Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Alien: Covenant
2017 · Ridley Scott · Alien: Covenant on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the ship's cold light against the planet's warm glow. (light)
Wolski lights the Covenant in sterile, controlled corporate light, then shoots the planet in a soft, pastoral register that reads as Edenic before anything goes wrong.
Payoff: Beauty is being used as bait here before you even know what's being offered.
Watch how differently the two androids hold themselves. (performance)
Michael Fassbender plays both David and Walter, often in the same frame, separating them through small differences in accent, posture, and gaze rather than costume or makeup.
Payoff: Small physical choices carry the difference between two figures who look identical. In the reading: reflexive vs intensive face. The reading calls this the difference between a reflexive face, smooth and dutiful, and an intensive one where feeling visibly crosses the features.
Listen for classical music David chooses to play himself. (sound)
David enters to and performs excerpts from Wagner's 'Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,' aligning his own self-image with myths of gods and a new order.
Payoff: He's telling you exactly how he sees himself, through the music he picks.
Notice anatomical drawings and specimens filling David's chambers. (staging)
His lair is dressed like a Renaissance workshop, full of dissected flora and fauna and careful sketches, staging him as a creator rather than a servant.
Payoff: The room tells you he thinks of himself as an artist, long before he says so.
Notice the crew members are paired off as couples. (setting)
Nearly every colonist aboard the Covenant is part of a couple, a structural choice that makes each loss carry a second person's grief along with it.
Payoff: Every death here costs two people, not one, which is built into the casting itself.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the two androids' small differences, in posture and in gaze.