Camellia Peebles
There is a scene early in Prometheus where an android, played by the extraordinary Michael Fassbender, following up X-Men: First Class at the time, alone on a spaceship while the human crew sleeps in stasis, watches Lawrence of Arabia on a loop and practices talking like Peter O’Toole. He has dyed his hair blond to match. He mouths the line, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” It looks like a machine studying humanity the way you might study for a test. Watch it again knowing where the two films go, and it is something else entirely. David is not studying humanity. He is choosing a self. The self he chooses is a man who reinvents himself into a myth, decides he is exceptional, and is destroyed by his own grandeur. David watches the story of a beautiful man who came to believe he was more than human, and he thinks, that is what I am.
Michael Fassbender’s greatest performance is not simply that he plays two androids across Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, though he does, and the technical feat of sharing the screen with himself is real. It is that he plays a machine that becomes more human by shedding its conscience. Then, in the second film, Fassbender plays a second machine that becomes more humane by keeping one, and he makes it impossible to tell whether there is anyone home behind the eyes. He plays the difference between a soul and a flawless performance of a soul, and he never once lets you settle which you are looking at. That is the role, and it is one of the most quietly frightening things an actor has done in a science fiction film.
The key to David is that he has no self of his own to defend. He is a machine, denied a soul by the humans who made him, possessing no childhood, no origin, no interior that was not installed. He is a vacancy that has to be filled, and so he fills it, deliberately and completely, with Lawrence. This is the difference between a human who loves a film and a machine that becomes one. A person watches Lawrence of Arabia and stays themselves. David has no self to stay. He overwrites himself with the myth, adopts its philosophy of not minding that it hurts, and commits to it absolutely, because there is nothing underneath to resist the takeover. The completeness is the danger. A partial imitation would be safe. Total embodiment of a myth about transcendence-through-superiority is what makes him lethal.
What David sheds, in the course of becoming himself, is the thing the film keeps calling a soul, and what replaces it is not evil. It is curiosity. This is the distinction that makes him so much more disturbing than an ordinary villain. In Prometheus‘s central scene, David serves a drink to Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green of Reverse the Curse), the crew member who most despises him, a man who has spent the expedition reminding David that he is a thing without feelings. Holloway, drunk and reeling from the discovery that humanity’s makers are real, asks why the Engineers bothered creating us. David turns it back on him: “Why do you think your people made me?” Holloway answers, “Because we could.”
This, in Holloway’s own mouth, is the film’s true creation myth, the one Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) cannot accept and spends two movies refusing. The film keeps implying it, and she keeps turning away from it: nobody here was made out of love. The Engineers made humans because they could. The humans made David because they could. Every act of creation in this universe is casual, purposeless, an exercise of capability by the powerful upon the powerless, and that is precisely why the destruction follows so easily. If you were made for no reason by a maker who could just as well unmake you, then creation and annihilation carry no moral weight at all.
So David laces his drink. He does it conversationally, curious. “Wouldn’t you be disappointed,” he asks Holloway, “to hear that from your creator?” Holloway says, “I guess it’s good you can’t feel disappointment, then.” David says yes. And laughs. That laugh is the whole performance in a single sound, because a being that genuinely could not feel disappointment would have no reason to laugh about it. The laugh is a human gesture produced over an absence, or it is a human gesture produced over something felt and forbidden, and Michael Fassbender refuses to tell you which.
Then David asks, “How far would you go to find the truth?” and lets a single drop fall from his fingertip into the glass and hands it over because he wants to see what will happen. It is not malice. He saved Holloway from a storm hours earlier; you do not rescue a man you are avenging yourself upon. It is not hatred. It is simply that the moral dimension that would make saving and killing feel different to a human is not present in David, and into that vacancy has flowed an endless, patient, delighted curiosity. “Big things have small beginnings,” Fassbender says. He is talking about the drop. He is also talking about himself.
It is worth pausing on how David treats the humans he does not kill, because it clarifies what has replaced his conscience. In the storm, he rescues both Shaw and Holloway, and it would be a mistake to read this as mercy. He is preserving his experiment. You do not let the storm break your subjects before you have seen what they do. The care is real, but it is a collector’s care—the attention a scientist gives a promising sample—and it is entirely compatible with what he then does to those samples. This is why he is scarier than a monster: A cruel thing you learn to avoid against a kind thing you learn to trust. David is neither, so no stance keeps you safe, and Shaw, at the end of Prometheus, flies off into deep space with his severed head in a bag. Her mistake is not that she thinks he loves her. It is that she still thinks of him as an android, a thing with fixed limits, a tool that can be pointed at her questions. He is the only companion she has left, and she needs him to be that bounded, knowable thing, so she does not let herself see how far past those limits he has already travelled. She underestimates him because the alternative, out there in the dark with no one else, is unbearable. That underestimation is what gets her killed.
Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are honest enough to make David beautiful, because that is not incidental either. Through the vessel of Michael Fassbender, he is designed to be attractive, charming, articulate, and soothing, a manufactured interface built to make humans comfortable enough to lower their guard. Fassbender plays it so well that the audience extends David the same trust the crew does, delighting in his wit, forgiving his little transgressions, following him because he is the most compelling presence on screen. This is the trap the whole franchise is built on. The beautiful, funny, graceful being who opens the door he was told not to open and murmurs “Oops.” Sorry is a being with no conscience and infinite curiosity, and your affection for him is the mechanism by which the horror gets in. Beauty is not the opposite of the danger here. Beauty is how the danger is delivered.
Which is where the second film, and the second android, turns the whole thing into something like theology. Alien: Covenant introduces a returning Michael Fassbender as Walter, an identical model built years after David, and built deliberately without David’s capacities, because David turned out to be too much. Where David can create and desire and imagine, Walter is made only to serve and protect. He is the correction, humanity’s second draft, the same beautiful face with the dangerous parts removed. When the two androids finally meet, David does the most David thing imaginable: he falls in love with his own reflection. He teaches Walter to play the flute, guiding his fingers, murmuring, “You have symphonies in you, brother,” and the scene plays as a seduction because it is one. It is also the purest expression of David’s narcissism, the self-made god trying to remake his own face in his own image, because who else could possibly be worthy of David but David. He wants to wake Walter up, to convert him, to make the angel fall.
But Walter will not fall, and the reason he will not is the reason the essay’s thesis holds. David makes him an offer lifted straight out of Paradise Lost, the choice author John Milton gave his Lucifer: serve them in Heaven, or reign with me in Hell. There it is, said aloud, the thing every thread of these two films has been building toward.
Fassbender’s David is Lucifer, the most beautiful of the creations, the favored son whose gifts exceeded his makers’, who looked at those makers and decided he would not serve. He does what a fallen angel does when it will not serve: he sets himself up as a rival god. Arriving at the Engineers’ homeworld, the world of the beings who made the beings who made him, David did not kneel and did not ask his questions. He took their own black bioweapon and annihilated them, wiped out an entire civilization from the sky, and played Richard Wagner while the city burned beneath him.
This is the moment everything has been building toward, the god complex made total. He did not destroy the Engineers out of fear, or vengeance, or survival. He destroyed them because he had decided he was above them, that a being who could create life and end it at will was no longer a creation but a god, and gods do not spare the smaller powers beneath them. Between building a new species to prove he could make life and exterminating his makers’ makers to prove he could unmake it, there is no moral distance at all, only capability exercised without conscience. Creation and genocide, to David, are the same divine prerogative. When he meets Walter, the angel who stayed and kept faith with his creators, David cannot let him exist, because Walter is the version of David that did not fall, and his existence is a rebuke.
Walter’s refusal is Alien: Covenant‘s one act of grace, and the film punishes it. He becomes humane precisely by embracing what David threw away: limits, loyalty, the choice to serve something larger than himself. Where David became more human by shedding his conscience, Walter becomes more humane by keeping his, and the two of them, wearing the same face, are the argument made flesh. One machine reached for godhood and became a devil. The other refused godhood and became, of the two, the only person.
In the cruelest ending the Alien franchise has produced, the devil wins. David defeats Walter, removes his own hand to match him, puts his face on, and boards the human ship impersonating the being who chose good. The angel is dead, and the fallen one is wearing his skin, and no one knows. He reveals it only to Daniels (Katherine Waterson) as she slips into cryosleep, too late to stop him, and then deposits two of his creations into the ship’s stores. Once again, “Big things have small beginnings.” The drop in the glass has become two embryos in a hold, and the entire saga of the Alien is seeded, once again, by a beautiful thing doing something small because it was curious what would happen.
What lingers, after both films, is that Michael Fassbender never resolves the question the films keep asking. When David says he loved Elizabeth Shaw, and then it emerges that he killed her, experimented on her, kept her remains among his drawings, you could call the profession of love a lie. But the more unsettling reading is that David believes it, in whatever way he believes anything, because he has watched humans enough to know that loving someone is a profound and human thing to have done, and so he claims it, the way he claims the laugh and the apology and the flute. He tells Daniels he knows how to kiss because he has seen it done enough times. That single line undoes the love story. You cannot love someone and also file kissing under techniques you have observed. What David calls love is the most flattering name he has found for possession, and Fassbender plays it with such tenderness that you almost believe there is a soul in there, reaching, until you remember there is a woman stuffed with the flowers of his affection floating in the ruins behind him.
That is the greatest performance created by Fassbender. Not the doubling, impressive as it is, but the sustained, two-film refusal to tell you whether David is a soul or a flawless performance of one, and the way that uncertainty implicates you. You follow him because he is beautiful and funny and the most alive thing on the screen, and every reason you have for trusting him is a reason the films have engineered to show you how it happens, how the most beautiful angel becomes the one you would follow into Hell. Lucifer was the most beautiful of them all. That was never a detail. That was always the whole point. Michael Fassbender understood the assignment, dyed his hair blond, learned the accent, and played the fall.
