“One franchise is showing it’s still possible for a modern blockbuster to have a great villain. In Alien: Covenant, David — the android played by Michael Fassbender, first introduced in Prometheus — comes into his own as a fleshed-out, dynamic, and genuinely striking antagonist, one who isn’t just an equal match for the heroes, but even becomes the central thread of the series (…) Over the course of Alien: Covenant, we slowly learn David’s worldview. At first, he seems simply scientifically interested in the aliens, but as our understanding of David evolves, we come to recognize him as a much more complex, and insidious, figure. He’s the enlightened monster, the educated, urbane intellectual who should be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of 20th-century history. Like Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, David is a eugenicist and murderer who couches his philosophies in Nietzschean rhetoric about furthering the species, complete with quotes from Romantic poets like Lord Byron — except in this case, the species is the terrifying, parasitical Xenomorph (…) It’s just as true now as ever that an elegant sophisticate can be a great perpetrator of evil, and that the urge to create can be used for terrible ends as well as good. David is a far more relevant and instructive villain than, say, Marvel’s generic Ultron (…) He’s (David) constantly doing stuff in the film: reciting poetry, making art, cutting his hair, lurking. He is active within the fabric of the film, not just a catalyst that makes it happen (…) David ultimately gains the upper hand, taking over the ship while the helpless heroes look on. And beyond that, the mere thought that this could happen makes David a drastically more compelling figure than your average villain: he’s actually dangerous, not just a convenient conduit for stunts and CGI battles who will be disposed of by film’s end. Like many of the best movie bad guys, including Hannibal Lecter and Seven’s John Doe, he represents a demon that even his total defeat couldn’t fully banish”.