MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: ALEXANDRE O. PHILIPPE / STARRING: BIJAN AALAM, TIM BOXELL, AXELLE CAROLYN / RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 2ND
It’s bit sobering to think that Alien is now 40 years old. Men and women have grown to middle age and gone to fat and ruin in that span of time – mind boggling. It’s the business of mind-expansion that propels this feature-length anniversary documentary from director Alexandre Philippe, which eschews the usual retrospective approach to get right inside the hive-brain of creativity behind it. If you’ve ever pondered why Ridley Scott’s 1979 space horror never seems to grow stale, this enlightening film will be an education.
Taking a lead from 78/52, Phillipe’s 2017 documentary on Hitchcock’s Psycho which performed a mythic deconstruction of the shower scene, Memory focuses in on Alien’s most famous shock: the moment the little critter version bursts out of John Hurt’s chest. Between discussion of this, Philippe gets under Alien’s creative bonnet, both as the essential product of a meeting of minds between Ridley Scott, Swiss artist H.R. Giger and disgruntled writer Dan O’Bannon, and as a timely conduit to maelstrom of influence, from ancient Greek fables to 20th Century surrealist art and crummy B-movies. Some you will expect, many you will not; all feed the beast: the latent power of our collective unconscious has rarely been tapped so brilliantly than with Alien.
Of the creators, O’Bannon, driven half mad by a desire and frustration, receives the most attention. Compelled by his experience of Carpenter’s Dark Star and Jodorowsky’s abandoned Dune to make a movie that fused Métal Hurlant’s new wave SF with old-fashioned drive-in shocks, his contribution is soon subsumed into the milieu. You feel his pain: at one point the camera poignantly lingers on pre-production paintings by Giger that refer to the film as ‘O’Bannon’s Alien’. But, like the creature itself, Alien is a shapeshifter and way more than the sum of its parts, although it’s fascinating to follow the rabbit warren of influences such as Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, IT! The Terror from Beyond Space and the paintings of Francis Bacon.
Philippe weaves the blood and philosophy together with a fan’s enthusiasm for the subject and a curator’s eye for selection; just for once the academic talking heads are more interesting to listen to than the cast and crew. Indeed, the decision to focus so much of the running time of the chestburster scene tends to break the spell – do you really need to hear Veronica Cartwright recall falling backwards in shock all over again? This is when the film falls back into the ‘making-of’ mode it wants to avoid but you’re never more than a few minutes away from more mental muscle-flexing of a most gratifying kind.
A celebration of the rich mythology in every frame of Alien, this heavyweight documentary is one every fan of the acid-blooded bastard should check out.
