I was reminded of Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga — another series I remember being in plenty of bookshops at the height of my fantasy-reading phase, in the mid-80s — when I came across a 20-minute filmed interview with her at the BFI’s site, in which she’s asked about late-1960s youth, which she was young enough to have insight into, but just that little bit older than, so presumably had some objectivity about. Looking her up on the British Newspaper Archive, I was surprised to see how much of an accepted, even happening author she was in the 60s — I’d assumed her first novel (written at the age of 16), the highly individualistic fantasy Strange Evil, would have made her a bit of an outsider in the literary market of the day, but no, she was busy publishing books, some fantasy (King’s Daughter in 1958, set in the lost continent of Mu, and so perhaps in the same world as the Atlan books, but called “her only truly bad book” in an excellent LA Review of Books article on Gaskell), some realistic/comic tales of young women’s travails in Swinging London (what the LA Review of Books calls “the novel of countercultural manners”), and even some that mixed the two (the very-hard-to-find contemporary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin, from 1964). The second book of the Atlan series — Atlan (1965) — even came out on the same day as one of her realistic novels, The Fabulous Heroine. What’s more, both her fantastic and realistic books were reviewed by the general press of the day.

Which makes the Atlan series a bit of an outlier, as far as fantasy novels are concerned. Atlan would have completely fit in with the early 1970s fantasy boom, when sword-and-sorcery-flavoured action started to blend with Tolkienesque trilogies — and, indeed, they were republished then, as they were again in the 1980s, when the more High Fantasy feel of that decade held sway. But she was producing these books in the early 60s, and in the UK — who else was doing that? (Okay, Michael Moorcock. But who else?) It’s almost comical to read a review of the first book, in The Westminster and Pimlico News (4 Oct 1963), which concludes:

“It would be interesting to study readers’ reactions to The Serpent. It could easily start a new vogue in books which the public demand.”

Yeah. Maybe it will. The earliest paperback cover I can find (Sphere 1967) looks so utterly un-fantasy, it’s obvious she was doing something UK publishers, at least, had no idea how to market. Gaskell was something of a pioneer, then (which makes finding her other books all the more frustrating — none of them had the afterlife of Atlan, and that isn’t in print, even in these Romantasy-loving days).

The first book in the series, The Serpent (1963), was later split into two for paperback publication (the two volumes being called, confusingly, The Serpent and The Dragon). I was going to review just the first paperback, initially, but it ended in a rather unsatisfying fashion, so I went on to read The Dragon immediately afterwards, which both perked up the narrative and provided a proper ending, so it makes sense to read The Serpent and The Dragon as a single (though long) book, as they were originally written.

The setting is prehistoric Earth in the days when the continent of Mu was “at the world’s foot”, and Atlan, once the most potent power in the world, has for centuries cloaked itself behind an invisible wall of mile-wide vacuum, leading to it enjoying “an era of utter peace… [with] no trade, no communication between them and any of the other continents”. At this time, the moon has fallen from the sky — another one will soon replace it — and the world is inhabited by both human beings and a “brutish race” of presumably Neanderthals, or something similar. People ride horses and giant warrior-birds. Gaskell ends her novel with a brief bibliography, with a note saying almost every detail of the world she’s created has “some basis in prehistory”, though the books she mentions are mostly of the “Atlantis was real” type, so “basis” may not be the right word.

The narrator of the novel is Cija (pronounced Keeya), daughter of “the Dictatress”, living in seclusion in a crumbling corner of her mother’s massive and ancient palace, because of a prophecy made at the time of her birth. She is, she’s told by her nursemaids:

“…one whom it would be hard to prevent from bringing disaster—that unless every precaution were taken, before maturity you would have fallen in love and by that love you would bring the fulfilment of an older prophecy… [to] throw our country into absolute degradation and ruin—let our country fall under stranger-rule—foreign rule.”

Cija has been brought up to believe men are extinct. All her knowledge about the world comes from the trashy novels in her private library. Then, one day, at the age of 17, she’s taken out of her rooms and told, first of all, that men still exist, and second, that one particularly egregious version has conquered the country and been in charge for some time. Now this General Zerd is moving onto another conquest and needs to take hostages to ensure the Dictatress and her people keep in line. Cija is to be one of the hostages. Her mother, however, has a special mission for her: get close to Zerd, by any means possible, and kill him, thus freeing their land, and disproving the prophecy.

Zerd, though, isn’t just any man. He’s not even properly human. The details are not clear — Cija, in her diary, doesn’t provide the sort of world-building a modern fantasy reader would expect, but is tantalising light in terms of explanations about the world she inhabits. Zerd, she jokes, is half crocodile. He has a scaled black and red skin:

“Except in strong light, one can mistake him for a man, but now he stood, clearly seen, a monster — and, my God, he was beautiful! I found him beautiful, in his arrogance and his evil, shining like a mighty dragon that fears nothing.”

And so begins the first of her many adventures. Cija, along with several other pampered hostages, is taken along with Zerd’s army. Well-treated at first, they spend their time gossiping and idling. As the army gets farther from Cija’s native land, though, the hostages have less and less value, and eventually someone tells her that, at some point, they’ll have no value at all, and will be discarded, killed, or made some other use of, if they prove to have any.

Here it’s worth pausing to mention something lacking in Gaskell’s world-building. She doesn’t name any of the lands she’s talking about. Zerd comes from the Northern Kingdom; he’s heading for the Southern Kingdom. Cija’s homeland — never named — is between the two, and at one point Gaskell/Cija ties herself in knots explaining it as “the land south of the Northern Kingdom”. Other places aren’t named, either. The capital of the Southern Kingdom is either “the Southern Capital” or just “the City”, from which flows “the River”. The only named land is Atlan itself — which is, it turns out, the General’s ultimate aim of conquest, for he knows a secret that will get him through the vacuum-wall. Either Gaskell is making a point that only Atlan is worth naming, and everywhere else can be treated as generic and archetypal, or she couldn’t be bothered to name the lands and cities and towns, and did her best to tiptoe over those awkward moments (“the land south of the Northern Kingdom”) were it would have been best if she had named them. Elsewhere, Gaskell’s naming of characters can be a bit slapdash: there’s an Ow, and a man called Blob. (On the other hand, she does drop some subtle hints that this world is different to ours — at one point, for instance, Cija refers to her “six senses”, and a nice moment of cultural difference occurs when Zerd and others are amazed at Cija’s effortless ability to run upstairs: stairs, to them, are just alien enough that they can only walk up them.)

For most of The Serpent, Cija is carried on by the action, rather than taking any active role. Although she is (she knows) a goddess, being descended from “ancient alien spirits which fell from the Moon”, she finds herself demoted to being a servant to the General’s current paramour, known only as the Beauty. They pass through extensive jungles, and get to see some of the sort of scenery that really makes a fantasy novel, include a truly massive waterfall (where the army are attacked by undescribed beings known as Fouls), and a section of the jungle where hibernating giant snails entirely cover the trees. (The soldiers, in passing, mindlessly smash the snails.) Cija has, up to this point, mostly been in at worst mild peril, but the tone suddenly changes when she decides to leave the army. Captured by a minor local official, she’s held captive and raped until the official tires of her. She escapes into the wild, then lives for a while in a village (befriending a boy who dresses in her clothes in secret). She enters the Southern Capital dressed as a boy, and finds work for a while as General Zerd’s wife’s stew-chef. (“When I was a self-important little girl with a knife hanging round my neck I thought I could change the fates of the world. Now I use the knife to slice onions.”) She then spends time as the “doxy” of one of her fellow hostages, who has now joined the army — and eventually turns out to be her half-brother. (The tone in this section is almost squalid kitchen sink drama.) Escaping once more, she ends up in “a Court of polished sex-addicts”, attached to the pope-like Superlativity, who is attempting to eradicate the worship of all gods but his own. Fleeing once more, she’s taken up by bandits, then returns to the Southern Capital just as it’s hit by a combination of the Northern army, earthquakes, and a volcanic eruption. Finally, at this late stage of the novel, she’s given a purpose: to redeem herself for all her idle sinning, she’s told to travel to Atlan and warn it of the General’s impending invasion. And so, finally, she enters that fabled land, to find it a sort of beautiful Eden. But the Serpent has found its way in, all the same…

As Moorcock & Cawthorn say in their Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, The Serpent is “stuffed with battle, rape, gossip and wild coincidence.” (L. Sprague de Camp, in Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme, says: “Miss Gaskell certainly tells a whale of a story, with keen humour and some wonderful orgies and chases.”)

The most obvious difference between The Serpent and the sort of thing you find in more standard genre fantasies is the tone. Written as a translated diary, Gaskell says in her Foreword that she has used modern language to indicate Cija’s own slangy tone, and this is one of the things picked up by critics at the time (the New Statesman said it was written in “the flat-heeled language of a teenager”), and later (Lin Carter, in Imaginary Worlds, called her writing “klutzy” with “the most blatant anachronisms”). I wasn’t sure if the very teenage-diary tone — sometimes poetic, sometimes flighty and frivolous, but also at times succinct and brutal — was a refreshingly light take, or one that didn’t quite work. The decider, for me, wasn’t so much the language as the use of concepts which felt too modern: terms like “safety valve” or “guilt complex”, even “sublimation” used in the strictly Freudian sense. The killer was when someone described Cija’s diary as being written in a “No. 8 High Quality Paper Account Book”.

That LA Review of Books article mentioned above describes Gaskell’s protagonists as being almost always “a youthful heroine who is brave but alert to her vulnerability, inquisitive yet vaguely lazy, intelligent and personable but also a bit of a brat”, and Cija is no exception. She comes across, generally, as rather self-involved, and makes few genuine connections with anyone else in her world. It’s obvious the main relationship is between her and Zerd, but she’s so sure, for most of the novel, that Zerd is evil, and that he must hate her, that it’s not really a relationship. (The most sustained relationship she has with a man is with Smahil — “we are violently young together” — who turns out to be her half-brother, and who “is never particularly gentle. He really dislikes me, I’m sure.”) The one loyalty she has, in the end, is to her riding-bird Ums — or, rather, it has a loyalty to her, but her own feelings to it are sometimes ambiguous.

The closest thing to a declaration of a philosophy, towards the end of the book, sounds good, but doesn’t really feel as though it has been demonstrated by Cija herself:

“If one loves everything, saving only war and cruelty and inside-out mockeries of realities, one is right from heaven’s point of view; love everything, as I incline to do, having come from the tower where I had nothing to love except the sky — love everything (but it must be love) and one is right for the spinning, dark, self-sufficient Earth.”

The tale itself is full of wild coincidences. Making her way through a crowded city where people are fleeing a volcanic eruption, she happens to ask help of the one person in the entire continent who really can help her. Wherever she goes — usually after fleeing Zerd — she finds she’s ended up where Zerd was going anyway. For an adventure that takes place over an entire continent, the cast of characters is small, and always popping up. But, I have to say, that doesn’t seem to matter. This doesn’t feel like the sort of realistic (if that’s the right word) fantasy you’d get nowadays. The torrid, wild improbability is part of the point. Moorcock & Cawthorn sum it up best, when they say that Gaskell “possesses to an outstanding degree… the ability to daydream constructively.” That’s what this is, a wild daydream, and best taken as such.

Aside from adventure, does the novel have a meaning? Cija’s journey takes her from believing men to be extinct, even mythical, to finding herself in a world full of them:

“I’ve lived with an army, off and on, for two years—I’ve even masqueraded as a boy for months—but I can’t lose a kind of shock at them, especially if there are a sudden lot of them… They are a bit overpowering in the mass, surely anyone would admit that.”

Among these men, General Zerd is “elemental man” — something, to Cija’s eyes, both beautiful and evil, alluring and not-quite human.

Male-female relations, then, are a key part of the story: “Suddenly I realised a fact quite new to me. I realised that most women in the world are used by most men in the world.” But Cija’s thinking about the men she encounters is more like the sort of thing you find in Angela Carter (Heroes & Villains, say), a push-pull to both the “beautiful” and the “brutal”, even more so when they’re combined, a love or desire that’s constantly tipping into hate. In this, then, she perhaps is demonstrating a little of that “love everything” ethos: she doesn’t seem to hate or resent the men for what they are, but comes to her own sense of how to relate to them.

Her initial, brutal abuse by the minor official becomes, in a way, the larger theme of the book. The Superlativity talks about the coming invasion of that self-sequestered continent as “the Pious Rape of the Introvert Soil of Atlan”. And Cija, uncomfortably, sees herself as part of that “rape”. When she arrives, Atlan seems to be idyllic. She encounters a scene where a (perhaps fairy) musician is leading a mass of animals, both predators and prey, in a harmonious dance. That ends when Cija’s warrior-bird, unaffected by the music, wades in, intent on mating, and with no qualms about casually killing the other animals in his way. Cija is at first mildly embarrassed, like a dog owner whose pet is doing something impolite; then she realises how alien to Atlan this brutality, that she’s come to accept as normal, is. A little while later, the Dragon himself, General Zerd, rides into Atlan, its new Emperor. The innocence has gone — but was she the Eve that brought this particular Serpent into Eden?

The adventure continues in Atlan…

After his 1987 novel Weaveworld, Barker at first thought to return to short stories, but instead produced a short novel, Cabal, which (for the first and only time) he drafted using a dictaphone. It was published standalone in the UK in 1988, but in the US was packaged with the stories in the last volume of The Books of Blood.

It starts with Aaron Boone, a troubled man who thinks he’s started to find some peace at last, thanks to the woman he loves, Lori, and a psychiatrist he trusts, Philip Decker. Unfortunately, Decker is a serial killer, who proceeds to convince Boone that, during hypnosis sessions, he’s confessed to a series of horrific murders — which, in fact, Decker himself committed. Distraught, Boone wanders off and, after a failed attempt to take his own life, hears rumours of Midian “a place of refuge… where whatever sins [he had] committed—real or imagined—would be forgiven…” He sets out to find it, but discovers it to be a massive, walled cemetery. Inside, he’s confronted by two men — or not-quite-men — one of whom bites him. Fleeing, he’s found by Decker, who has the police in tow. The psychiatrist persuades Boone to come out of hiding, then shouts to the police that he’s armed, and everyone opens fire. Riddled with bullets, his body is taken to the mortuary, but sometime after that disappears. He’s not dead, but, thanks to that bite in the cemetery, is one of the Nightbreed now. He returns to Midian, where this time he’s welcomed in. Two people come in search of him, though: his girlfriend Lori, and Decker. And upon learning about the Nightbreed, Decker is determined to goad the local police into exterminating the lot of them.

The persecuted and hidden tribe of monsters with which the protagonist ultimately finds a home is a theme that’s popped up in Barker’s work before, from early stories in the Books of Blood (“Twilight at the Towers” and “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance), to the magical/theatrical Seerkind of Weaveworld. Part of the “coming home” feeling is that these “monsters” allow the protagonist to accept his true, full nature, as not quite fitting into the societal norm. (There’s also a parallel to be drawn between Cabal and The Hellbound Heart, as Cabal is, also, a love story, in which a living woman, Lori, seeks to redeem a dead-but-living lover, Boone.)

Of course, there are two types of “monster” here. There’s the Nightbreed, who “didn’t belong to Hell; nor yet to Heaven. They were what the species [Boone had] once belonged to could not bear to be. The un-people; the anti-tribe…” Monstrous in form, they’re nevertheless far more human in behaviour than the second type of monster we meet in this novel, who look human, and fit into society — in fact, occupy positions of trust and authority — but whose actions prove them to be utterly monstrous inside.

Of the latter type, Decker — “the one in the well cut suit, with the doctorate and the friends in high places; he was the man, the voice of reason and analysis” — is the arch-monster. In contrast to Boone who, once transformed into one of the Nightbreed, will say “I’m not behind this face. I am this face”, Decker must don a mask to become the monster he is. And that mask, Button Head — like “a sewing-box doll: zipper for mouth, buttons for eyes, all sewn on white linen” — is the essence of the scary-yet-bland conformity Decker represents. If Decker had his way, everyone would be “sane” — outwardly normal, with their darker and stranger impulses thoroughly contained and repressed, locked inside just as the Nightbreed are forced to live underground. In Decker’s world, only those in power are allowed to indulge this dark monstrousness: Decker’s own murderous sprees, for instance, which he can get away with because he can foist the blame on his vulnerable patients, or the police, whose local chief Eigermann’s philosophy is: “Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.”

While Decker’s kind of dark monstrousness is all about repression and secrecy, the Nightbreed have reached a state where they can no longer hide what makes them different, like Narcisse, who “could pretend nothing: his wound was a vicious honesty”. But this is what makes them a community, at whose heart is the being they call Baphomet (“Who made Midian. Who called us here.”), whose very essence is a wounded suffering: his enemies took him apart, but he is somehow preserved as “the Divided One”, his sundered body suspended in a flame that both represents his supernatural power and his exceptional pain. Decker, meanwhile, does the wounding to others. As the serial killer Button Head, he likes to attack his victims’ faces so thoroughly they become as indistinguishable as his own blank mask.

I don’t think it’s ever stated explicitly why Decker so instantly feels the need to wipe out the Nightbreed, but in a way it doesn’t need to be: in their unabashed oddity, their explicit woundedness, they represent a sort of dangerous honesty that undermines his own need for conformity and control.

Cabal, then, is rich in themes Barker has explored before. If I have a criticism, it’s that the last section of the novel — where the attempted extermination of the Nightbreed really gets going — began to feel a little oppressive in its atmosphere of goodies/victims (the monsters) versus baddies/oppressors (Decker, the police, a hastily-assembled town mob). I could see it was necessary — we need to see the persecution and attempted extermination of the Nightbreed for what it is — but the switch from Barker’s usual subtlety of characterisation to something a bit more clichéd in a way had the opposite effect. Instead of the (moral) horror of actual human beings perpetrating genocide, we see a cartoon all-guns-blazing mob at work, which has much less of an impact. Barker’s at his best when he’s dealing with his characters’ inner transformations and responses to the unusual, mysterious, and horrific (as with Lori, here: “She’d been touched by a knowledge that had changed her inner landscape out of all recognition.”). Perhaps this sort of Western-style shootout isn’t his thing — or maybe it’s just not mine.

Barker apparently intended this to be the first of a series of intertwining tales about the Nightbreed. Certainly, it ends with a new start: Boone is renamed Cabal, and is given his mission to reunite the scattered Nightbreed and heal the sundered Baphomet.

The film adaptation, Nightbreed (released in 1990), became Barker’s second full-length feature as director, one he also intended to be the launch of a franchise. “At last the night has a hero”, ran the tagline to the first paperback edition of Cabal, but it seems that audiences — or film executives, anyway — weren’t sufficiently of the night to see the need for it to have a hero. Personally, I find Nightbreed lacks the dark atmosphere that made Hellraiser so effective. It’s presented far more as the sort of action-fantasy that might well have gone on to be a franchise, only the imagery was perhaps too explicitly horrific for that ever to work for the sort of audience numbers required.

And both Nightbreed and Cabal have a certain amount in common with Underworld (1985), the first full-length film Barker scripted. An underground-monsters-versus-overground-mobsters plot, you can equate Cabal’s police with Underworld’s mob, and the former’s Decker to the latter’s Dr Savary, a man who’s invented the perfect pain-killer — or, one that would be perfect, if only it didn’t leave its users with horrific disfigurements, ending with them living as pariahs in a sewer. Both films culminate in gunfights with the overground forces trying to rid the world of the monsters. Barker was very unhappy with Underworld, but I think if you don’t expect much from the film, it’s not too bad. It looks like a mid-budget 80s music video, so has a certain dreamy, stylised tone, and has some good actors, even if they’re not being particularly stretched: Denholm Elliot, Steven Berkoff, Miranda Richardson and Ingrid Pitt, as well as Nicola Cowper, last seen in this blog as a child actress in Break in the Sun.

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…