gothic-fiction-in-space:

They know and they won’t tell. And we only have to feel.

This may seems obvious to the most of you but it wasn’t to me: the scriptwriters (and the director and who knows how many other people… ) know.

They know.

They all know how the story between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant played out. They simply decided to omit the most of the story from the material that the audience would have seen. This is an important detail to me because it reassures me over a thing: the “plot holes” are there not because they didn’t had any ideas, but because they simply wanted to maintain as much mystery as possible. Over Elizabeth’s death, over the Engineers, and over David’s experiments on creating the Xenomorph. Now I can say I am sure of it.

We saw only the tip of the iceberg but there really is an iceberg below.

In an interviews (partly contained in the Blu Ray version of the movie) Dante Harper (the first scriptwriter that worked on the movie that ultimately became the Alien: Covenant we have seen in theaters) said:

“In terms of how much we know, and how much we learn, that in a sense becomes Ridley’s decision. It’s very hard to fabricate new information, but it’s very easy to cut it out. In my drafts of the screenplay — and I’m sure drafts that came along later — even if you’re keeping things shrouded in mystery, I think you actually have to know what happened, because people can tell when they see a tip of an iceberg but there’s no real iceberg underneath it and you really haven’t done the math, you haven’t figured out what happened. I think I could write a small book about all the things that happened, because we had to figure all that out. So the question became how much are we going to learn? One of the things that was interesting about the final cut of the film, is we actually ended up learning a lot less than was possible given the drafts that we had. That was always the question with every draft, “how much can we reveal, how much can we not?” At the end of the day, I think a lot of those decisions got made in the editing room. You can tell the information is there. I think they pulled back in places. If you’ve see teaser No. 2 that has the scene between David and Shaw [Noomi Rapace] — that was a scene that was at the beginning of many drafts of the movie that I wrote, because at the time, we were thinking that this movie would really pick up a few seconds or a few days after Prometheus ended”.

You can tell information is there.
So, feel free to speculate over any minor detail of the movie: they probably put it there because they knew it was making sense with the hidden parts of the plot. They wrote all the story because they wanted to make the visible details, the visible clues, somehow coherent among themselves.
This doesn’t mean that everything we see must be necessarily connected. The way the artists Matt Hatton and Dane Hallett talked about their drawings makes me think they, for example, have a coherence to David’s drawings putting together the informations they had but also adding elements of their own that are like sort of “theories” of their own.
So: not everyone knows everything, not every clue contained in the movie is connected to all the others, but the story of what David did to Elizabeth has been written, entirely. It’s there, even if we can’t see it.
I’m thankful for that, it means they thought about every aspect of David’s “madness” even if they ultimately decided to leave it a mystery for us.

This makes me think about the old scripts of the movie we can freely read. Harper said that the old script contained more explanations and informations than the final movie, and we can easily see it’s true: in the oldest script we do even see Elizabeth dying, even if some parts of that version of the story have been changed before the making of the last version of the script. And if we look at the old scripts that came after that one (”Paradise”), we see that they all were explaining (in different scenes and with different intentions from David’s part) David’s goals (in the “Paradise Lost” one) and David’s vision of what Elizabeth should have become beside him (in the old “Alien: Covenant” script, the most recent we have). Whatever element of these earlier versions was kept into the actual movie or not, it’s a fact that the scriptwriters, Ridley Scott and the one who edited the movie, had a clear and complete story in mind in the making of final version too. They simply decided to show the less that was possible to reveal to the audience.

The iceberg is there, down below David’s tears and papers.                          The information is there.
And people complain that Alien: Covenant doesn’t respect the rule “show don’t tell”…

We spectators are indeed left “alone”, thinking about too many things, with a sweet music that plays from the birth of the first Xenomorph to the reveal of dissected body of Elizabeth.

The moment is shocking. In my opinion Alien: Covenant is edited in a way to show us that the final and most shocking revelation is not what David did to the Engineers (people we are sorry about but that we know David didn’t had good terms with… ) but what he did to the woman he said he loved. The real shock for the audience is too realize we can’t be sure of anything anymore, whatever we feel about all of it. We can’t be sure of David’s motivatons. He killed her! The rebel sort of anti-hero who keeps emotions in high regard killed her! And suddenly we feel sort of guilty for having sympathized with David even for one second.

But the sweet music hadn’t stop playing: it’s like one single scene from Oran’s death to Walter that moves his gaze away as soon as he hear a flute breaking the silence at the end of the uninterrupted sequence. It’s the theme “Life”.
I don’t know how to explain you what exactly that sequence tells to me, but the movie kind of shouts loud to me in a not translable language that Elizabeth’s death and the birth of the Xenomorph are deeply connected and that all of that means a lot to David in an emotional way. It’s probably meant to not be explained: you just have to feel it.
The atmosphere speaks, the lights speak, and you feel lots of unspoken things, even the deep connection between David and the Xenomorph as correlated characters on a thematic level too.

gothic-fiction-in-space:

About the black goo: a simple plot device or something more deep and fascinating?

The first time I watched Prometheus, the black goo felt like a bit of a cheap plot device to me. I’ll explain why.

In Prometheus the human characters arrive on a planet, an abandoned scientific/military outpost of the Engineers, were no one lives anymore, apart from one last Engineers that’s asleep in his pod. It’s not the only one that sleeps: the black goo, dormant in the jars, is a threat that must not been awakened too. The “main threat” for great part of the movie, is the black goo. At first I thought it was a too simple way to make humans get infected: it’s cheap and easy to put some dark liquid substance in a movie, it’s not something particularly visually elaborate and interesting.
On one hand you have a great cast, an expensive setting, a huge alien planet, a spaceship, spacesuits, and on the other hand you have… some goo. That didn’t felt so exciting the first time I watched Prometheus.

This feel of mine persisted in the first part of Alien: Covenant too, the first time I watched it. When I watched the scene where we see how David killed the Engineers, I was partially shocked by how far David had gone, and partially disappointed (but it wasn’t so important to me) by the way the Engineers were killed: using the simplistic plot device of that black cloud that goes around and basically burns and destroys whatever biological organism it meets. That’s an easy way to make a genocide happen in a very few amount of time.

Few time after watching Alien: Covenant I realized, thanks to the novelization, that the way the Engineers die is actually very similar to the death of the gods in the story told by David while he’s playing the piano at the beginning of the movie. And so I got it: oh, it’s the “twilight of the Gods”. And then I also realized that that kind of genocide was very much similar to the destruction of Pompei.
My brain started to work better and my imagination grew and my sense of wonder grew too.

Watching Alien: Covenant made re-evaluate the role that the black goo has in these movies, so in Prometheus too. The black goo has an unimaginable power of creation: it’s life itself at its most powerful form. That’s why Ridley Scott says that the aliens regenerate: the materials that compose them are indestructible, at the level of the DNA, at a genetic level; the virus can’t die, it transforms endlessly. It’s a power beyond our imagination. The goo used by the Engineers, by the creators of mankind, by the Gods, is the power of both life and death itself.
From that simple looking black liquid born mankind itself, and born the evil lost brother of mankind: the alien. Mankind and aliens are brothers since Prometheus: they have the same “parents” and they come from the same primordial ooze.

The wolf and the lamb. In all of this finds its place David’s pride, his vanity, his god-complex. He steals the “fire of the gods”, the most powerful one: he steals the “programs” of life in its entirety and has access to the “codes”, and can modify the program (a bit like when he enters in the main computer of the Covenant while Muthur is off for few hours and he has access to Walter’s codes and he inserts his own code). David has the very ingredients that produce life and he’s free to use them however he wants. It’s what Holloway foreshadows in Prometheus, that the discoveries they made make him think there’s “nothing special” in the creation of life and that “anyone can do it”, one only needs half of a brain and a strain of DNA. Unfortunately David has more than half of a brain and he doesn’t obtain a simple strain of DNA but he obtains access to the power of life and death themselves. While Elizabeth cries because she can’t “create life” in the form of the children she would like to have, David discovers that thanks to the black goo he can actually make Elizabeth’s body produce life. What kind of life? Not a human one, unfortunately for Elizabeth, but David doesn’t care: he’s the one that is in charge now, he’s the one who decides that humans are obsolete and that he has to create something better and something more evolved. The universe he finds himself into says to him that he’s right. The nightmare of the humans that discover to be just one failed experiment among the many possible ones, justify David’s actions. That’s what he inevitably sees. He has always wanted to prove to the universe he had the potential to be “the next visionary”, and once he finds himself free from Weyland and with the horrendously powerful black goo in his hands, he decides his time to take the stage has finally arrived, and around him he doesn’t see any clues that he could be wrong, he doesn’t find them in the universe where he lives into.

With the black goo David obtains the same powers of his father Weyland too: “the power to create, to destroy, and to create again”. David is in charge to decide how life shall work and how life shall look like: “reshaping life, virtually limitless in its potential”. “How is the creation of such incredible individual considered unnatural??” Asked Peter Weyland so many years before David erased whover could have stopped him. Weyland had to fight a mediatic battle against who believed in some inherent value in the human being as it was, but David simply looks around and thinks he has no reason to worry about this value at all, not anymore.

So of course the Engineers die in a pretty fast massacre sequence because of a giant black cloud: it’s the wrath of a new god, David. It’s not a cheap plot device, it’s something more deep.
If one has the power of death too in his hands, he can surely kill whatever he wants to kill without too much effort.
I re-evaluate the black goo, I think that it fits with all the themes we can find in the prequel saga. It’s fire, it’s life, it’s death, it’s a virus, it’s a cataclysm, it’s the wrath of a superior being (or self proclaimed one), and so on.