films, page 1 of 31

Set in the year 2120, Alien: Earth opens with the USCSS Maginot on its way back from a 65-year mission to gather alien specimens—and not just any alien specimens, but, seemingly, the most cunningly lethal it can find—when the inevitable happens and some of them get loose, causing the ship to crash into the city of New Siam. While the Maginot is owned by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, New Siam is owned by one of its rivals, Prodigy (the entire solar system, at this point, is divided up between five mega-corporations), so it’s Prodigy emergency teams who go into the wreckage. Prodigy, meanwhile, have been working on a new technology, the uploading of human consciousness into synthetic bodies. At the moment, only children’s minds are adaptable enough to make the change, so a handful of kids with terminal illnesses have been uploaded into new, adult-sized and super-resilient bodies. One of them, the group’s “big sister” Wendy, has been keeping an eye on her older brother in the outside world, and sees him entering the crash site in his role as a medic. She persuades Prodigy’s founder and CEO, the “boy genius” Kavalier, to send the kidroids (not what they’re called in the show) in, as a test of their abilities. Kavalier agrees, and soon sees an upside: they can get him the alien specimens before Weyland-Yutani reclaim them. It needs no degree in science fiction to know this is a bad idea.

Of course, one of the specimens loose on the Maginot is the Alien xenomorph. (There’s also a handy supply of its eggs, as well as the usual array of face-huggers in jars.) But, just as one swallow does not a summer make, neither does one xenomorph make this, necessarily, a real part of the Alien franchise. My take on the series is that, while it would have made an interesting, even quite original, SF show without the xenomorph, bringing one in, and calling the show Alien: Earth, sets up expectations it doesn’t deliver on. In short, it’s a good SF series, but it’s not an Alien series.

Some things are definitely Alien. The look and feel of the original film has been reproduced, particularly in the USCSS Maginot, which is pretty much identical to the first film’s Nostromo, complete with wildly outdated-looking computer equipment (green VDUs, chunky keyboards, and vast, room-sized arrays of winking lights). But the xenomorphs themselves aren’t really central to the plot. (I even began to suspect the show was written with one many-tentacled eye on easily removing the Alien elements, just in case it wasn’t green-lit for the franchise.)

One thing that makes the xenomorphs themselves expendable is that there are a host of other, new alien lifeforms, all with icky and disturbing ways of infecting, consuming, or parasitising human beings. And one of them, the eyeball-thing that spends most of its time planted in the head of an eerily determined-looking sheep, is by far the most memorable. (And one that doesn’t get fully explored. The “boy genius” Kavalier at one point wonders what it might say if planted in the head of a human rather than a sheep, but never gets round to trying it out. This, to me, would clearly be the focus of a second series.)

But there’s another thing that spends the show elbowing the xenomorphs aside in their traditional role of apex predator. In Aliens, the Weyland-Yutani corporation want the xenomorphs because of their potential use as a weapons technology. But here, Prodigy have already developed something far superior in the bodies of its hybrids: they’re super-strong, super-resilient, and have super-sharp perceptions. They’re already the perfect killers (except that they’re currently inhabited by the consciousnesses of children, who of course don’t want to kill—but that changes as the show goes on). At one point, Wendy, who has developed a bond with the xenomorphs (to the extent that she can basically use them as attack dogs, thus removing the element of conscienceless chaos that made them so frightening in the first two movies), starts to explain what she sees in them. As she did so, I was so primed for her to echo Ash’s speech in the first film (about them being “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”), that when she merely said “They’re honest,” it felt like a missed opportunity—or, perhaps, an acknowledgement that, in this show, the xenomorphs don’t stand for much.

The show doesn’t tie in with what, for me, is one of the key thematic strands of the Alien series, which is all about just how viscerally, weirdly biological our bodies are, and how vulnerable that makes us to all sorts of violation by infection, parasitism, or weird varieties of impregnation. But where Alien: Earth does tie into the Alien series is in its exploration of the extremes of capitalism. One way of viewing the original film is that it’s about the ultimate abuse of workers: they’re already having to work lightyears from home and sacrifice years of life they could have lived with their families, but now they’re being forced (under pain of receiving no shares at all—and presumably this is the only form of salary available in a corporate-dominated future) to put their lives in mortal danger. In Alien, workers are expendable. The ultimate corporate man in that film is Ash, the android, who will do anything the company wants, even if it means the deaths of his fellow crew-members. In Alien: Earth, we have all sorts of compromised beings, from the Ash-like synthetic Kirsh to the cyborg Morrow, who has become the perfect company man not because he’s had his humanity removed, but because he owes so much of his body to Weyland-Yutani that he has no choice but to act as it demands. (As he says to Wendy’s brother at one point: “There’s always a price when the corporation gives you something. Do you know what it is?” “Everything,” says the brother. “Everything,” Morrow rejoins, “doesn’t begin to cover it.”)

The only glimpse we get of ordinary workers along the lines of the “space-truckers” from Alien are the first-responder security guards/soldiers. One of them says: “We got a good thing going here. We’re alive. We get paid.” But in a tone that implies you can’t really ask much more than that. No freedom, self-expression, or security, just survival. In this ultra-corporate world, the only truly free people are the CEOs that sit atop those five mega-companies. Everyone else has to do what they’re told.

The child-robot hybrids are the essence of this clash between corporate beings and human beings. Their bodies are entirely owned by the Prodigy corporation. And after uploading their consciousnesses into these bodies, the company renames them, as though to underline its ownership. (Later, the “boy genius” Kavalier tells them straight that they’re not human beings or employees, but “show models”: company property.) But, because they’re kids, and not yet worn down by the corporate grind, they resist—and that, really, is the main story being told here, not the survival-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth narrative of all other Alien movies.

As a standalone SF series, I’d still, perhaps, be tempted to criticise the often over-mannered acting. It’s understandable for the kids to act like kids, and the synthetics to act a little strange (Kirsh’s constantly talking just a little too quietly, for instance), but elsewhere normal people act so mannered it started to become distracting. In a non-Alien series, I might think the show was making a point about how differently people might behave in the future, but the Alien franchise needs its people to act realistically to highlight the contrast between their ordinary humanity and the extreme survival situations they’re faced with. Here, I found myself feeling mostly irritated by the characters, so I didn’t care so much when they died. (There were exceptions. I think Adrian Edmondson was excellent, channeling the paternalistic menace of late-career Charles Dance.)

But also, I’m not sure the show really had something it was trying to say. Occasionally in the last episode, someone would say something that felt like it was one of those lines that sums up the theme of everything that had gone before. For instance, when the cyborg Morrow is fighting the synthetic Kirsh, he says “In the end, Man will always win. It’s a question of will.” Then he seems to win, but there’s a switch-around, so that obviously wasn’t the theme of this show. I was left feeling the show hadn’t really focussed on one particular theme or meaning. This, combined with the fact there were no major twists (you can predict the ending from the beginning, except for it being even more simplistic than you might expect), was one thing that made me feel that, even as a non-Alien show, it wasn’t entirely in the top notch of SF shows.

Still, it had some good ideas, and some relevance to our times (in its examination of a world ruled by a handful of over-indulged tech-trillionaires, for instance). I do think the Alien franchise needs to switch to this sort of long form TV series to really do more than merely attempt to reproduce the first movie. As I said in my review of Alien: Romulus, what I’d like is much more of a political thriller, focusing on the xenomorphs as the subject of industrial espionage, with plenty of corporate shenanigans and the occasional gruesome death, but I’m happy to watch something like Alien: Earth, which at least tried to do something new. Frankly, the first two movies of the Alien franchise are pretty much perfect, so it’s hard to imagine anything equalling them, but I’ll continue to watch (and no doubt criticise) anything that makes the attempt.

And I will watch the eyeball-thing when it gets its own series.

It’s been a while since the last Alien film (Alien: Covenant was 2017), surely long enough for something gestating in this hypersleeping franchise to burst forth and cause merry havoc. And now here it is, Alien: Romulus, which I went to see on a Saturday afternoon at my local cinema. (Two days after its UK premier. I assumed it was best to book in advance, but there were only two other people there. I don’t think this is any measure of the film’s success globally, just a combination of a small town and good weather. Really, I’m glad we have a cinema at all.)

The film opens on a mining colony on the sort of planet where you never see the sun rise, and are equally unlikely to die of old age. The female lead Rain and what I at first thought was her autistic brother Andy, but who turns out to be a slightly malfunctioning android (and I’ve only just got the joke, Andy: Android — but he of course prefers the term “artificial human”, so should have been called Art), are working for the faceless (and hug-less) Weyland-Yutani corporation. Rain, whose parents are both dead (the mother, at least, due to working down the mines), has just clocked up enough hours to be released from her contract and sent off to a proper colony world, only to be told, sorry, due to manpower shortages — mostly, it seems, due to illnesses and fatalities — the company has just extended the minimum contract term and she has to stay for another five or six years. It’s then that her ex-boyfriend Tyler turns up with a proposal. A large chunk of space-debris due to crash into the colony planet’s (spectacularly rendered) Saturn-like ring is an old Weyland-Yutani station, and bound to contain some cryonic stasis chambers. If a small group of them get into it, they can remove the chambers and use them to make their own trip to the colony world of Yvaga, where Rain will be able to see the sun rise at last. Of course, we know from the prologue that this chunk of space-debris is a research station that picked up a certain biomechanical-looking thing from the fragments of the Nostromo… (Which, to pick at a minor point, should in no way have been clumped so closely together. Alien ended with not one but three massive self-destruct explosions.)

I’ve developed my own sketchy thematic outline for the Alien series. The first film is about pregnancy; the second is about motherhood; the third, after struggling through a few rewatches, is, I have to say, about rape (which, despite it being a well-made film, is perhaps why I find it somewhat repugnant); the fourth I haven’t pinned down yet, but might be about hybridisation; Prometheus is about abortion; Alien: Covenant, again, I haven’t pinned down. Alien: Romulus is full of children (twenty-somethings, yes, but still feeling very much like children) who have lost their parents (and most specifically their mothers, as at least two characters mention how they’ve lost theirs — in both cases due to the Company). It might be subtitled, then, “Raised by Wolves”, only the wolf that does the raising isn’t the benevolent she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, it’s the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and far from feeding these motherless children from its body’s milk, it sucks the life out of them.

The ultimate aim of the research station is to create a new “perfect” strain of humans, through extracting a certain icky black substance from that biomechanical egg it recovered from the Nostromo wreckage. (And this is this film’s only major connection with the — aptly aborted — Prometheus-direction the franchise had been going in, and I have to say it’s done with the sort of light touch I prefer.) So, you could say, by the end of the film we get to see what a real “Raised by the Weyland-Yutani Wolf” child would look like. And I’m sure it would never call in sick, but I also wouldn’t call it human.

My basic feeling about Alien: Romulus is similar to how I felt about the recent (2022) Hellraiser film. Both are returns to a franchise that had been going awry, if not downhill. Both bring a more 21st-century sensibility — to me, they very much feel like they’re made by the current generation — and both are aware that they’re bearing the responsibility to pay proper respect to their originating films and provide something sufficiently box-office-worthy to enable their franchises to survive. As a result, they’re basically well-made films which provide some nice minor surprises, lots of nods to their originating films (maybe too many, sometimes), and a satisfying watch, but never stray into the truly challenging, truly shocking, truly visceral or mind-blowing, as those originating films did. That might be unfair to ask — great films are rare — but every sequel will be judged against its original. And anyway it’s probably better, in both cases, to have a solid success so the franchise can continue, than the sort of big-idea-loaded messes that Ridley Scott’s last two contributions were (despite being well-directed, shot, plotted, and acted). But, at the same time, you come away missing that essential something from the franchise, and that essential something is, it has to be said, the sort of transgressive, shocking, visceral weirdness that made the originating films so original. The original Alien seemed to exist in a constant state of shock at how weird its alien was; by Alien: Romulus, even the gloopier moments are handled in an almost offhand way, without that element of reverence or awe — that sense of the dark sublime.

(There seemed to be, in Alien: Romulus, a lot of business with doors, multi-layered difficult doors, with obstructive locking systems. I can’t help wonder if that doesn’t reflect, in some way, the creative atmosphere around a film like this, with the weight of so many requirements — commercial and artistic — putting a constant series of checks, blocks, and dead-ends in the way of really free creativity.)

The stand-out in this film, as all the reviews I’ve read so far agree, is David Jonsson as Andy the android, particularly when he gets an upgrade and suddenly becomes a corporation man. The other notable android — sorry, artificial human — is what for a brief second seems like a nice tribute to Ian Holm, as we see another of the same model of android that was Ash in the first film. But then he talks. And the special effects technology is not up to giving us a mock-up of Ian Holm moving his mouth in anywhere near a convincing way. (Film-makers: lay off relying on this until it’s convincing! It’s just creepy, and not in a good way.)

What I’d really like to see, I think, is an Alien mini-series, long enough for a nice, slow build-up and deeper characterisation. Aliens worked so well by tying the SF-horror of the original with another genre — military SF, or the Vietnam War movie — and I’d love to see the series tied to something like a political thriller, full of the sort of commercial shenanigans we only get to glimpse in the films. (Which makes me realise that, in the Alien films, the political and the commercial are one and the same. I’m sure my motherhood/reproduction-based reading of the films can be completely replaced by one saying that the whole series is basically about capitalism. Certainly this film.)

Anyway, basically a good film, and if I expect too much of it, that’s only because the first two instalments in the franchise are so good. I can only hope there will be more — while also hoping there won’t be so much more it becomes like Disney’s over-ploughing of the Star Wars franchise. But then again, Disney owns 20th Century Studios, which makes this, basically, a Disney film, so I can’t be sure that won’t happen…

Re-reading Barker’s fiction, The Hellbound Heart presents itself as something of a quandary. Overshadowed as it is by its adaptation as Hellraiser (1987), the question is, is this novella a standalone piece of fiction, or just a stage in the production of the film? In his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic, Douglas E Winter writes: “Clive insists that The Hellbound Heart was not conceived as a template for a film… but as he wrote the short novel, he realized that it was ideal for low-budget film-making.” But an October 1987 interview by David J Howe for Starburst, quotes Barker as saying that he wrote the novella “with the specific intention of filming it. This was the first and only time that I have done that, but it was useful in that I worked through a lot of the visual problems in the novella and the final screenplay didn’t take that long to draft.” The only reason this matters to me, in this re-read, is I thought the first two-thirds of the novella didn’t quite click, and I wondered if this was because the focus was on a film as the finished product — and so, the visuals and outward drama, rather than the inner lives of the characters. But equally, it could just be that sometimes fiction does take a while to click, even in its finished form.

The Hellbound Heart was first published in 1986 in Night Visions 3, an anthology edited by George R R Martin, which gave a third of its space to each of Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and Clive Barker. Barker’s only contribution was the novella.

The story of both novella and film are virtually identical. Julia is in a passionless marriage to Rory (Larry in the film), which was ruined before it even got started thanks to a one-night stand with his far more adventurous but driven-to-extremes brother Frank. When the couple move into Rory’s now-empty parents’ house, it turns out the long-missing Frank is there with them, only in an all-but-disembodied state. He used the house to experiment with an occult ritual involving Lemarchand’s Box (the Lament Configuration in the film), to summon the demonic Cenobites. Thinking this would open up whole new realms of hedonistic indulgence, Frank quickly finds their version of “extreme” is way more extreme than his, and now he just wants to escape back to reality again. Blood from a cut to Rory’s hand starts the process of reforming his sundered body. But to complete the process — and fully escape the Cenobites — he needs more blood and bodies. The besotted Julia agrees to provide them. Unaware of any of this, Rory asks his somewhat pallid friend Kirsty, who’s silently in love with him (but is his daughter in the film, which works better dramatically but less well thematically), to talk with Julia. Kirsty finds herself facing the Cenobites, and does a deal that will either return Frank to their S&M hell, or let them take her in his place…

As I said, for me, the story only really kicks into gear, as a piece of written fiction, in the last third or so, when Kirsty becomes the protagonist. Julia, the main mover of the first part of the story, doesn’t have the presence she does in the film, with the result that when the narrative wanders off to follow Frank or Rory, it feels less like a diversion and more like the story’s still in search of its narrative centre. But when Kirsty takes over, even though she’s presented as a much less passionate woman — she’s “the girl with the pale handshake” who “had long ago decided that life was unfair” — her perspective is the one that makes the full horror, weirdness and threat really click into place.

The Hellbound Heart does that thing horror does so well, of both indulging in something and issuing a stern warning against it. Here, that thing is one of Barker’s key themes, the “further reaches of human experience”, and the quest into other realms for its fulfilment. It’s clear, here, that Julia is suffering, as a human being, by living such an unfulfilled life with Rory, having been awakened to something stronger, darker, and more passionate by Frank (even though that relationship probably contains just as little love). But there are no gradations here between dour lovelessness and the Cenobites’ realm of unbounded “pleasure”. Because the Cenobites have taken things so far that they, too, have stagnated, caught at the point where what they provide has long since ceased to be pleasure in any sense of the term. Right from the start, they’re presented as an image of over-repletion, tired, empty and chilly:

“A fitful phosphorescence came with them, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold; charmless.”

“…he saw nothing of joy, or humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.”

They’re accompanied by a scent of vanilla — a byword for blandness — “the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath”. The quest for the far reaches of human experience has taken them to a dead end, a one-note world (like the bell that tolls when they appear). Frank, who just wants his sexual fantasies made real, ends up in the position of a jazz enthusiast turning up to hear some legendary saxophonist, only to find their art has advanced to the stage where they honk the same, single note, as loud and long and ugly as they can, on a bent instrument with a split reed.

According to Winter:

“The evil of appetite is a repeated theme in Barker’s work, and in The Hellbound Heart he offers a searing condemnation of lust in the guise of love — and the pursuit of pleasure in fulfilment of a spiritual void. Frank’s sin is not his self-indulgence, but his hollow — and thus hellbound — heart…”

But elsewhere, though very briefly — in the one moment where the character of Julia starts to come to life in the novella — we get a glimpse of how the promise of pleasure, in a world devoid of it, can attain an almost spiritual dimension, capable of transforming everyday reality. Watching the news on TV while she thinks of the promise of the slowly-regenerating Frank, Julia is already in another realm of being:

“What did the world have to tell her? Little enough. Whereas she, she had news for the world that it would reel to hear. About the condition of the damned; about love lost, and then found; about what despair and desire have in common.”

But, like all of Barker’s fiction that deals with transcendence, transformation, and elevated realms of being, this is still just about the body. The Cenobites — “angels to some, demons to others” — are utterly physical, “their anatomies catalogues of disfigurement”. Their realm, their power, lies entirely in what they do to your body, your nerves. Frank’s return from death means not some magical rebirth, but the disgusting business of remaking a new body out of other, freshly-slaughtered bodies. In bed with Rory, trying to distance herself from her own despair, Julia thinks of herself as nothing but a body with its physical processes, reducing herself to the least she can be as a human being. Next to the Lead Cenobite (better known as Pinhead), the book and film’s crowning image is of the body revealed beneath the skin: Frank as nothing but a pulsing, naked nervous system, “this too vulnerable body”, as Julia thinks of it.

It seems odd, then, that the centre of this tale would turn out to be the supposedly passionless, pallid Kirsty (though even in her, the ever-lubricous Frank sees possibilities), but probably she only seems passionless in comparison to Julia and Frank. Kirsty loves Rory and will do anything for him (he just doesn’t ask much); hers, then, is a very human form of passion. And she can see the horror in Frank and the Cenobites that Julia can’t, because Julia is blinded by her own desperation. (Perhaps the real villain of the novella is Rory, for being so inadequate to the women in his life.)

Perhaps, though, the reason the first part of the book doesn’t have the impact I wanted it to have is simply because I already know the story from having seen the film so many times. (If so, it’s something the film doesn’t suffer from, as that’s still a thrill to watch.) It’s hard — certainly for me, having never got used to watching pre-Hellraiser films till after I’d seen Hellraiser — to really appreciate what a game-changer the world presented by this novella-and-film-combo really was, for the horror of its day. It sits alongside Alien and The Thing as a milestone in the genre.

The puzzle box, for instance, did away with years of the same old cinematic occult rituals (pentagrams and women sacrificed on altars). And it wasn’t just a visual coup; the box captured as never before the difficulty and self-absorbed, driving obsession of such a magical operation (while also no doubt chiming with an audience who’d grown up trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, and were now glad they hadn’t).

And then the Cenobites themselves: a whole new class of demon, with the suaveness of the vampire, the grossness of the zombie, and that added Barkerian element, a philosophy, and the eloquence to defend it.

Hellraiser is a more finished form of The Hellbound Heart, and one that works all the better for having actors bring it to life. It’s a rare film whose strong emotional drama matched the impressiveness of the day’s cinematic effects (whose new levels of “rubber reality” all too easily dominated 80s genre films, to the point where they were visual spectacles first and human dramas second). I’ve only seen the two immediate sequels (both have nothing on the first film) and the very latest reboot, which neatly franchise-ifies the first film’s elements into something that feels just a little bit too packaged to retain the raw-nerve edge and sense of danger of the original. As for Barker, Hellraiser proved him to have a cinematic sensibility as developed as his literary and artistic ones, thanks to its occasional arthouse touches of surrealism and dark beauty (seen best of all in his short film The Forbidden) — though, I have to say, that’s an element of his work as a director that didn’t survive into his subsequent movies.

And speaking of what’s next (skipping over my favourite Barker novel, Weaveworld, which I’ve reviewed before): another novella-and-film pairing, with Cabal/Nightbreed.