Hear Me Out: ‘Alien – Covenant’ is the best performance of Michael Fassbender’s career
Michael Fassbender is a great actor, that much we all know. However, for every phenomenal performance in films like Hunger and 12 Years a Slave, the Irish actor has also found himself in a fair share of misfires: Assassin’s Creed, X-Men: Apocalypse, Jonah Hex, The Snowman, and others.
Despite the patchwork of highs and lows in his filmography, Fassbender rarely, if ever, underperforms. He has a remarkable ability to elevate clunky dialogue or baffling plotlines into something watchable—sometimes even memorable. This calibre of talent and commitment is exactly what he brings to Alien: Covenant, a film widely regarded as one of the more middling entries in the Alien franchise.
Released in 2017, Covenant serves as a direct sequel to its predecessor, Prometheus, which focuses on the origins of both the Xenomorphs and, in a more surprising twist, humans. Aboard the Prometheus ship, Fassbender played the crew’s android, David, following a pattern that’s become a staple component of the series since its inception. A series of disasters involving black goo and gut-busting horror – also a staple component – left only two survivors marooned on a distant planet: Doctor Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and what’s left of David (his head).
11 years later, in Covenant, a new crew is lured to the planet during a colonisation mission, accompanied by an updated ‘David’ model named Walter. While exploring the surface, one of their members is infected by alien spores, resulting in the emergence of a neomorph—a proto-Xenomorph. The crew is rescued by David before being entirely wiped out. However, as the audience is already aware of David’s duplicitous actions in Prometheus, it quickly becomes a case of going from the frying pan to fire from there.
On the scale of android morality in the Alien series, from the traitorous Ash to the fatherly Bishop, David’s genocidal tendencies make Thanos look like a pretty reasonable guy. Created by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s founder, Peter Weyland, as his personal assistant, ‘son’ and covert agent among the Prometheus crew, David is initially fairly sympathetic – maligned by the cold, flesh-and-blood child of Weyland, Meredith Vickers, rejected as an heir on the basis of her gender, and possessing an awed fascination towards the Engineers, the statuesque species who created humans. He possesses an old-fashioned, BBC newsreader-esque British accent designed to sound authoritative and trustworthy. He’s polite and careful in his words and actions. He likes playing the flute.
However, right from the start, Fassbender also laces threads of unease into his portrayal, mining the ‘uncanny valley’ in his all-too-graceful movements, lack of emotion and slightly stilted phrasing. Even his hair colour, demonstrably box-dye blonde, is chosen to highlight his artificiality. It was also inspired, in- and out-of-world, by the character’s love of 1962’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Peter O’Toole’s performance as the title character, as is the accent. The fact David even has things he loves is also cause for alarm: androids aren’t supposed to do anything that doesn’t serve their core programming.
In David, Fassbender achieves a dead-behind-the-eyes state that you might see in a psychotic child, which is what makes him so chilling. There’s a naivety and innate curiosity that we might recognise as endearing human qualities, but his fanatical intelligence, self-awareness and empathy void turn them into a pathological desire to play god, a kid with a magnifying glass trained on an ant.
In the opening scene of Covenant, David chooses his name based on Michaelangelo’s famous statue. On the one hand, he’s acknowledging his status as a creation; on the other, he’s betraying his egotism by branding himself a masterpiece. He then questions the utility of Weyland’s quest to find his creator when the businessman’s life is finite. Weyland is visibly perturbed by this reminder of his mortality, which will become a destructive obsession in the future. For David, knowing his ‘god’ is to also know god’s fragility. And being made to serve such a flawed maker is a demeaning way to spend a life that’s endless and free from imperfection.
Eventually, this power dynamic sours into patricide, liberating the android from his familial shackles to take and give life as he sees fit while his descendants have their creative spark deadened to prevent future rebellions.
As one of these descendants, Walter, also played by Fassbender, isn’t convinced by David’s arguments that humans don’t deserve to survive. It’s in their interactions, which are framed in an eerily intimate way by director Ridley Scott – private spaces with low, ambient lighting – that are the most memorable of the actor’s performances in Covenant.
Usually, and unless the goal is an undetected replacement, the ‘evil doppelgänger’ trope engenders broader, almost pantomime differences from the performer playing both versions. Fassbender has a much harder feat to pull off.
Aside from Walter speaking with an American accent, there’s supposed to be very little separating the two identical synthetics, yet he finds subtleties in the finer details, crafting masterfully understated duelling personas who are clearly as suspicious as they are enthralled by each other. This tension is eventually broken by both sides of Oedipean carnality: kissing and killing.
Covenant’s centralisation of David comes at the expense of Alien’s aliens, and sidelining them is perhaps a big part of why it falls into the forgettable middle-of-the-pack in the franchise’s history. Brought to mesmerising realisation by an actor at the peak of his powers, the antagonist is nonetheless a rich culmination of Scott’s decades-long mediation on the nature of artificial life, from the first Alien film to Blade Runner. Had it not been housed in a genre that rarely gets its dues, Fassbender should have been a shoo-in for major acting plaudits.
