told us. And David, the ultimate rebel, serves only himself and his misbegotten creation.

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