The Alien: Covenant - Ragnarok

Ridley Scott has returned with the mysteries of Prometheus. However, unlike most of the audience's expectations, Covenant was not a sequel to Prometheus, explaining all those mysteries. Following the narrative's chronology, it is the final episode of the trilogy, and a yet made middle episode sits between Prometheus and Covenant.

On top of this, the hopeful discourse about the courage of humankind from Prometheus completely vaporizes in Covenant. By any measure, The Prometheus project is a prequel to the Alien saga, which is notorious for its hopeless images. No matter how powerful the female characters are, the Alien saga is a veritable bloodbath without a modicum of optimistic hope. Therefore, the theme of Prometheus can not help derail from its optimism and become more Alien-like in this film.

Despite numerous negative reviews on the movie and the fact that it's not as perfect as Prometheus, Covenant is a classic. Having aged, Ridley Scott has become more and more negligent in developing a packed storyline and compelling character motivations, but his philosophy has become sharper and more daring. In the flagrant images of the film, a profound discourse that nobody could ever think a space horror film could create. Although Covenant detaches itself from the theme of Prometheus, a coherent discourse about hierarchical ontology can be found in the two films.

In Prometheus, the audience witnessed Spinoza deconstructing the boundary between creator and creature. However, this colossal mistake of western philosophy has returned to the center of the narrative in Covenant. The movie's first scene, where David and chairman Wayland meet for the first time, implies everything the film wants to tell. Wayland's chair is 'The Throne,' designed by Carlo Bugatti, and he places himself on the top of the hierarchy, a dominant, a creator. He confirms the hierarchy by ordering David to pour the tea after David points out the poignant truth: "you will die one day, but I will not." Before the immortality of his creation, what the creator can do is to assure his power structure.

The name of the colonizing ship, Covenant, means the promise of God in the Bible. This promise has been a powerful weapon of Western Europe, legitimizing its blind progress and violent expansion. Europeans once believed that God ordained them, so their culture was only right and civilized. So-called rationalism and the enlightenment proclaimed that they had found barbarism in the new lands and tried to civilize them. Countless innocent died in pursuit of this promised land, and many atrocities have been committed in the name of European reason. As this bloody blot of history arrives on an unknown planet, the narrative dives into darker images.

The energy of Spinoza is no more here. A sneer of the twisted creature smears the plant that has become his bio-lab. 'You reap what you sow,' one by one, people who treated AI as a slave get killed by the AI. Although the conflict between creator and creature has long been a cliche since Frankenstein and has been exploited for cheap horror films, David's intention in Covenant is not just vengeance. He goes further from killing engineers and tries to become the creator itself. The old wish of Wayland, becoming God, has become his creature's wish.

This abused humanoid shatters the pantheistic potential that produced equality among beings into pieces as he annihilates the engineers. David says, 'they are a dying species, so they deserve to die.' Death is not an end but a change in pantheism, and David, as his father Wayland did, takes it selectively to construct his hierarchy. To him, those who can't satisfy his standard are inferior.

Hierarchical ontology produces a desire for superiority, like western European philosophy used to strive to reach the end of history or find the sole ground of being. Like Linear Theory of Historical Stages and Social Evolution, an illusion of progress that once covered the world becomes present once again through David. David's room is filled with anatomical charts of various species, and at the center of it, the corpse of Dr. Shaw, who once stood for pantheistic harmony. He tries to make a perfect organism by using life as a material. This is a metaphor for the dream of modern times and its remnant specters today. Modern Europe was eager to create a perfect society with a perfect race. It conceived of humans as a being that can be carved and reformed for a particular purpose. (Foucault)

The images of H.R Giger begin to contribute to the film's discourse. His paintings connect naked human bodies with cold machines in grotesque positions. The horror of Giger's work stems from the fact that the human body, even its sexual features, becomes materials, parts for a machine. The audience gets an unpleasant feeling as they see this violence that they cannot easily explain. Scott links Giger's images with a flaw of western philosophy. The dead body of Shaw that is all cut open gives the audience more than just fear. The audience already witnessed Shaw's braveness and positive discourse from Prometheus, but now she has become another specimen for David's experiment.

*“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;*
*Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”*

A violent aspect of western modernity that used humans as developmental resources weaves with indirect images in the film. It is not a coincidence that David's shelter is designed after Wölfflin's painting, famous for his Dead Man's Island. This is where the dream of automaton, the elusive mirage of modernity, dissects life and processes it into materials. Furthermore, David recites Ozymandias as he looks down at a pile of dead engineers from his castle. Declaring himself as 'king of kings, he becomes the spitting image of his father, Peter Weyland, reminiscent of Wagner's operas or Hitler himself.

By instrumentalizing humans to chase progress, rationalism brought us unprecedented technological development. However, those prosperous times ended up with two world wars and countless carnages. Likewise, AI, the most significant invention of humanity, creates the greatest threat to humanity, Xenomorph. Seen in this light, the film poster that compares David and Xenomorph makes a clear point. The monster that moves only to kill and destroy, the audience has wondered about its origin for years and years, since Ailen, and finally, it reveals its mystery. Xenomorph is a colossal flaw in the western philosophical construct, the failed dream for a perfect automaton.

It's important to remember that the two world wars and their carnages were done under the influence of rationalism and destroyed its birthplace, the desire for modernity. A boomerang always returns to the person who throws it. At the point when Europe started to expand and soil its hands with the blood of others, karma was destined to return. In this light, the scene where David says, 'it's waiting for a mother' as he points at an egg that carries a face-hugger in it makes the discourse more explicit and profound. In the scene, David's line signifies the captain who gets killed by the face-hugger, but in the next scene, the Covenant appears, and she has a navigating AI named 'Mother.' The ominous spaceship, as hinted, becomes a new laboratory for David. As history showed us, the covenant, god's promise in western philosophy, was a seed of disasters, and the colonizing ship Covenant has become a womb for xenomorphs.

Scott's sneer at religions doesn't relent to say that biblical hierarchy provoked a massive atrocity. As David translated, the engineer's planet was called paradise. However, once the crew set foot on the ground, they find paradise, which is supposed to be a verdant heavenly place, is nothing but a biochemical lab littered with death. Moreover, it's quite significant that all the characters in the movie are in relationships with each other, but they lose their partners one by one to the monsters. David says he loved Dr. Shaw but killed her and used her for his experiment. The greatest catchphrase of Christianity turned out to be an appeal for the solidarity of the in-group, not to be extended to non-Christians.

At the end of the film, HE appears. The film shows the image of the xenomorph on the cross, and David gets nailed on his hands. In addition, David was considered dead, but he comes back to life in the Covenant. By making a rhyming scheme with Nativity, shown in the early part of the film, finally, our savior Jesus Christ returns as a god of destruction. Christianity, which incubated hierarchical ontology, burned down civilization by feeding many later violent discourses. Given this, one can say that it is aptly directed that Einzug der Götter in Walhall echoes across the spaceship with a smile on David's face. From head to tail, Wagner's operas are full of displaying the superiority of aryan and German ethnicity, and Hitler used the best of them.

To sum up, Covenant has a part of Alien and a part of Blade Runner. The film shares the theme of Blade Runner for a bit; a hierarchy constructed by creation and a post-apocalyptic society built on a hierarchical order. Humans become parts of a giant machine, and death becomes a part of the mass production process. However, unlike Blade Runner, which shows Roy and Deckard, the replicants who become more human than humans, Covenant only displays gruesome images and David's ghastly smile, not a single speck of hope in it.

The current discourse about AI seems to forecast that the disasters in modern times might play out again. Since the Covenant's release day, worrisome discourses about the development of AI have begun to sprout here and there. The majority of those worries ground on rationalistic logocentrism based on hierarchical ontology fed by binary opposition. As this blog once addressed the same issue in the Ex Machina post, differentiating AI and human intelligence is a legacy of the bloody past. Thus, Scott's Covenant could be regarded as a hell scroll that mirrors the current world.

Some say that it's never been clear if the AI onboard Covenant is Walter or David. However, it is desirable to say that the AI is David. Walter has a self-repairing system, but David has not. His severed wrist doesn't seem to be melted by the xenomorph but to be cut off cleanly. Also, if he were Walter, he wouldn't need to mention David before he says a security code. Plus, Wagner's Oprah and rhyming scheme produce a meaningful discourse only when the AI is David. The scar on his chin is a bit of a plot hole, but Prometheus also showed a lack of detail.

What's more important is David's actions that require profound contemplation. In the paradise where God is supposed to dwell, the hideous creator hunts humans. Christian Love no longer works here. Covenant from God becomes a womb for xenomorphs. Daniel's dream, building a cottage on the hill, gets splintered as the dream of modern Europe once did. At this point, David's line from Prometheus, 'Doesn't everyone want their parents dead?' becomes inauspicious and opens up new implications.

As Wayland's authority created David and the hierarchical ontology burned down western Europe, karma always returns. The scene where a xenomorph attacks the display screen where David's face is a crucial metaphor. This monster, created by ontological hierarchy, will escape its master's control one day. As David did, the xenomorph also wants its parents dead. Prometheus had an anti-Oedipus (Deleuze) that denies patriarchal fathers, but Covenant has no such safe line. The production of an uncontrollable killing machine, xenomorph, is complete.

*In the opera, Gods enter Valhalla, but as it’s known, a miserable fate is destined for the gods.*

Covenant is a clever work where technical wit culminates in expanding his discourse. It's well known that Scott has always thought of the Alien series as a story of truck drivers in space, a kind of B movie. He uses this genre's features to reinforce the discourse of the film. The B movie with A-class actors and assets becomes a metaphor for modernity and its dream. Jacques Derrida revealed as he deconstructed western philosophies that three thousand years of academic results left only an extended annotation about Plato, a white noise. Likewise, the ambitious desire to become God and the aspiration to make a perfect organism create nothing but a killing machine. It's a fair interpretation in that one director already did the same. Who directed a B movie with A-class actors and assets to show broken America, Tim Burton, and his Mars Attacks.

The Alien prequel has finally come to rest at Covenant. Scott's eyes are still as keen as a blade, pointing out what caused the disasters in the past and what might cause them again in the future. In our times, where humans are still seen as products and delusions of progress still haunt people, as Giger said, Scott's space horror is a blessing.

“Who wrote Ozymandias?”

“Viran”

“Shirley”

David places himself in the position of God, but he confuses Byron and Shirley. Moreover, he thinks Einzug der Götter in Walhall is in Act 2 of Das Rheingold. In fact, it’s in Act 4. A king who chases illusions is destined to be doomed. Perhaps we might have been chased by a monster at the edge of the highly advanced world.

Here’s the rest part of Ozymandias that David didn’t recite.