“Memory — The Origins of Alien,” Alexandre O. Philippe’s feature-length analysis of the roots and repercussions of Ridley Scott’s horror masterpiece, seems determined to reconcile its two fundamental truths. The first is that every successful movie reveals something profound about the time when it was made. The second is that great art taps into a collective unconscious as old as time itself, tracing a direct line from ancient mythologies to modern pop culture.

At the very least, Philippe’s entertaining but frustratingly incomplete documentary confirms that “Alien” did both of those things, and it did them well. This scattershot 90-minute visual essay, though — made with love but lacking the focus of “78/52,” the director’s obsessive look at the shower scene from “Psycho” — is far more interested in exploring where the Xenomorph came from than it is in contextualizing why it was born in 1979 (and continues to grow inside of us today). 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.

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