Alien 3 – Blood and Porridge

October 1, 2025

In space, no one can hear the alarm

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

What an exasperating franchise the Alien one is. It kicked off in 1979 with one masterpiece, Ridley’s Scott’s Alien, and continued in 1986 with another masterpiece, James Cameron’s Aliens. But its instalments after that have been, in various ways, maddeningly uneven. They’ve contained some intriguing ideas, themes, characters, sequences and images. Yet those good things were nullified by other things that were utterly duff.

David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) had as its setting a fascinatingly grim, labyrinthine industrial complex that’d been repurposed as a prison. But it was hamstrung by an ill-conceived script wherein most of the interesting characters vanished halfway through and the movie’s interminable final act consisted of indistinguishable bald guys running Super-Mario-like through corridors.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1998) had some great ideas – Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character reincarnated as a superhuman clone containing bits of alien DNA, the setting of a stricken space station that’s basically The Poseidon Adventure (1974) in outer space, gripping action set-pieces underwater and on a vertiginous ladder. But it suffered from juvenile plotting and dialogue, a crap-looking new monster (‘the Newborn’), and misjudged performances ranging from Ron Perlman’s obnoxious overacting to Winona Ryder’s wan underacting.

In 2012 and 2017 Ridley Scott returned to the franchise and made two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which again had some nice touches – especially Michael Fassbender’s performances as the angelic android Walter and the devilish android David. But the prequels were ruined by their obsession with creating an over-complicated and unnecessary backstory for the aliens. Also, there were some clunking scenes such as the one in Covenant where Walter and David meet up, Walter starts playing a flute, and David suggests, “You blow, I’ll do the fingering.” Ooh-err, missus.

Recently, we got Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus (2024) and, again, some lovely moments – a sequence where the surviving protagonists have to negotiate a shaft in zero gravity while deadly globules of acidic alien-blood float around them; or a bit where a hitherto nice android (David Jonsson) hooks into some tech in order to open a door, accidentally gets upgraded, and turns into a callous shit. But Alien: Romulus blew its potential by paying too much fan-service to the previous films. “Please,” I was thinking as the film’s big finale approached. “Don’t anyone say, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’” But wouldn’t you know it? Someone did.

© 20^th Century Studios / Scott Free Productions / Brandywine Productions

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the two crossover movies where the aliens encounter the creatures from the Predator franchise, Alien vs Predator (2004) and Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007). That’s because I regard both films as unspeakable shite that deserves to be fired into a black hole.

Now we’ve just had an eight-part TV series entitled Alien: Earth. This was masterminded by Noah Hawley, responsible for five seasons of the Fargo TV show (2014-24) inspired by the 1996 movie of the same name made by Joel and Ethan Cohen. It pains me to say that I feel the way about it as I feel about the post-Aliens alien movies. Alien: Earth has some good bits, but those are offset by some crap bits.

Here’s Alien: Earth’s set-up. (Be warned that spoilers for the series are coming.) It takes place in 2120, shortly before the events depicted in Ridley Scott’s original Alien. Earth is controlled by half-a-dozen super-corporations, including Weyland-Yutani – ‘the Company’ – which featured in the movies. Episode One sees a Weyland-Yutani spaceship, which has been on a mission of exploration and has collected specimens of five different extra-terrestrial species, including some worryingly familiar-looking eggs, return to earth, out-of-control, and crash into a skyscraper in Bangkok. Thailand is the property not of Weyland-Yutani but a rival corporation called Prodigy. The young, impulsive CEO of Prodigy, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), sends in rescue and security teams to secure the disaster site – but also to seize whatever cargo the spaceship is carrying.

Lately, Prodigy’s big project has been to ‘upload’ human consciousnesses – souls, basically – into super-strong and super-durable synthetic bodies. The results aren’t just ‘synths’ – the trendier term for the ‘androids’, like Ash, Bishop, Call, David and Walter, who appeared earlier in the franchise – but ‘hybrids’, which have human ghosts in their synthetic machines. However, Prodigy has only been able to do this with young consciousnesses – they’ve transplanted the souls of six children, dying from incurable illnesses, into the artificial and enhanced bodies of six adults. The first operation moved the soul of a terminally sick girl called Marcy Hermit into a hybrid Boy Kavalier has christened ‘Wendy’ (Sydney Chandler). He’s a big fan of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911) and insists on naming all his hybrids after Peter Pan characters.

Boy Kavalier sends the six hybrids, supervised by an enigmatic synth called Kirsh (Timothy Oliphant), to the crash site to test their responses in an emergency. What he doesn’t know is that Marcy Hermit’s brother (Alex Lawther) is one of the medics already there – and, inevitably, Wendy encounters this sibling of her former self. Meanwhile, it turns out that one spaceship crew-member has survived the crash, a science officer called Morrow (Babou Ceesay), who’s unswervingly loyal to Weyland-Yutani and isn’t about to let a rival company steal his alien specimens. Morrow belongs to a third category of non-human or non-quite-human persons in the 22^nd century, besides synths and hybrids. He’s a cyborg, part-machine, and has a mechanical arm that can exude blades or work as an oxy-acetylene torch.

Boy Kavalier gets the five specimens off the spaceship and transports them to his island headquarters, where they’re placed in a laboratory for study. Predictably – and due partly to Morrow’s attempts to retrieve them for Weyland-Yutani – things go wrong and some of them escape. The escapees include one from a much-loved, 46-year-old movie franchise…

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

I’ll start with the show’s shortcomings and my first criticism is an obvious one for fans of the films. The aliens aren’t in it much. Alien: Earth features three of the H.R. Giger-designed beasties, one birthed on the spaceship before it crashes into the earth, one created in Prodigy’s laboratory, and one produced by an egg-released ‘face-hugger’ that latches onto a human victim, but in Alien: Earth they’re little more than a sub-plot. The focus is on the hybrids, synths and cyborgs as they ponder who or what they really are. As such, the show often feels more like a follow-up to another classic Ridley Scott movie, 1982’s Blade Runner.

Also, in Alien: Earth, Wendy gradually becomes able to communicate with the aliens – much to the dismay of her new-found brother. First, she behaves like an ‘alien-whisperer’, but by the last episodes she’s managed to exert full control over them and uses them as attack dogs. This deprives them of agency and – though it’s unsettling to see her direct an alien to tear a platoon of soldiers to pieces – diminishes them as the objects of fear they were in the movies.

And the aliens are inconsistently presented. Several times we see one encounter a group of extras, bloodily slash and chomp its way through them and slaughter them all in a few seconds. But whenever an alien bumps into one of the main cast-members, it immediately becomes slower, clumsier, and more incompetent, which allows the main cast-member to escape. Basically, the aliens can be perfect killing machines or can screw up badly, depending on what the script requires at the time.

And that brings me to Alien: Earth biggest problem. Its scripts are so riddled with holes they’re like slabs of Swiss cheese. The Weyland-Yutani spaceship plunges towards Bangkok and catches everyone by surprise. But weren’t there satellites in space and stations on earth tracking it? Didn’t anyone have an inkling it was on the way? It slams into a skyscraper and is left sticking out of it, but inflicts little structural damage – indeed, there are rich people partying at the top of the skyscraper who don’t even notice what’s happened. This is a whole, humongous spaceship. In 2001, we saw what a pair of passenger planes did to the World Trade Centre. Despite dropping out of the sky, the spaceship manages to end up horizontal after ploughing into the skyscraper. When people enter it from outside, its floors are perfectly and conveniently level.

Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier sends his six hybrids – who’ve presumably cost billions of dollars to create – to the crash scene without any briefing, any guards, any weapons, any protective equipment. Led by Kirsh, they just saunter on board, and it’s purely through good luck that at least three of them don’t get splattered or taken over by the extra-terrestrial specimens there. The illogicalities surrounding the hybrids continue through the series. At one point, Boy Kavalier’s scientists have to ‘wipe’ one hybrid of traumatic memories. But they don’t isolate her and don’t inform the other hybrids of what they’ve done. Afterwards, one of them speaks to her and points out that she’s missing a bunch of memories, and she gets even more screwed up as a result. And the scripts turn the hybrids’ superhuman powers on and off depending on the situation. They’re meant to be superstrong. Indeed, at one point, we see one rip off a soldier’s jaw in a fit of pique. But hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) spend most of Episode Seven struggling to transport a face-hugged body across Boy Kavalier’s island. As they huffed and puffed, I was reminded of Basil and Manuel trying to shift a dead hotel-guest in the Fawlty Towers (1975-79) episode The Kipper and the Corpse.

Speaking of which, Boy Kavalier’s island seems to range in size from being big, with characters taking hours to cross it, to being the size of someone’s back lawn. A young alien, newly erupted from someone’s chest and still in snake-like form, has the whole island and its foliage to hide amid. Yet Timothy Oliphant’s Kirsh soon catches it with a small-looking piece of netting. The diminutive alien lifeform known as ‘T. Ocellus’ – basically a tentacled eyeball – manages in a short time to escape from captivity, scuttle across the island on its tiny tentacles, and find a human body lying on a distant beach, which it parasitically attaches itself to and takes over.

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

All the alien specimens are highly dangerous – not just the acid-blooded ones – so the lack of security protocols around them is head-scratching. On the spaceship, scientists eat and drink in their presence. They leave alien-housing containers improperly sealed. They don’t fasten those containers correctly on their racks. When one creature breaks free, no alarm-bells go off. In Boy Kavalier’s giant complex, they’re kept in close proximity to one another. Shouldn’t they be all be isolated? You never see any guards near them. Often, the only people in the Prodigy laboratory with them are Kirsh and the hybrids – who are, essentially, children. At one point, a single hybrid is left to supervise the specimens alone. When an external feeding-hatch breaks, he gormlessly opens a door and enters a cell to bring a couple of the beasties their food. That doesn’t end well.

Hawley and his writers are simply being lazy. When you write something, especially a science-fiction, fantasy or horror story, you’re confronted by problems of logic, practicality and consistency all the time. A conscientious writer considers those problems and works out ways of solving them. That’s what’s what human creativity is for – for example, figuring out how an alien creature could escape from a laboratory with a working alarm system. It’s facile to just ignore these issues and hope the viewers won’t notice while the plot unfolds.

All this gives the impression I didn’t like Alien: Earth, but I had some fun with it. For one thing, I thought the show’s retro-futuristic look was wonderful. I loved the scenes on the spaceship, where the set-design nostalgically recreated the style of the Nostromo, the ill-fated craft featured in Ridley Scott’s original.

I also enjoyed the performances. Oliphant and Ceesay are excellent as, respectively, Kirsh the Prodigy synth and Morrow the Weyland-Yutani cyborg, and the scene where they at last square up to each other is the highlight of the final episode. The actors and actresses playing the hybrids do a good job of reminding us that, adult thought they look, these are children: variously naïve, trusting, devious, petulant, confused, frightened. I particularly liked the hapless Laurel-and-Hardy double-act of Gourav and Ajayi.

And though the character is obviously a caricature of fabulously-wealthy-far-too-young sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, Boy Kavalier is played with entertaining, pantomime-villain flair by Samuel Blenkin. His Peter Pan obsession disturbingly echoes Michael Jackson, another rich and powerful man who gathered children into his lair for unsavory purposes. Also, with his tousled black hair, I thought he bore a troubling resemblance to disgraced fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, now dealing with multiple accusations of sexual assault.

But Alien: Earth’s breakout star is surely the afore-mentioned ambulatory eyeball, T. Ocellus, which in the course of the series plonks itself in the eye-socket of, and takes control of, a cat, a sheep and Michael Smiley. No offence to Michael Smiley, but when the thing is embedded in the sheep, it’s most terrifying. The sight of that bloody-faced ewe, with an outsized eyeball, staring impassively from its place of containment, is the stuff of nightmares.

© 26 Keys Productions / Scott Free / 20^th Television / FXP

July 3, 2023July 6, 2023

Cinematic heroes 4: Brian Glover

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Brian Glover’s Wikipedia entry begins with a quote from the great man that served both as a mission statement and as a career summary: “You play to your strengths in this game. My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.” For a quarter-century, Glover played characters that were shiny of pate, pugnacious of visage and flat of vowels in many a British movie, TV show and stage play, and in the process made himself one of the most recognisable character actors in the country.

Born in Sheffield and brought up in Barnsley, the young Glover initially followed in his father’s footsteps. His dad had been a professional wrestler and, while attending the University of Sheffield, Glover topped up his student grant by wrestling too. He fought bouts under the moniker of ‘Leon Aris, the man from Paris’ and was good enough to appear on television, featuring in the Saturday-teatime wrestling slots shown on the ITV programme World of Sport that, a half-century ago, turned such burly, grappling bruisers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Jim Brakes and Big Daddy into household names. He continued to wrestle long after he’d graduated and settled into a respectable day job, which was teaching English and French at Barnsley Grammar School.

One of Glover’s school colleagues was Barry Hines, who’d authored the novel A Kestrel for a Knave. In 1968, this was filmed as Kes by the incomparable Ken Loach. Loach needed someone to play the puffed-up, preposterous and loutish Mr Sugden, the PE teacher at the school attended by Kes’s put-upon, juvenile hero, Billy Casper (Dai Bradley). Hines suggested Glover. For his audition, and to test Glover’s believability as a teacher, Loach staged a playground brawl and got Glover to break it up. This obviously wasn’t difficult for him, being a teacher already and a wrestler.

Glover’s turn as Sugden, who organises a football match with his pupils, insists on captaining one of the teams, and then cheats, dives and brutally fouls the kids while spouting his own match commenatary – likening himself to “the fair-haired, slightly-balding Bobby Charlton” – provides a bleak film with its one shaft of comic sunshine. Come to think of it, Loach’s 1998 movie My Name is Joe has some funny footballing sequences too, and when he finally got round to directing a proper comedy, it was 2009’s Waiting for Eric with French soccer legend Eric Cantona. The beautiful game is clearly the one thing guaranteed to make the famously grim, anti-establishment Loach lighten up.

© Woodfall Film Productions / United Artists

Glover spent another two years teaching before his next acting assignment, which was a role in the Terence Rattigan play Bequest to the Nation. Thereafter, he swiftly became ubiquitous. On television he appeared in Coronation Street (1972), The Regiment (1973), Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeny, Quiller (all 1975), Secret Army (1977), Minder (1980), Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (both 1985). In that last show he makes a memorable exit when he’s blasted away by some Cybermen. He also gives notable performances in two 1970s shows written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who at the time scripted virtually the only British TV sitcoms set outside London and southeast England. In a famous 1973 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads he plays the devious Flint, who makes a bet with Geordie heroes Bob and Terry that they can’t get through the day in Newcastle-upon-Tyne without hearing the result of an important football match. A year later, Glover joined the cast of Clement and La Frenais’ revered prison sitcom Porridge, playing the hapless, slow-witted convict Cyril Hislop, whose key line is: “I read a book once. Green, it was.”

When not playing bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshire chancers and convicts, Glover could leaven his northern tones with a twinkly avuncularity, which made him popular among advertisers. Thus, when his face wasn’t popping up on TV shows, his voice was popping up on commercials between TV shows. He voiced the TV advertisements for Allinson’s bread – “Bread with nowt taken out” – and for Tetley teabags. In the Tetley ads, he played the leader of the Tetley Tea-folk, an animated tribe of diminutive, white-coated, cloth-capped characters tasked with the exacting job of giving each teabag its ‘2000 perforations’.

Meanwhile, during the 1970s, Glover became a regular in British movies. These included Lindsay Anderson’s oddball 1973 epic O Lucky Man! and its follow-up, 1982’s Britannia Hospital (about which I intend to write on this blog very soon); Michael Crichton’s 1979 period adventure The First Great Train Robbery; and Terry Gilliam’s 1978 medieval comedy Jabberwocky, in which he plays the foreman of an ironworks that’s reduced to chaos when Michael Palin blunders into it. In Douglas Hickox’s 1975 London-set thriller Brannigan, he’s a minor villain who gets roughed up by John Wayne, playing a tough American cop on an assignment to the British capital – Wayne creates mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town. “Now,” he warns Glover, “would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”

In 1981, John Landis made his much-loved horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, the opening scenes of which, set in a northern pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, called for a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman. Obviously, there was only one man for the job. Landis duly cast Glover and the resulting scene, wherein he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke, is, along with Kes, his finest cinematic moment – both films show what a fine comic actor he was. Unfortunately, the pub’s jovial mood is then ruined when David Naughton and Griffin Dunn inquire about the strange five-pointed star painted on the wall. And as they’re ejected from the premises, Glover utters the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue: “Beware the moon, lads!”

Three years later, Glover turned up in another classic werewolf movie, playing a villager in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short story, The Company of Wolves. At one point, he’s involved in a brawl with the previous subject of this Cinematic Heroes series of posts, David Warner; and at another, he comes out with a very Yorkshire-esque line: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

Glover faced another monster, a slimy one rather than a hairy one, in 1992’s Alien 3, wherein he plays the warden in charge of a prison-colony on the stormy planet Fiorina 161. Sigourney Weaver crash-lands there, unwittingly bringing with her a cargo of egg-laying alien face-huggers. Directed by a young David Fincher, Alien 3 is a much-maligned film. It can’t help but seem anti-climactic after the previous film in the Alien series, James Cameron’s barnstorming Aliens (1986), and the fact that it begins by killing off most of the characters left alive at the end of Aliens didn’t endear it to fans. It’s got some wonderfully grungy set design, though, and there is something heroic about the film’s un-Hollywood-like, and commercially-suicidal, pessimism. Even Weaver herself gets it at the end.

One of Alien 3’s biggest problems is that, due to incompetent scripting and editing, most of its interesting characters – Glover, Charles Dance, Paul McGann – vanish from the story halfway through. Incidentally, for British audiences, Glover perhaps brought a little too much baggage to his role. When I saw Alien 3 in an Essex cinema, a scene where Weaver confronts Glover in his office, while he – voice of the Tetley Tea-folk – absent-mindedly dunks a teabag in a cup of boiling water, provoked guffaws.

Glover must have got on well with Sigourney Weaver, for he subsequently turned up in 1997’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror, in which Weaver played the evil queen. Another late role was in the endearingly off-the-wall 1993 comedy Leon the Pig Farmer, in which a young Jewish Londoner, played by Mark Frankel, gets the unsettling news that he was the result of an artificial-insemination mix-up and his father is actually a Yorkshire pig farmer – inevitably a bald-headed, rough-looking one played by Glover. What makes Leon, which also starred Fawlty Towers’ Connie Booth and former Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, slightly melancholic to watch now is the knowledge that lead-actor Frankel died in a motorcycle accident a few years later.

Glover’s stage CV was as busy as his film and TV ones. He appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It (playing, appropriately, Charles the Wrestler) and Romeo and Juliet, while other theatre work included Don Quixote, The Iceman Cometh, The Long Voyage Home, The Mysteries and Saint Joan. Lindsay Anderson, a stage director as well as a film one, cast him in productions of the David Storey plays The Changing Room and Life Class and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. Such was Glover’s fame by the time he appeared in a West End version of The Canterbury Tales that it was advertised with a slightly amended version of one of his catch-phrases: “Chaucer with nowt taken out.”

Glover was a literary figure as well. He was a prolific playwright and writer, was responsible for over 20 plays and short films, and penned a column in a Yorkshire newspaper. Asked to contribute a script to a 1976 TV drama anthology called Plays for Britain, which also featured writing by Stephen Poliakoff and Roger McGough, Glover found himself short of inspiration. He ended up paying a visit to a police station and inquiring if they’d experienced anything unusual lately that he might be able to use as an idea. While he was at the station, a woman trooped in to the front desk to report indignantly that someone had pinched her front door. Suddenly, Glover knew what his story would be about.

Meanwhile, I remember seeing him on a TV arts programme, discussing – with Anthony Burgess, no less – Paul Theroux’s acerbic 1983 travel book about the British coastline, The Kingdom by the Sea. Glover, who during his wrestling days had toured many of the towns Theroux wrote about, took particular exception to a comment Theroux made about Aberdeen: “…the average Aberdonian is someone who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.”

Alas, in September 1996, Brian Glover met his own Alamo. He underwent an operation for a brain tumour, although a fortnight later he was back at work, making one of his final films, Up ‘n’ Under. Fittingly, this was about the north-of-England sport of rugby league and was made by the playwright John Godber, whose debut play Bouncers has become a much-revived classic. Glover was among the first people to go and see Bouncers when it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 and was quick to offer Godber encouragement. Despite the surgery, the tumour eventually killed him in July 1997.

Thanks to his gruff-but-lovable persona, unmistakable voice, and talent for stealing any scene he was in, Glover lives on in the memory of people like me, who grew up watching a lot of television and movies in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Those folk include actor Jason Isaacs, who admits to using him as inspiration for his star turn as the Soviet war-hero and Red Army commander-in-chief Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s historical satire The Death of Stalin (2017). While he played Zhukov as a blunt, abrasive and – crucially – Yorkshire-accented bad-ass, Isaacs said, “I had a picture of Brian Glover in my head. Magnificent actor.”

Meanwhile, Glover is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London, where a simple gravestone describes him as a ‘Wrestler… Actor… Writer’. Not just a Yorkshireman, then, but a true Renaissance man.