I can go all night bebe
"No one understands the lonely perfection of my memes, er, dreams."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/brightlightsfilm.com/god-dead-shadow-long-ridley-scott-alien-covenant-horror/amp/https://filmfreedonia.com/2017/05/21/alien-covenant-2017/amp/"
Alien: Covenant is a highly perverse hymn to creativity as a natural law and urge (ding ding ding ding ding ding!), manifesting in whatever form it will. Scott's professional drive to keep working, so often the source of critical suspicion of his output, is constituted by him as the essence of his being.
Scott does more than make a horror film here; he makes a film about the horror genre, its history, its place in the psyche, analysing the way the death-dream constantly underlies all fantasies of ego and eros. Scott reaches out for a hundred and one reference points, some of the already plain in the Alien series lexicon.
The deserted Engineer city recalls the Cyclopean confines of the lost cities in Lovecraft tales like At the Mountains of Madness, the Elder Gods all left gorgonized by David's perfidy.
At one point Scott recreates Arnold Böcklin's painting "Isle of the Dead," an image that obsessed H. R. Giger, the crucial designer behind so much of the Alien mythos, as much as it did Val Lewton, whose cavernously eerie psychological parables redefined horror cinema in the 1940s; Scott no doubt has both in mind.
David's "love" for Elizabeth, which has taken the form of relentlessly exploiting her body to lend genetic material to his creations, is both reminiscent of a particularly tactile serial killer worthy of Thomas Harris and of the obsessive, invasive eroticisation of the loved one's cadaver found in Poe, whilst the whole meditates as intensely and morbidly on its landscape of Poe's poetry. The design of the failed prototype xenomorphs and David's rooms hung with sketches reminiscent of medieval alchemic ephemera both pay tribute to Guillermo Del Toro's films and also poke Del Toro's oeuvre back for its own debt to Scott and Giger.
A head floating in water comes out of Neil Jordan's self-conscious unpacking of fairy tales,
https://filmfreedonia.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/the-company-of-wolves-1984/ (1984). The touch of Captain Branson's death struck me as a possible tip of the hat to Dark Star (1974), in which the captain had died in similar circumstances, and which was of course made by Alien co-writer Dan O'Bannon.
Late in the film Scott stages a shower sequence that sees Upworth and Ricks having a hot and steamy moment under the spigot only to be surprised by a xenomorph. At first glance this sequence revels in a trashier brand of horror associated with 1970s and '80s slasher films, but Scott also adds self-reference – the xenomorph's tail curling in demonic-penile fashion around their legs calls back to the similarly queasy shot in Alien when Lambert was attacked by the monster, whilst also nodding back to Hitchcock and Psycho (1960). It's staged meanwhile with all the pointillist precision of Scott's most fetishistic visual rhapsodies – spraying water like diamonds playing over soft flesh, fogged glass, grey knobbly alien skin, and the inevitable rupture of red, red blood.
Which points to another quality of Alien: Covenant – its deeply nasty, enthusiastic commitment to being a horror film, an anarchic theatre of cruelty and bloodlust barely evinced in any other film of such a large budget, especially in this age of gelded adolescent fantasies. If it's still not the deep, dank leap into a barely liminal space like the original, it is perfectly confident in itself and bleakly poetic in unexpected ways."
As for the significance of Wagner's Das Rheingold -
"I would place emphasis on "Valhalla," Hall of the Fallen (in combat, honorably). In this context, David is entering the deck that has the frozen travelers (pilgrims, if you will).
In Valhalla, we get the imagery of Odin and the many worthy dead chosen by his Valkyries for training and fighting in the realm of the Aesir to prepare for Ragnarok.
While Odin himself was a semi-subversive God who sometimes intentionally brought about human conflict to increase his own ranks, David presumably takes this position to use these many worthy souls to concoct and perfect his conception of the human/xenomorph hybrid for waging his own Ragnarok on human/engineerkind.
If you contrast it to the title of "Covenant," which in my mind is very much tied to the ideas of Puritan/Pilgrim immigration from England to the New World and that whole fantasy/mythos. Obviously its all horribly subverted as these cryosleep pilgrims, who are essentially dead and waiting to be reborn, have an entirely new reward for the initial covenant/contract they had taken or made in embarking on this journey.
Whether you also take Covenant in its religious sense is up to you. Life being a journey and the idea of promises to god or congregations are everywhere and everywhen.
I think the fabric of the Valhalla references is stronger when considering the mythos of the titan Prometheus and Hesiod's Theogeny. Prom steals fire for mankind and all that jazz, he gets punished for it. Down the road, Hercules sets him free.
Meanwhile, Theogeny is one example of the succession of hierarchies; Ouranus to Cronos and the titans to Zeus and the Olympian gods. Throughout Classical Greek literature and mythology(from which ideas are carried over into Roman mythology), there is always an idea of the gods, especially Zeus, trying to prevent their fated decline or overthrow.
You can compare that to the engineers trying to destroy their own creations, only to be destroyed by their other creations intended for the destruction of the first.
...
The reference (to Ozymandias), I thought, was supposed to inspire the sense of that poem: a memento mori. That is to say, everybody dies eventually (special ironic emphasis is placed on people with power or aspirations to grandeur). David says it while looking out over the ruins of the engineer's temple-city-thing. In this regard and while considering the whole "We're better than humans, let's kill/surpass them," the sense of Greek God lineage/succession and the transience of life/power are all emphasized. David pokes a hole in the assumed timelessness of human hegemony when in truth, the death of engineers (human progenitors), should be a reminder that a similar fate is in store for them. We might even apply this to David himself in assuming his invulnerability with respect to the xenomorphs."
As important as the idea of David's godlike view of himself, is the revelation of his imperfection. Just as he mistakenly attributes Ozymandias to Byron instead of Shelley, so in his last line he requests "Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, Act II; 'The Entry of the Gods into Walhalla'." Rheingold is one single act. I haven't seen this pointed out anywhere, but the writers certainly knew it (note, writer John Logan is an accomplished
playwright). It's the final irony of David's monstrous hubris, as he goes off to freeze his regurgitated face-hugger embryos."
