Material such as this is rich enough to form the center of a satisfying documentary on its own. But Phillippe goes further, encouraging participants in the production as well as present-day buffs, scholars, and mythology aficionados (including actor Tom Skerritt, genre film master Roger Corman, film journalist Axelle Caroline, genre movie expert Clarke Wolfe, and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz) to go beyond "Alien" and the works it inspired, and think about where all the influences and allusions came from—not just in terms of film history, or even art history or literature, but humanity itself: our needs and fears, dreams and nightmares.
At various points, the story, direction, and production design of "Alien" are convincingly tied to mythology, religion, dream analysis, then-current developments in politics, the long history of colonialism (which links "Alien" to another 1979 blockbuster, "Apocalypse Now," both of which acknowledge the fiction of Joseph Conrad) and Egyptian art and architecture. H.R. Giger, who designed the creatures and planet where the Nostromo crew discovers them, was hugely inspired by the latter; so were Alexandre Jodorowsky, whose aborted 1970s adaptation of "Dune" brought together O'Bannon and Giger. Right up until production started, the astronauts were supposed to find the egg chamber in an ancient city oriented around a set of pyramids—a notion that would find its way into Scott's "Alien: Covenant" decades later. (The city was replaced with a spaceship in the 1979 film for budgetary reasons. But decades later, the so-called "space jockey" would become the Engineers in "Prometheus"—a film which, like "Covenant," doubles as Ridley Scott's consideration of his role as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein in two genres, horror and science fiction.)
Philippe's direction, far more imaginative than the norm in a movie about moviemaking, is very much in the spirit of Scott's original vision for "Alien." Every detail of cinematography and design dovetails with the images and stories being presented, from the chiaroscuro lighting and black backgrounds that make the witnesses' recollections seem to be occurring in dream space, to the way Philippe plays previously-seen snippets of interview footage on squarish monitors embedded in control panels that look like items on the bridge of the Nostromo.
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