Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II The Terrordome is like few other films. The dystopian Afrofuturist allegory ties the past, present, and future into a heated tale of anger and grief, a folk story rooted in African tradition, rap music, and hyperstylized sci-fi. With its U.K. release in 1995, Onwurah’s film became the first theatrically released British feature directed by a Black woman. But for three decades, its radical message and poetic rhythms never crossed over to theaters in the States—that is, until Janus Films’ recent restoration makes its debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month.
Welcome II The Terrordome opens with a warm glow on a sandy beach, but this is a bitter scene as a group of slaves arrive on these hostile shores. Instead of listening to their harsh white owners, the group turns back and walks into the sea, a nod to the legend that those who leave their ancestral homes will return when they die. But their journey is much more perilous: Instead of going home to Africa, they find themselves in a middle place called the Terrordome—a dystopian police state that looks right at home alongside Escape From New York—a hostile world that has pushed these survivors to the fringes of society, desperately trying to survive the cruelty of an unjust system and racial oppression.
Onwurah drew on the legends she heard growing up in Nigeria about the Ibos to come up with the concept of the Terrordome. She also cited the urban environment of Taxi Driver andthe reality-questioning premise of Apocalypse Now as inspiration for the torturous place between worlds.
“They saw the future before them, and they saw what was ahead of them, and they decided to go back into the water and return to the land of the ancestors,” she tells The A.V. Club. “As someone who had left Africa and was living in the U.K. [in] this incredibly racist town, I couldn’t accept that they’d gone back to the land of the ancestors. It felt to me like they hadn’t made it, because if they’d gone back to the land of the ancestors, what were we doing here? Because this isn’t the life that the ancestors would have wanted for us. Where had they gone?”
Onwurah watched Welcome II The Terrordome travel through the festival circuit, complete its initial theatrical run, and land a television deal on Channel 4 years later. The film lived on through screenings at colleges and retrospectives, like the screening Janus Films curatorial director Ashley Clark saw years ago. But the prints that had traveled throughout the U.K. had endured decades of wear and tear. When it came time to restore the film, Onwurah ran into an unexpected problem.
“Technicolor had our one negative, and they went bust,” she remembers. “When we were approached about doing the restoration, we went to try and get the neg, and it completely disappeared. We don’t have a negative for Terrordome.”
When preparing for a restoration, the film negative is the ideal starting point. Anything else is considered a second- or third-generation copy and not the greatest quality, but in the case of Terrordome and so many other movies whose negatives have been lost, a second-generation copy of a film print (or worse) may be all that’s left. Onwurah and her husband, the film’s cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, came in with low expectations.
“We thought it would be like a nice clean, a few of the scratches taken out,” she says. “In L.A., they did the first screening of the restoration at the Academy. I was just going to stay like I usually do for the first 15 minutes, but I got completely sucked in. I just kept looking at it, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh my god!’ I got really proud. You could see what we had been trying to do at the time.”
According to Onwurah, there were only three or four prints of Welcome II The Terrordome ever struck. Over time, the film’s haunting blue-lit sci-fi future faded into darkness from wear and tear. Splices and scratches became souvenirs from decades on the road, screening on old projectors, but the new restoration returns details to the film that had nearly been erased.
“The scene in the gym where the guys are doing kung fu, we oiled them to within an inch of their life because I wanted that sheen on the body,” Onwurah says. “After the first year of Terrordome, that sheen had literally gone. It was all dull. Seeing it on this restoration, they were glistening. It was all it was meant to be.”
Thirty years later, the themes and ideas in Welcome II The Terrordome feel just as prescient as when they were first injected into the film, in the wake of Rodney King’s beating at the hands of the L.A.P.D. Blending a poetic narration with a propulsive mixtape (including Public Enemy’s “Welcome To The Terrordome”) the film moves its audience through the grief and anger of its characters’ losses, their persecution, their frustration over their inability to protect their children, and the searing rage that erupts when it comes to avenging their murder. Revisiting Welcome II The Terrordome feels like reconnecting the past with the present.
“One of the reasons why it’s getting this resurgence is that it’s still so relevant,” says Onwurah. “What happened during the Black Lives Matter movement, it was a kind of version of the Terrordome that was so much worse, because they were real people that you were seeing. It was relentless, and it still is. But that’s what gave people viewing glasses in order to see what was in the Terrordome. At the time, a lot of people refused to accept it. I’m very happy that it’s gotten this real life again, but I don’t know what it says also about the world we’re living in, and what we think the future might be of what we’re living in now. Is it going to be valid again in 30 years? I hope not.”
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