Memory: The Origins of Alien. (15.)
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe.
Featuring Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerrit, Ronald Shusett, Ben Mankiewicz, William Linn, Ian Nathan and Diane O' Bannon. 95 mins.
I'll always cut a little slack to a film with a really good title, the kind where you really enjoy the sound of the words coming out of your mouth. Conversely, a film with a real mess of a title, one that you just can't get your head round, can be oddly fascinating. The total disparity between what is on either side of the colon in this film's title is an affront to your eyes, but I knew I had to see it, if only to find out if the film was as unbalanced as its title. It starts in The Temple of Apollo in Greece with a group of furies emerging from the earth through laser beams, but after that it is pretty much a people-talking-about-a-film documentary.
I have to say there is some rather large talk about the influence and importance of Ridley Scott's classic, not all of which I could go along with. It doesn't go to the nutty extremes of The Shining examination Room 237 but I could feel the stretch in certain places. Is Alien really “one of the biggest cultural dreams we ever had”?
This film's greatest virtue is giving Dan O'Bannon his due, recognising that his input was on a par with Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger. Brought up in a house without a TV or a phone his talent went largely underused in Hollywood but he did help give us the wonderful Dark Star, The Return of The Living Dead and was the originator of Alien. His line “I didn't steal from anybody, I stole from everybody” is the basis of O Philippe's analysis.
The pre colon part, Memory, was the title of the first draft of what would become Alien. The film wants to show how Alien took influences from Greek and Egyptian Mythology, HP Lovecraft, Sci-fi B Movies, comics (primarily a 1951 EC Comic story called The Seed of Jupiter), and the paintings of Francis Bacon. The influences aren't always direct, but worked on a pass-the-parcel principle making their way down through the centuries. Greek mythology influences the paintings of Bacon which inspire the designs for the chestburster. Director O. Phillippe spent a whole film, 78/52, dissecting the shower scene in Psycho; here he gets hung up on the chestburster scene. Almost the entire second half of the film is devoted to its execution and its meaning.
There was a lot of this about in the late seventies, searching for a mono myth, one that would encapsulate everything that preceded it. George Lucas based Star Wars on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The result of this is Hollywood's ongoing mission to perfect a foolproof formula for making successful films. Alien is acclaimed for being a hybrid of various cultural myths but isn't that just celebrating its lack of originality?
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe.
Featuring Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerrit, Ronald Shusett, Ben Mankiewicz, William Linn, Ian Nathan and Diane O' Bannon. 95 mins.
I'll always cut a little slack to a film with a really good title, the kind where you really enjoy the sound of the words coming out of your mouth. Conversely, a film with a real mess of a title, one that you just can't get your head round, can be oddly fascinating. The total disparity between what is on either side of the colon in this film's title is an affront to your eyes, but I knew I had to see it, if only to find out if the film was as unbalanced as its title. It starts in The Temple of Apollo in Greece with a group of furies emerging from the earth through laser beams, but after that it is pretty much a people-talking-about-a-film documentary.
I have to say there is some rather large talk about the influence and importance of Ridley Scott's classic, not all of which I could go along with. It doesn't go to the nutty extremes of The Shining examination Room 237 but I could feel the stretch in certain places. Is Alien really “one of the biggest cultural dreams we ever had”?
This film's greatest virtue is giving Dan O'Bannon his due, recognising that his input was on a par with Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger. Brought up in a house without a TV or a phone his talent went largely underused in Hollywood but he did help give us the wonderful Dark Star, The Return of The Living Dead and was the originator of Alien. His line “I didn't steal from anybody, I stole from everybody” is the basis of O Philippe's analysis.
The pre colon part, Memory, was the title of the first draft of what would become Alien. The film wants to show how Alien took influences from Greek and Egyptian Mythology, HP Lovecraft, Sci-fi B Movies, comics (primarily a 1951 EC Comic story called The Seed of Jupiter), and the paintings of Francis Bacon. The influences aren't always direct, but worked on a pass-the-parcel principle making their way down through the centuries. Greek mythology influences the paintings of Bacon which inspire the designs for the chestburster. Director O. Phillippe spent a whole film, 78/52, dissecting the shower scene in Psycho; here he gets hung up on the chestburster scene. Almost the entire second half of the film is devoted to its execution and its meaning.
There was a lot of this about in the late seventies, searching for a mono myth, one that would encapsulate everything that preceded it. George Lucas based Star Wars on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The result of this is Hollywood's ongoing mission to perfect a foolproof formula for making successful films. Alien is acclaimed for being a hybrid of various cultural myths but isn't that just celebrating its lack of originality?
