A lot has been made about the influence of Alien (1979) on The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). The writer who came up with the long-in-development project, Bragi Schut Jr., explained his original inspiration in a 2022 interview with Bloody Flicks:
I’m a huge fan of ALIEN and ALIENS and I wanted to try something in that same genre. But no matter what I thought up, everything just felt like an Alien ripoff. So I shelved my plans. Anyway, when I first arrived in Hollywood, I managed to get a job working in a model shop. I became friendly with the model makers and one of the guys had his portfolio and he showed it to me. He had all these wonderful miniatures in it […] and there were these photos of this fantastic schooner with bloody tattered sails. Well, they caught my eye and I asked him what they were from, and he replied, “that’s the Demeter. That’s the ship that carried Dracula from Transylvania to London. It was used for a few shots in Coppola’s Dracula movie”… and it hit me — that was my way into an alien-type story.
This is basically Alien on a ship in 1897, where Dracula is the monster, and we are following the crew, the poor crew, who is just dealing with this enormous power, with this creepy presence that they don’t understand that is hunting them for blood night after night.
Alright, we’ve got that established. And every single review of The Last Voyage of the Demeter makes the comparison. But when I finally got around to watching the movie recently, more than Alien I was reminded of one of its infamous sequels — Alien3!
Surely I was the first person to make this brilliant connection?
Nope!
Turns out Sarah Welch-Larson beat me to the punch with her article, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter Is Alien 3 With Dracula (But in a Good Way).”
Welch-Larson draws several astute parallels between Alien3 and The Last Voyage of the Demeter. There’s the rather blatant signaling of the filmmakers’ intent with the lead doctor character, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), sharing a name with Charles Dance’s disgraced medicine man from Alien3. Both movies are male-dominated, with a female outcast character that the rest of the cast distrusts. ‘It’s the sense of isolation and suspicion about an “othered” gender—and stubborn hope from people of that gender against bad odds—that makes Last Voyage more of a spiritual successor to Alien 3 than to Alien,’ says Welch-Larson.
But where I disagree with the author is her assessment of the funeral scenes for children in the two movies:
The audience is supposed to be deeply affected by the death of a child in both movies, but Alien 3 and Last Voyage treat those deaths as clinical, almost perfunctory. It’s an artistic choice that works if you’re plugged into the movie’s general affect, but if the rest of the movie doesn’t work for you, then this plot point feels callous and detached.
This reaction completely baffles me. Newt’s fate in Alien3 is certainly a point of controversy with film geeks — perhaps the ultimate point of controversy — but you can’t say her death and funeral are devoid of emotion.
Ripley’s grief drives her in the first third of the movie, powered by Sigourney Weaver’s brave and vulnerable performance. The child’s offscreen death is certainly blunt, but the movie forces you to sit with it, especially during the incredibly raw and confronting autopsy scene. And who isn’t moved by Charles S. Dutton’s sublime eulogy for Newt as Elliot Goldenthal’s score swells?
Similarly, Toby (Woody Norman) in The Last Voyage of the Demeter is the precocious, lovable grandson of Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) whose death is treated horrifically and with weight. The movie does a clever trick of starting in the “present” of August 6, 1897, with a crewless Demeter washing ashore in London, and then jumping back four weeks. With the presupposition that the entire crew dies, Toby is introduced as a source of light and joy. He’s even given inner life when he cries over guilt at not being able to protect Huckleberry the dog (another mirror of Alien3 — well, the theatrical cut — a dog is killed) and the other livestock.
The camera does not flinch when Dracula (Javier Botet) actually bites the boy. We see his pained face as the monster drains his body of blood. Bear McCreary’s combination of traditional symphonic colors and eerie, atonal notes overlaid with a mournful choir brings the horror home.
Perhaps where Welch-Larson is experiencing a disconnect with the funeral scenes is in the leadups to the big emotional moments. Alien3 has prison warden Andrews (Brian Glover) reading from a bible with an attitude that could certainly be described as “perfunctory.” In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, the crew is speechless and, yes, detached because they are unable to make sense of Toby’s death. They look to Captain Elliot who has no words, but Anna (Aisling Franciosi), the aforementioned female outcast, graciously steps in. Her words come from a place of genuine compassion and pain: “Dear Lord…take this sweet boy. May he never again be hungry, never be cold…never be scared. This world is cruel and uncaring. May Toby find his next home to be a kinder one. Amen.”
Now, what’s fascinating about Anna’s words is how they reflect the movie’s feelings on religion compared to Alien3. Last Voyage is surprisingly secular while Alien3 can be read, in a serpentine manner that is nuanced but doesn’t quite cohere, as pro-Christian.
After all, the movie’s unwavering moral center is Dillon, a self-proclaimed “murderer and rapist of women” turned born-again Christian. He sacrifices himself for Ripley, and his proclamation that “God will take care of you now, sister!” is presented earnestly and without cynicism. The rest of “Dillon’s God Squad” may be questionable in their apocalyptic, millenarian, Christian fundamentalism — and even attempt to sexually assault Ripley at one point — and seem more concerned with keeping their heads low until the end times, but they do help in the fight at the end. They die for the good of mankind as much as Ripley does. And Ripley assumes a saint-like appearance, introduced under glass and then evoking Joan of Arc before dying with arms outstretched in a crucifix pose.
And while much has been made of Ripley the Christ Figure, the long-coveted Assembly Cut of Alien3 also explores the downfalls of pure faith with Golic (Paul McGann) and the “dragon.” He calls the xenomorph as much, as well as “the beast,” which are of course names for Satan and the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation. When Boggs and Rains are slaughtered, Golic is splashed in their blood like a kind of baptism, and spends the rest of the movie worshipping the murderous creature — until it kills him. Golic appropriately enough serves as a kind of Renfield character, overcome with religious zealotry for a false idol.
The easy interpretation is the titular alien as a kind of Antichrist figure. The barcodes on the back of the prisoners’ heads could be a nod to the concept of the Mark of the Beast. The Mark of the Beast is detailed in Revelation 13, with verses 16 and 17 describing the purpose and placement of the symbol:
And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.16 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead.17
But Fincher is not simply equating Ripley with Christ-like good and the xenomorph with demonic evil. When Clemens finds Ripley unconscious on the beach at the beginning, she is drenched in thick, black seawater. It’s almost like she’s a ancient goddess, emerged from a primordial womb. As well, there’s something incredibly pagan about how she leaps into the foundry at the end and returns her essence into the earth. Well, Fiorina 161.
Welch-Larson examines this foiling of the women, how they serve similar roles in the stories and how the culmination of their arcs is to purge the villain from their bodies:
Anna’s character arc in Last Voyage closely mirrors Ripley’s in Alien 3. Anna is connected to Dracula; she can sense his presence, and he can see through her eyes. He won’t kill her, because she’s a useful pawn, and eventually she’ll turn into a vampire like him. Likewise, the xenomorph in Alien 3 won’t kill Ripley, because she’s carrying an alien queen inside her chest. Both women are inextricably connected to their respective monsters in a way that they know will kill them[….] Ripley falls into a tank of molten lead to prevent Weyland-Yutani from getting a hold of her alien. Anna intentionally exposes herself to sunlight, bursting into flames as a result of her gradual turn towards vampirism. Both women choose how they go out, immolating themselves so that they won’t be a conduit for more evil.
But something she doesn’t get into is that Anna’s ultimate decision is made due to a lack of intervention from any higher being. As I discussed above, Alien3 does not involve the providence of the Christian God — unlike, say, what I’ve argued about before with Ridley Scott’s approach to Alien: Covenant (2017) — but the movie does make an argument for the redemptive power of faith. In The Last Voyage of the Demeter, however, faith will fail you.
When Dracula kills Toby, the camera lingers on the cross and rosary beads that the boy ineffectually grips in his hand. Anna’s holy words at Toby’s funeral are followed by the transformed boy attacking the crew. The cook, Joseph (Jon Jon Briones), is also incredibly devout but his beliefs do not save him. When he panics and tries to escape the Demeter on a rowboat, he recites Jonah 2:2-3 to himself but is still torn apart by Dracula. Finally, when Captain Elliot attempts to tie himself to the ship’s helm with the very same rosary beads and crucifix in hand as his grandson, Dracula does not hesitate. “I do not…fear you,” Elliot musters up the courage to spit out, but Dracula responds coldly, “You will.”
This turn of events is a stark contrast to the depiction of this sequence in Stoker’s epistolary novel. In Chapter 7 of Dracula, the unnamed captain in his final log entry states: “I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch.” He’s successful, as the coastguard finds him in that exact spot when the Demeter runs ashore, his only wounds where the ropes had rubbed his flesh to the bone.
Last Voyage sides with Clemens, whose rational mindset needs “this world to make sense” and to grasp why the monstrous Dracula “is the way it is and why it does what it does.” His humanist view proven out must mean the soil that powers Dracula and his blood that infects others all have some sort of logical, testable explanation. Anna exposing her body to the sun and combusting is just some sort of…allergic reaction to ultraviolet rays?
Boring!
Alien3‘s ending, in which Ripley’s transmission from the end of Alien is picked up by the wrecked EEV, makes little sense when examined under a microscope. But viewed through a mythic lens, Ripley transcends the flesh and becomes a story. Her story may very well continue to spread through Morse (Danny Webb), who ends the movie as Ripley’s loyal disciple.
Welch-Larson doesn’t sound particularly enthused about either Alien3 or The Last Voyage of the Demeter. And that’s totally fair! But I think she would agree with me on this:
Seemingly removing the supernatural elements from Dracula reduces him to a generic monster. A satanic xenomorph is much more thematically tantalizing!
The Bartcave 