MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN
Talking heads (but attached to bodies, thankfully).
CERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Alexandre O. Philippe STARRING Diane O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Tom Skerritt SCREENPLAY Alexandre O. Philippe DISTRIBUTOR Dogwoof RUNNING TIME 93 mins
Exhaustive DVD documentaries, multiple meticulous books, way too many Total Film retrospectives to accurately count… few films have been as comprehensively chronicled as Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi-horror classic Alien. But on the film’s 40th anniversary, documentary maker Alexandre O. Phillipe has found a fresh angle: positioning Alien as a modern myth writ large.
As far as #hottakes go, it’s as highfalutin as they come. But Phillipe connects the dots in convincing fashion, drawing a line from the Furies of Greek mythology to the chestburster-influencing imagery of Francis Bacon, via the unspoken patriarchal guilt of the ’70s. Rather than a straightforward making-of then, Memory is more concerned with the literature, art, ideas and dreams that fuelled Alien’s filmmaking hydra: director Ridley Scott, xeno-designer
H.R. Giger and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, whom Philippe credits as the film’s creative lynchpin.
Multiple talking heads contribute, from commentators and critics to filmmakers and a handful of cast members. But while the absence of Giger and O’Bannon was unavoidable, the lack of new input from Scott and Sigourney Weaver leaves it feeling like a major piece of the puzzle is missing.
Philippe’s previous film, 78/52, was an impressively forensic dissection of Psycho’s iconic shower scene. Here, a significant chunk of the punchy runtime is dedicated to the peerless chestburster sequence. But by slipping into more conventional behind-thescenes territory it temporarily forgets what makes Memory so, well, memorable. Jordan Farley
ThE VErDiCT
Bursting with fresh insight, Phillipe’s unconventional doc is a deep dive into the genesis of a sci-fi classic.