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.