Ambiguous android

With Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott proves that in space no one can miss the shift in perspective

Tale of many themes A still from Alien: Covenant and (below), the alien from the films

When a little alien creature burst out of John Hurt’s chest, it was a pop culture milestone. Ridley Scott’s Alien in 1979 about the commercial vessel Nostromo and its seven-member crew investigating a signal from the planetoid LV426 introduced the face-hugging alien with acid for blood. It also introduced the woman warrior in warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver).

The movie, which film critic Roger Ebert called “an intergalactic haunted house thriller set inside a spaceship” told the story of an alien that was a remorseless killing machine. The movies that followed — Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997) — followed the same plot. The constants were Ripley and the relentless alien that could be counted on to decimate everything that came its way.

The other constant in the movies was the presence of a “synthetic” or an android. Ian Holm plays Ash, the ship’s science officer, who is revealed to be an android. Whether he is a good or bad robot depends on your philosophy, as he was only following protocol even as he tries to kill Ripley.

In James Cameron’s super-successful

Aliens (it made $180 million against its $18 million budget), Ripley is justified in being suspicious of Bishop (Lance Henriksen), the android executive officer aboard the Sulaco. Bishop proves to be good, helping Ripley escape with the little girl Newt.

David Fincher’s Alien 3 , set in the prison planet, Fury 161, with violent inmates, got mixed reviews. The film featured a dismembered Bishop, who still helps Ripley. A Bishop lookalike, who claims to be Bishop’s creator, comes to Fury at the end of the film and he is up to no good.

By the time of

Alien: Resurrection , Ripley herself is a clone with bits of alien DNA in her system. Aboard the spaceship Auriga, the military want to weaponise the alien, which is why they clone Ripley, so they have many little chest busters to play with. Winona Ryder plays Annalee Call, one of the mercenary crew of the spaceship Betty, delivering humans to serve as incubators for alien embryos. She is a synthetic but a helpful one in the Bishop tradition.

Then came the prequels from Ridley Scott — Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant last week. Prometheus , set in 2093, is an origin story, and explores deep and meaningful questions of who we are, where do we come from and where are we off to, in the midst of many-toothed aliens and flammable humans.

A fascinating synthetic is introduced in the fastidious David. With his smooth face and pristine clothes and clipped British accent, we are unsettled about his motives. He inexplicably does both good and dastardly deeds. At the end of Prometheus , a decapitated David travels with Elizabeth Shaw to where the mysterious Engineers came from. Shaw wants to know why the Engineers created us, and why they then created the xenomorphs to kill us in such a spectacularly gory manner. Apart from being super thrilling, the Alien movies tapped into primeval fears, as well as an innate distrust for machines, military and faceless corporations. The feminism was troubled, as while there is the Amazon warrior in Ripley and the ship’s computer is called Mother, the alien is also female.

The message about motherhood is also ambiguous. So while Ripley is a surrogate mother to Newt in Aliens , the Alien queen is a killing machine merely to protect her eggs. And when Ripley realises she is carrying an alien in Aliens 3 , she chooses death to delivering an alien.

The prequels see a shift from the what to the why. If Alien was Jaws in space, then the prequels don’t focus on the shark, but rather who put the shark there. So while the wicked aliens go about their gory business, enigmatic David becomes the still centre of how this came to be. Why did the Engineers create the aliens? What turned the Engineers against us? Do we come with our destruction built into us?

The duality of David — the perfect man, he takes his name from Michelangelo’s creation and can also be the perfect weapon — is personified in Michael Fassbender’s double role as David and Walter. He learns to kiss, creates a symphony and recognises discordance. It is particularly poignant that he does not recognise Shelley’s Ozymandias even as he quotes the lines, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’. Instead of Shelley, David could do well to remember that other Romantic, William Blake’s existential, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” from The Tyger .

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