Review

Aliens

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

13 November 2025

5 min read

Alien, Nietzsche and the death of dread: why the franchise lost its fear

Alien: Earth forgets what made the original so terrifyingly profound

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Don't pet the alien.

26 Key Productions.

The credits are rolling on Alien: Earth and all I can think about is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of history’s most enigmatic and misunderstood philosophers, one of Christianity’s greatest foils and explains exactly why the TV series, to my mind, fell flat.

Oh, how excited I was for Alien: Earth! It looked like someone had finally nailed the look and feel of Ridley Scott’s original Alien and paired it with a script by Noah Hawley (who wrote, among other things, the first series of Fargo, which I still think is one of the best series of TV ever made). I couldn’t wait.

But far from understanding what made the original Alien so terrifying, Alien: Earth manages to undermine the franchise’s key premise at almost every turn, resulting in something truly baffling. While Alien is a deeply nihilistic piece of art that draws on its nihilism for its thoroughgoing sense of dread and unease, Alien: Earth is too cute, too pleased with itself to be truly nihilistic. And therein it loses the power to shock that Alien wielded so effectively.

Let me explain what I mean. (Spoilers ahead for both Alien: Earth and Alien – although Alien came out in 1979 so if you haven’t seen it at this point, where have you been?)

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”

So declares ‘the mad man’ in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, giving rise to one of philosophy’s most quotable moments. Nietzsche isn’t talking about a literal ‘death of God’ (he didn’t think there even was a God to kill!). Instead, he’s talking about the death of belief in God.

But, for Nietzsche, society’s collective loss of belief in God is not a trivial thing. It’s not like realising Santa Claus isn’t real (sorry if anyone was still clinging to that!). No, belief in God gave society structure, purpose, and meaning. Without belief in God, society needs to start from the very beginning and give itself these things all over again. We cannot stop believing in God and imagine that the rest of our lives are untouched.

For all Nietzsche’s faults – which are numerous – he is clear about the implications of what we might now call ‘secularisation’, in a way that is seldom recognised. In this respect, I often wonder if Nietzsche is the only real atheist who ever lived.

There is no grand ‘why’ behind the world. No objective meaning or structure to it: we must instead impose our own, individual meaning onto our lives.

Alien is a deeply Nietzschean film. The xenomorph (that is, the eponymous alien) does not come with a ‘why’. It has no motives other than to kill; no grand plan. It’s not really a villain, in this sense: it just … is. It is the chaotic unstructured whirlwind of a universe without God distilled into a creature.

It is pure, nihilistic, Nietzschean nightmare fuel.

At the end of the film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t ‘defeat’ the xenomorph; she just sends it into space and escapes. She doesn’t ‘overcome’ this nihilistic creature, she just about manages to escape with her life. She does what Nietzsche encourages us all to do and lives despite meaningless chaos of the godless world around us.

This is not what happens in Alien: Earth, however. The most telling parallel between Alien and Alien: Earth is the role science and technology plays in both. In Alien, the mysterious Weyland-Yutani company wants to capture the xenomorph to use it as a bio-weapon. But the xenomorph resists such human categories and just does what it does: kill, indiscriminately.

In Alien: Earth, again the xenomorph is seen as a potential weapon, as a potential piece of technology. And … that’s exactly what it becomes. The main character in the show – Sydney Chandler’s Wendy – a little girl whose consciousness is put into the body of a robot (to cut a long, tedious story short), eventually learns the xenomorph’s language and even befriends the creature. By the end of the series, the two have effectively teamed up, with Wendy siccing (setting) the alien on her enemies.

Excuse me?

She … ‘sics’ the xenomorph on people? Becomes its friend? Right …

The first time this happened I full-on laughed at the screen. This is so far removed from the utter nihilism of Alien. Here the xenomorph has agency, motivations, preferences, and even flipping friends! It is so deeply … unscary.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise. In Alien, Nietzsche’s godless anarchy is distilled into a creature of pure terror. In Alien: Earth, that creature is literally made someone’s pet. Alien continues to terrify because it shows us something of the full implications of what it is to be without God: a world of disorder, anarchy, and chaos. Alien: Earth domesticates that entirely and puts it on a leash. In so doing, lacks all of the potency of its muse.

In his recent book Dominion, Tom Holland (no, not that Tom Holland) reminds us of what Nietzsche said long ago: our values, ethics, and even our society structures, come from a shared and historic belief in God. Too often we want to have those values, ethics, and structures without the theologies that underwrite them.

Alien: Earth wants to have its cake and eat it in precisely this same way. It wants to tell a story about a marauding, indiscriminate predator … that can be tamed by a little girl. It fails to scare because it undermines the deeper, even more terrifying story underneath Alien: that without the structure afforded us by belief in a creator, there’s no God out there to hear us scream.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.