Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman February 18, 2021

It would take maybe a few hands to count the truly transformative movies in cinema history, and it would be rare to find three released in three consecutive years, but that's what happened with 1977's Star Wars, 1978's Halloween, and 1979's Alien. It is the latter which is the subject of Memory: The Origins of 'Alien', a fascinating documentary that focuses on the film's script and its inspirations, the film's themes and suggestions and place in then-contemporary society, and the making of its most famous chest-bursting scene. The film, from noted documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe (The People vs. George Lucas, Doc of the Dead), explores Ridley Scott's genre-blending masterpiece not so much in intimate detail but rather through the lens of its broad scope technical construction, social reflections, and impact on the cinema landscape.

The film explores Alien’s place in popular culture, its impact by design on culture and psyche, and its redefining of its genres with heavy emphasis on Writer Dan O’Bannon’s script and influences and the famous “chest burst” scene. The film looks at the stories and films that inspired the Alien writer, including his own story They Bite as well as, among others, an old comic called Seeds of Jupiter, the novel At the Mountains of Madness and other H.P. Lovecraft inspirations, The John Carpenter film Dark Star and the 1951 film The Thing from Another World (which Carpenter would remake in the 1980s), and Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, a film conceptualized but never materialized.

Memory (which was the title of one of O'Bannon's earlier concepts that would become the film's opening act) also explores some of the nuts-and-bolts technical tricks of the trade, such as the film's production design, photography, and the cast and characters. It looks at H.R. Giger's creature design and artistic style, other art world influences, and more. Thematically, there's discussion of the sexualized concepts behind parts of the film and the story's roots in real world biology, human history and mythos, the film’s allegorical and predictive leanings, and more. Finally, it takes a good amount of time deconstructing the chest bursting scene from technical, thematic, emotional, and cultural perspectives.

Memory features a well defined tangle of new interviews (including O'Bannon's widow Diane and film stars Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright) and vintage material with Scott, O'Bannon, and others. The film seamlessly brings together a story of great interest that methodically, but engagingly, reveals the countless influences that went into the making of the movie, from old comics to classic films, from cherished novelists to (then) relatively obscure artists. It's a sprawling story that comes together quite nicely in its 90-some-minute runtime, bringing compelling narrative and visual aid together in the process of piecing together the story behind a bonafide cinema classic.

Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Memory: The Origins of 'Alien' is a documentary that is not so much concerned about its own aesthetics, rather rightly more concerned with dissecting those of its subject. It's not at all a flashy film. It's static in many ways as it shifts from interview subjects to film clips, from still images to artist renderings to tell its story. But Screen Media has ensured the film comes to Blu-ray with a proficient 1080p transfer. The film is not a challenge for the high definition format. Essential elements are handled fine. The new interview clips are probably the primary place where most viewers will ascribe a "score" to the material, grading out how these look compared to old film clips (which are of course not so dynamic as Alien's 1080p or UHD presentations, here showing some banding and the like), vintage interviews, and stills depicting scripts, storyboards, concept art, and other materials. The interviews fare well, offering good, firm command of skin in the tight shots and overall clarity and sharpness in wider views that reveal clothes as well. Colors here are full and flush. Perhaps most notable in these is the dramatic usage of black. Most subjects are situated off to the side, allowing background black to fill much of the frame, a stark contrast against the well illuminated subjects. These blacks are solidly deep and inky. The rest of the image is cobbled together of various images of varying innate qualities. While the Alien clips lack the finesse of the actual full film release, they're presented with enough visual acumen to carry the story behind the film which is the true subject matter here. In short, there's nothing at all dynamic at work with this one, but most viewers will be too absorbed into the story to fret too much over any inherent flaws or encode accidents that might get in the way of a Hollywood production meant to entertain rather than to inform.

Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Memory: The Origins of 'Alien' arrives on Blu-ray with a pair of soundtracks: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless and LPCM Uncompressed 2.0. In short, the 5.1 track is the fuller, richer of the two, though to be sure this is not a film with any particularly challenging sonic cues; either track carries the extremely front heavy material well enough. But with the 5.1 track, there's a finer sense of front end fluidity, mild ambient fill, and dialogue that is grounded in the front-center channel. Conversely, the two channel track is a little thinner with dialogue that struggles to reach a pure center imaged area. But the film has no cues that demand surround extension and certainly nothing that challenges the low end in any form or fashion, so really either track will do. This reviewer found, in switching back and forth through the course of the presentation, the 5.1 track to be the more reliably filling and satisfying of the two.

Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Screen Media's Blu-ray release of Memory: The Origins of 'Alien' contains no supplemental content. The main menu screen offers options for "Play," "Chapters," and "Setup" atop music and a series of stills and film clips. No DVD or digital copies are included with purchase. This release does not ship with a slipcover.

Memory: The Origins of Alien Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Memory engagingly and succinctly breaks down the film's influences, its design, its purposes, its cast, its crew, its legacy as a key influencer in the Horror and Science Fiction genres, particularly as the film serves as something of a demarcation line from the aesthetics of its time to what is more identifiably tangible and real today. The film will please both longtime fans of the film as well as a broader base of armchair film students interested in how a classic came together. Screen Media's featureless Blu-ray delivers perfectly serviceable video and audio. Highly recommended as a now-critical supplemental companion piece to one of the best films ever made.