An early sketch of what would become Alien (Screen Media Films)

The first question that one may consider when viewing Memory: The Origins of Alien is, simply, “How is this any different, or superior, to a DVD special feature documentary?” The short answer is, it is and it isn’t.

It may be scary how soon some of us have forgotten in the age of streaming that on Blu-Rays and DVDs directors like Laurent Bouzereau (on any given interview special feature) and Charles de Lauzirika (Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner) would take extensive deep dives into how a particular film or franchise was made. Even Alien got this treatment via de Lauzirika on the special edition DVD set (The Beast Within: The Making of ‘Alien’ from 2003). The key thing to notice with these special features—and I have watched and enjoyed many of them over the years—is that they were commissioned by the studios that made the films, so one would have to take a grain of salt here and there on how truthful or in-depth they could be.

What separates Memory from any typical making-of, aside from being an independent production from Alexandre O. Philippe, the director of 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, is that it’s more like taking a semester’s worth of a mass media class squeezed into 90 minutes. The actual nuts-and-bolts production of the Ridley Scott 1979 science fiction horror staple is only one piece of this examination.

The title can be taken literally on two fronts. First, it’s a look at the main writer of the film, the late Dan O’Bannon (his wife, Diane, is a producer on this film), and how his formative years reading and writing science fiction and horror stories—from films like It! The Terror from Beyond Space to author H.P. Lovecraft—informed what would become the script. The section on O’Bannon is totally engrossing because of how unique he was. As his wife says, “You couldn’t call him an iconoclast, because he didn’t have icons to break.” His biography makes up the emotional spine of the documentary, as the man who took “from everything,” including comic books, for his saga (originally titled Memory in the early 1970’s) found a creative partner in Alejandro Jodorowsky in the aborted 1970’s Dune project. He then found another in Ridley Scott and the designer for much of Alien’s production design, H.R. Giger.

Secondly, the director interviews scholars, professors, scientists, and art historians (even the late Giger’s agent) to understand the historical and mythological roots of where Alien came from. This is where we see more than what would normally be included in a usual behind-the-scenes feature, and this is both captivating and a little frustrating. Philippe highlights the dark and sexually morbid inspiration from Francis Bacon and his paintings, but other connections take more of a leap to grasp, such as Egyptian iconography and Greek mythology. The latter is featured in the most baffling segment, the opening few minutes, set in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, which depicts a re-creation of female demonic figures posing as furies. The word symbiosis is thrown around as well.

I don’t know if the documentary makes its case that O’Bannon was thinking of this or that Egyptian God or Greek figure when writing about an alien that infects people, but it does sell the science part of the story, with experts who describe parasitic wasps that inspired the movie’s space creatures.

It may vary on how much of the influences strike a chord or make sense, but the good news is that Memory is spot-on when it comes to getting into the filmmaking, once Scott is hired (after Walter Hill briefly flirted with directing duties) and fights battles with the studio, such as the resistance to the slow buildup to the action and horror in his film.

Most significantly, Philippe (not unlike the shower sequence for Psycho) has a lot of fun digging into the “chest burster” sequence, from the set design to the reactions of the actors. Unfortunately, Scott and Sigourney Weaver weren’t interviewed (only Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright were, albeit others have passed on, such as John Hurt), but there are enough crew members featured to fill in the gaps. Occasionally, some takes are a little shallow; podcaster Clarke Wolfe notes, “Ash [Ian Holm’s character] is such a dick!”

Memory is strongest when it’s about the artistic process, from O’Bannon’s influences to Alien’s early incarnations—Roger Corman tells of the version he was pitched, with the apt title Star Beast—to how it compares, favorably mostly, to what Scott would later do with the more recent Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. It may be slightly uneven as far as covering so much ground in a running time that should be longer. Yet the whole experience is a cut above what one would usually see on those somewhat cheaply made DVD or Blu-ray extras, and the theories aren’t over cooked either (so it’s also a cut above, say, Room 237).