Movie Details
| Title: | Memory: The Origins of Alien | |
| Director: | Alexandre O Philippe | |
| Year: | 2019 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.22.19 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- 78/52
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.22.19 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2019 Day Four! This is (another) making-of doc about Alien. It's from the guy who did the doc about the Psycho shower scene. I liked this a lot but a couple things about the Q&A bugged me so let me get them out of the way first. The first is that he kept saying stuff like "another behind-the-scenes making-of doc would be fine but it's not what we do" I guess to try and say that this movie looks at Alien with a focus on the inspirations and mythology that the creative forces behind the film drew from, but you know it's also a behind-the-scenes making-of doc so don't pretend "it's not what we do." And the second thing is the last time he was at the fest for the Psycho doc he said not only did he do a whole movie about one scene, he could do a sequel too! Well????? Anyway, this was really good. You can tell that the movie was built around the chest-burster scene (not my own insight, he said as much during the Q&A) because that part of the film is built just like the psycho doc with different people watching the scene, pausing and breaking down shot by shot, photographing the subjects in a way that also shows the screen they're watching, etc. But the rest of the stuff draws from everything between mythology and Lovecraft. They pull in stuff that overlaps with the Jodorowsky's Dune doc, they pull in Giger's backstory, do a bunch of stuff on Dan O'Bannon (one of the coups of the film is that O'Bannon's widow agreed to be interviewed and open up the vault of Dan's records to be photographed). Overall, this fits nicely with the bevy of material already available surrounding the making of Alien. If you're obsessed or already very familiar with that movie, I doubt you get much new here but at the same time it's very interesting and entertaining to watch. |
