Memory: Origins of Alien

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror masterpiece, Alien. It was only Scott’s second major film, and yet he managed to make a movie that has stayed in the public consciousness for four decades and has spawned eight other big screen movies, as well as countless video games, comic books, novels, and toys. I can walk into any Target in America today and buy an action figure of the xenomorph, the terrifying, phallic apex predator alien of the film’s title. Got that? I can still buy brand-new toys from a film made when I was five years old. That, my friends, is pop culture staying power. 

The story, of course, follows the crew of the Nostromo, a tugboat in space making its way back to earth after a long mission. The crew members are awakened from their deep sleep by the ship’s computer reporting a potential distress signal. They land on a rocky, forbidding moon to investigate and discover the signal is coming from the remains of a marooned alien ship. Inside, they find a chamber filled with hundreds of egg-like objects. A crew member touches one only to have it open and have a combination of a spider, a witch’s hand, and my worst nightmare jump out and attach itself to his face. This frightening violation leads to one of the most memorable and shocking deaths in movie history when it becomes apparent that the face hugger planted an egg in the crew member that then gestates and is “born” when a baby alien bursts out of his chest in spectacularly gory fashion while everyone is eating dinner. The rest of the crew, especially our protagonist, Ellen Ripley as played by Sigourney Weaver, spends the rest of the film trying to kill and then just survive the unstoppable killing machine that’s been unleashed on their ship.

The whole film is atmospheric, strung with electrified tension wires, and speckled with the sweat of desperation. The cinematography, production design, sound design, script, and performances are powerful and still perfect after all these years. If you haven’t ever seen the original Alien or you just want to be good and scared, you should screen it tonight. 

 If you’re a fan from way back, another film you may want to consider is the 2019 documentary Memory: The Origins of Alien. It’s not a behind-the-scenes or making-of so much as it is a meditation on where some of the major story points and images came from. Rather than focusing on the production itself or, say, Ripley’s role as a feminist icon, Memory focuses on Dan O’Bannon, the writer whose love for horror, comics, and H.P. Lovecraft eventually became a story that became a script that became a film that became the cultural juggernaut that is Alien. Memory also highlights the contributions of H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter whose nightmarish, techno-sexual designs inspired the truly alien aspects of the xenomorph and the ship where it originates. The film features interviews with the now-deceased O’Bannon’s wife along with actors like Veronica Cartwright and Tom Skerritt who appeared in the film and a variety of producers and intellectuals who touch on Alien’s subversive, controversial undertones dealing with male rape and impregnation. They shed interesting light on some of what has given Alien such unsettling staying power.

The documentary’s focus is quite tight in the sense that it really does zero in on the origins of the story, the images, and the infamous chest burster scene with John Hurt. Some would argue this makes the film myopic or shallow, but I choose to think of it as one specific chapter in the much larger collection of things written and filmed about Alien over the last forty years. It’s stylishly filmed and edited, and is a nice addition to the body of work about Ridley Scott’s influential film.

So to sum up, Memory: The Origins of Alien is good, but 1979’s Alien is truly great.