Metacritic reviews

This is a hearty, four-course meal for film fans, which, once again, demonstrates that the study of a film can be just as invigorating an experience as the actual film itself.

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

A rich and diverting piece of film scholarship.

While it is generally engaging to learn about the influences of the screenwriter Dan O’Bannon or the artistic process of H.R. Giger (who designed the alien), the documentary is at its least fawning when it focuses on technique.

Memory certainly makes a good go of it, weaving together industrial production history with its mythic, pulp and artistic inspirations. The disparate strands of Alien’s origins have never quite been connected like this in a popular documentary, but billing this as the “untold story” of Scott’s film is a bit of a stretch.

Falls slightly short of being the definitive Alien doc, but Memory is slick and thoughtful, and will deepen your love of a classic.

Alexandre O. Philippe is a fine filmmaker and documentarian. Memory – The Origins of Alien, however, is a bit of a class on story structure and theory.

An admirably full portrait of a film that reflects, with thrilling discomfort, the darker recesses of our minds.

The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.

Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared “Alien” into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own.