j* movie reviews 2020

Memory: The Origin of Alien (2019)

This is a brilliant exploration of the "creating of" the epic mythology that is Alien.

I love a "making of," hearing the tales of actor and director woe and fraught and loving relationships. But this is not that. This is a doco that chronicles the development stages of Alien and it is amazing! For the first five minutes I was actually unsure we were even watching the right thing. Because this positions the whole story within a greater conversation of mythology and art. Possibly it represents the first doco exploration of any film within such a holistic cultural context.

I'm a bit smitten.

There are explorations of the human interactions of the three main players, writer O'Bannon, director Scott and visualiser Giger. We hear tales of personal cheques, of studio fears and bravery in the presentation of this story of Furies revenging via male rape.

There are interviews with surviving collaborators and familiars of the dead ones, archived interviews with the dead humans involved. There are also interviews about the cultural impacts with modern, cultural curators. All the new interviews are shot in a range of genius half light. So moody, so atmospheric.

This doco spends a lot of time exploring parallels and sources of inspiration for Alien. It treats it with respect as both an art and a film. We hear the explicit stories of exactly which arts inspired it, beyond Giger to Bacon to legend to sanitised sci-fi films. We see moments of it framed side by side with these arts, and with other sci-fi films. It creates an amazing sensation of being sucked into a gallery exhibition. But here it's not just one form of "art" that's on display, it's all of them. I cannot stress enough how much this feels like the first doco I've ever seen that treats a film in such a delightful way.

We weave from art back and forth with mythologies, writing, writers. We detour through the Lovecraft. The layers of ancient Greece. Through Egypt. Through the human psyche. We see how all these threads of ideas and fears have welled up through story and literature and art. And then how they weave together into the tapestry of Alien.

We also see so much of the creative detritus of the film's evolution. The scripts. The scrawled and scribbled and crossed out scripts. The sketches, the re-sketches. The varieties of multiple alien designs. We see the models made and discarded. We ponder how the film would have looked if they'd used "that" and not what we know and love.

There's also some analysis of the class dynamics in the film, and quite serious frame-by-frame analysis in parts. It's not afraid to dabble into the academics of shot composition. A small exploration of the beauty of chest-bursting mistakes. A little talk about how maybe Ridley Scott can never escape that first great artistic synergy, and is destined to revisit it in lesser ways forever...

It also raised an issue, whilst not addressing it directly. Common lore says that Ripley is a great female character even though the part was written as a male. And we hear this said...but at the same time we're shown a very explicit script note "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women." So perhaps, in Ripley's story, credit has never been widely given where credit was due. And it reminds me how much, perhaps, that most scripts should be written in unisex.

I've never seen a doco so doubled down on the development stages of a film. And I've never seen one that treats the film so perfectly as a fusion of art and myth making. I say it's a must for film lovers.

J* gives it 5 stars.