1329 Welcome II the Terrordome

[Finch]

Ngozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time dystopian sci-fi film Welcome II the Terrordome—the first theatrically distributed British feature by a Black woman—furiously evokes a near future in which Black people are segregated within a slum called the Terrordome, where simmering violence and anger threaten to boil over in the wake of a young boy’s murder. Named after an incendiary single by Public Enemy, the film uses its rap soundtrack to both comment on and drive its narrative, part of a sensibility in which American, British, and African cultures collide and the past, present, and future collapse. In this prescient work, Onwurah builds a visionary, Afrofuturist cosmology that connects the history of slavery to modern-day systemic racial brutality.

New 2K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
New audio commentary featuring Küchler, director Ngozi Onwurah, and Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark
Meet the Filmmakers: Ngozi Onwurah, a Criterion Channel original interview
Three short films by Onwurah—Coffee Coloured Children (1988), And Still I Rise (1993), and Hang Time (2001)—with a new introduction by the director
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by poet and critic Kadish Morris

New cover by Ngabo “El’Cesart” Desire Cesa

[colinr0380]

I will copy the discussion we had about the film back in 2015 in the 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions thread here as well:

Welcome II The Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995)

Spoilers:

A flawed, contrived but fascinating polemical curio. I'm not entirely sure that the premise entirely works, but the anger in the film is pretty intensely felt (albeit much of the political element is second hand, taken from Malcolm X speeches!), and it feels weirdly disturbing to watch in the wake of Ferguson et al.

The film begins with a group of West African slaves on a beach in the 17th century coming face to face with a group of white slave owners (including Saffron Burrows in one of her earliest film roles). This is presumably meant to be America given the dodgy Southern accents. An escaped slave is dragged back to the beach and branded, which inspires the rest of the slaves to turn right around and walk into the sea to drown.

Then the film begins again, in a sort of dystopian sci-fi purgatory known colloquially as the Terrordome. It is basically an inner city ghetto patrolled by armed white guards. All the characters from the period prologue get recontextualised, in particular the pregnant Saffron Burrows character who exchanged a curious glance at one of the slaves while her white boyfriend glowered at them, now is actually a woman in a relationship with the black guy, Spike, still pregnant though this time with a mixed race baby. Unfortunately the white boyfriend has been recontextualised too, into a jealous stalker, and the mixed race relationship is the aspect that causes a whole tragic sequence of events to unfold, eventually encompassing a young boy getting killed due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the mother of the boy going on a revenge shooting spree (played brilliantly by Suzette Llewellyn, an actress who would later turn up in a similarly powerful role in Lars von Trier's Manderlay), which turns into a cop killing sequence, which turns into a brutalisation at the hands of the police sequence, which turns into an execution scene.

I'm not really sure if the setting of this film entirely works, (though it is a novel one!), in the way that it is mashing up Britain and the US (especially in the Malcolm X speeches peppered throughout the film) with sci-fi setting. It feels rather divorced from any form of reality and therefore a little contrived in setting up its polemic about racism. There is also the issue that all but one of the white characters are frothing at the mouth racists, so there's not that much nuance there! The final call to arms speech is disturbingly straight faced and legimitately angry, but also rather hollow. As hollow as the mother getting hung while a bunch of burly martial arts fighters just stand in a room solemnly doing martial arts manoeuvres rather than actually getting out there and doing anything to save her!

Part of my ambivalence about the film comes from the final section in which the mixed race relationship is consistently shown, by the main characters of both races and the film itself, to be the thing that was beyond the pale and caused all the trouble with both lovers deserving to be punished. The scene of the funeral for the young boy with the call to arms speech intercut with Saffron Burrows's character miscarrying her baby all alone is the key scene in this (strangely the scene mostly reminded me of the funeral-birthing scene from Alien 3!). Its sort of problematic in its rhetoric yet I wonder if the, righteous yet callous, cruelty of even the black characters is meant to play purely as celebratory. Perhaps the film is just as much about the way that individually tragic events get folded into crusades and causes, with the victim becoming less a person and more a symbol to be opportunistically used? (The funeral involves laying the boy out and then tracing round him with chalk to leave a body imprint on the ground). If so it is a subtext that is only really teased out by the attention it provides to Spike and Jodie, while all the other characters punish them for their 'trangression'.

It is a difficult film to judge in that the two lead performances by Suzette Llewellyn and Saffron Burrows are the key ones of this film. They're both playing characters whose potential for continued life and escape represented by their children get completely destroyed by petty, intractable racial divisions. With their characters as the fulcrum all of the other characters around them, whatever their race, seem set in their ways and just looking to kill each other (with death in this sci-fi Terrordome appearing to be the only way out of purgatory and back to the fabled shores of West Africa?). If there had not been as much time provided to at least acknowledging the grief of both Anjela and Jodie as there was then this film wouldn't have been very good at all! As it is, I think that the film is problematic but at least has a couple of (brutalised and systematically destroyed) characters that can at least be empathised with, even if I'm left wondering if the film wants me to or not!

colinr0380 wrote:

Spoilers:
A flawed, contrived but fascinating polemical curio. I'm not entirely sure that the premise entirely works, but the anger in the film is pretty intensely felt (albeit much of the political element is second hand, taken from Malcolm X speeches!), and it feels weirdly disturbing to watch in the wake of Ferguson et al.

Coincidentally, I just finished teaching this film in a class about race and science fiction. I agree that it is a bit odd- I see it as a feminist rewriting of both the near-future dystopia genre (Escape from New York, etc) and the early-90s ghetto-set films like Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society , with a little bit of Sankofa thrown in for good measure. With all those genres floating around, it is bound to feel a bit strange. It is immensely affecting, though, especially given how current all the issues that it raises still are. The odd mash-up of Britain and the U.S. doesn't really bother me, either: by opening the film with the slave trade, it suggests that it is about global racial violence and colonialism more than the specific situation in a single country. Indeed, by taking its title from a song on Fear of a Black Planet, the film suggests that whatever revolutionary action takes place must necessarily be global. I think Fanon is as big of an influence to the film's politics's as Malcolm X.

Part of my ambivalence about the film comes from the final section in which the mixed race relationship is consistently shown, by the main characters of both races and the film itself, to be the thing that was beyond the pale and caused all the trouble with both lovers deserving to be punished. The scene of the funeral for the young boy with the call to arms speech intercut with Saffron Burrows's character miscarrying her baby all alone is the key scene in this (strangely the scene mostly reminded me of the funeral-birthing scene from Alien 3!). Its sort of problematic in its rhetoric yet I wonder if the, righteous yet callous, cruelty of even the black characters is meant to play purely as celebratory. Perhaps the film is just as much about the way that individually tragic events get folded into crusades and causes, with the victim becoming less a person and more a symbol to be opportunistically used? (The funeral involves laying the boy out and then tracing round him with chalk to leave a body imprint on the ground). If so it is a subtext that is only really teased out by the attention it provides to Spike and Jodie, while all the other characters punish them for their 'trangression'.

I definitely don't think that the film itself is suggesting that the mixed race couple deserved to be punished, for many of the reasons that you list here. As you point out later, the female characters are the key ones in the film and I think we are absolutely meant to sympathize with Burrow's character. The resolution to the film is unsatisfying, but I think that this reflects Onwurah's sense that these problems cannot be easily resolved. A bit of biographical context is helpful here, too: Onwurah is herself the daughter of a mixed race couple and many of her early documentary shorts address issues relating to being of mixed race descent.

I would agree entirely Satori, although the film being in the trend of Menace II Society and Boyz n The Hood in a British context sort of suggests a cultural interchangability that I'm not too sure that I would subscribe to. That Black-British and Black-American experience is identical, when presumably there would have to be certain cultural differences there. Though if I'm being cynical it allows the film to include guns and execution scenes and comments about emancipation that are rather American! Though I say this as someone who has not really considered these issues too deeply yet, maybe they are equivalent in ways that I had never previously guessed! I do wonder if the aim of the film was more to emphasise a shared "West African" cultural origin taking primacy over everything that has happened since being removed from that environment through the slave trade. That is a fascinating idea, though in a way I find that approach a little difficult too, in problematically implying that black experience in Britain/America has not involved cultural integration and new experiences since that time that has changed both the black community and the wider one too. In some ways this is a film that could only exist within its sci-fi aconextuality in order to make its points, whereas something like Boyz n The Hood, while of course fiction, is trying to situate itself within an existing millieu.

In some ways though I like the way that the characters have the political speeches imposed over them in voiceover. I don't think that the film has much hope that any of the characters in the film are going to be able to change, or revolutionise on their own. Instead they are trapped in an almost archetypal cycle of love, sacrifice and righteous anger that itself is as rigidly defined as the prison gates enclosing the ghetto. Even the call to arms speech feels layered on top of the action from outside as a stance that has to be taken, rather than arising from within the characters themselves.

In some ways I bracket Welcome II The Terrordome in with the other apocalyptic 'sci-fi social issues' film inspired by the decaying state of 90s Britain (which, like Mike Leigh's Naked, are just as much about working through the legacy of the social upheavals of the 1970s and 80s): Paul W.S. Anderson's joy riding Shopping. Although Shopping kind of problematically lionises its anti-hero more than any of the vengefully murderous characters in Welcome II The Terrordome!

Having suggested my ambivalence though, this is exactly the kind of film that raises extremely difficult and complex issues that put the recent Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave somewhat in the shade. At least it is daring to mix historical issues with contemporary ones and suggest some sort of through line legacy of anger at injustice!

Now Sankofa on the other hand, I haven't seen that in a few decades but remember it being fantastic, with a number of extremely striking images. Isn't that the film in which a Naomi Campbell-style supermodel goes on a location shoot in the West Indies and somehow gets transported back in time (or has a reverie based on the locations that she is moving through) to the era of slavery?

I would agree entirely Satori, although the film being in the trend of Menace II Society and Boyz n The Hood in a British context sort of suggests a cultural interchangability that I'm not too sure that I would subscribe to. That Black-British and Black-American experience is identical, when presumably there would have to be certain cultural differences there. Though if I'm being cynical it allows the film to include guns and execution scenes and comments about emancipation that are rather American! Though I say this as someone who has not really considered these issues too deeply yet, maybe they are equivalent in ways that I had never previously guessed! I do wonder if the aim of the film was more to emphasise a shared "West African" cultural origin taking primacy over everything that has happened since being removed from that environment through the slave trade. That is a fascinating idea, though in a way I find that approach a little difficult too, in problematically implying that black experience in Britain/America has not involved cultural integration and new experiences since that time that has changed both the black community and the wider one too. In some ways this is a film that could only exist within its sci-fi aconextuality in order to make its points, whereas something like Boyz n The Hood, while of course fiction, is trying to situate itself within an existing millieu.

Yeah, I agree with all of this. I think the film tries to emphasize the shared experiences of all afrodiasporic peoples in that they have all experienced slavery and colonialism from Britain, the U.S., and the other imperialist powers. There is a famous Toni Morrison interview where she argues that we should rewrite the history of modernity to make the importation of slaves from Africa its founding moment, which emphasizes this shared history from below. I think this film is very much trying to do something similar with its opening and closing scenes of the slaves and slave traders (the fact they are played by actors who reappear in the future part of the film strengthens this connection). With that said, you make a great point about the film flattening the current differences between British peoples of African descent and American people of African descent. One of the great things about films like Boyz in the Hood is how they burrow into a specific, relatively small geographical location and explore its complex cultural makeup. Terrordome's vision of the "terrordome" is going to necessarily be a bit more abstract.

Now Sankofa on the other hand, I haven't seen that in a few decades but remember it being fantastic, with a number of extremely striking images. Isn't that the film in which a Naomi Campbell-style supermodel goes on a location shoot in the West Indies and somehow gets transported back in time (or has a reverie based on the locations that she is moving through) to the era of slavery?

That is the one. Like Terrordome, it links the present and the past through the experience of slavery. The aesthetics of the opening and closing sequences of Terrordome on the beach are also very close to certain sequences in Sankofa . It is also a powerful, intense experience.

Do you think that a film like Derek Jarman's Jubilee might also have an influence on Welcome II The Terrordome? The trip from a tipping point, bucolic past into a ravaged, very contemporary looking, future. Perhaps Terrordome is as unsure about the power of hip hop to change the world (given that the young boy is killed after sneaking into the gang's generator room hangout to dance along to the music) as Jubilee was of punk! We even get the forces of authority storming the party to rough everyone up, and earlier on Anjela dancing to music being interrupted by being shouted at by a neighbour to turn her music down as it is disturbing a crying baby!

I had never considered the connection, but I'm convinced! Terrordome's use of hip hop is intriguing- It's worth pointing out that in the scene you mention, the kid raps a few lines from Public Enemy's "9-11 is a Joke," which is also from Fear of a Black Planet. Unlike most hip-hop inspired films from the era, Terrrordome fully integrates its music into the world of the film: most of the rap lyrics are from the point of view of specific characters, narrating their experience. The most disturbing variation of this is when we get lyrics from the point of view of the Saffron Burrows character's racist brother. Maybe the film sees hip hop as more of a way of expressing the contemporary condition rather than necessarily as a tool of liberation.

[colinr0380]

Incidentally, I had a brief interaction with Ashley Clark when I put that initial post up on my Letterboxd profile a few years back, when he was curious to know about where I had come across the film when he was showing it as a rediscovery in US cinemas. It has been a rather obscure film in the UK as well, though it did receive a VHS release at the time. However I caught it on its one and only so far UK television screening on Channel 4 on 25th June 1996, where it was showing so late at night that dawn was breaking by the time it ended around 3 or 4 in the morning! So I have sometimes wondered how many people caught that singular television screening at all!

[colinr0380]

Also it is worth noting that this is Saffron Burrows' first major film role (if you do not count a tiny bit part in In The Name of the Father) as the much abused White member of the inter-racial couple.

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

Went to find the film on the Channel as Criterion says you can watch it there, same with Justwatch and Letterboxd. It’s seemingly disappeared.

[Lowry_Sam]

5.8 on IMDb with less than 500 ratings but with lots of 1's & 10's. So it looks very polarizing. Will wait for it to return to the channel to preview first.

[The Curious Sofa]

I saw this a long time ago and, while I admire its micro-budget ambition, I found it fairly unwatchable. The filmmaking is amateurish, it's almost comically unsubtle in that every character is a mouthpiece, and the acting is terrible throughout. If you want to see whether it's for you, you can find it on YouTube.

[colinr0380]

I must admit that the bit that really jarred me the most as being rather too comic were the scenes of guys doing kung fu fighting training moves in their dojo in prep for an uprising that just never happens. Instead they just go through the performative motions of conflict instead! Which may be the main statement of the film in how a lot of the characters in the film are all talk and no action, and leave the women to suffer the consequences all the more.

I do wonder (and this is what made me think it would make a good companion piece to Jubilee above as well, which was an 'anti-Punk' punk / 'anti-sci-fi' sci-fi movie) if along with some of the roughness in the filmmaking, was just too uncomfortable in its contrived world combined with blunt polemic message for both sides. Yes, it does stereotype every White person as a frothing at the mouth racist; but it also suggests that Black people are too in thrall to US cultural imports that blinker them to the realities of their lives as well. Plus the general idea that Men of all shades are completely useless, only effective as abusers. It leaves a kind of scorched Earth, 'plague on all of your houses' feel to the film, with such a nihilistic tone perhaps being its saving grace from being quite so inflammatory as it could have been!

[The Curious Sofa]

Jarman managed to turn his financial limitations into an asset, his films have a distinctive aesthetic that made the most of his resources. Onwurah’s film overextends itself and ends up looking like something from the lower end of the Troma catalogue, which is fitting for a film with a title that sounds like a mockbuster version of the least loved Mad Max movie.