Alexandre Philippe’s new feature-length documentary, Memory: Origins of Alien (2019, 94 mins) is currently doing the rounds of film festivals and related gallery shows…

On the eve of Alien’s 40th Anniversary, Memory (the title of the script’s first draft) unearths the largely untold origin story behind Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece: its roots in Greek and Egyptian mythology, underground comics, parasitology, H.P. Lovecraft, the art of Francis Bacon, and the symbiotic genius of Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger.

Sundance reviews say it tries to take an intellectual angle, but is a bit wobbly in terms of achieving that. Also that it’s about the original 1979 Alien, rather than the later world-building and cash-ins.

The documentary is currently on pre-order on Amazon, with a “student grant-money cow-catcher” release-date of 2nd September 2019.