Book Review: "Alien: The Archive"

- by Señor Editor, 12 December 2014

For a split second I planned to put some kind of "in space, no one can hear you scream" joke somewhere in this review, but then I realized how awfully cliché and utterly unoriginal that would be. That's how ingrained in pop culture the Alien franchise is - not only would everybody get the reference, but also everybody probably heard enough stupid jokes and spins on that slogan to last them a lifetime.

What I'm saying is, the Alien franchise is as big and iconic as they get. And something like that certainly deserves a nice, big, be-all, and-all book with fancy glossy photos and text detailing everything about how the movies were made. If that's the kind of thing you'd be interested in, hypothetical Alien fan that I'm talking to right now, then Titan Books awesome Alien: The Archive has got you covered. It's as close to the definitive book about the movies as anything ever got, and it looks beautiful.

This book is a great resource, featuring everything from concept art, to set photos and behind the scenes stuff of Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection.

Titan has pretty much mastered making this kind of art/photo books by now (just check out the reviews of their recent RoboCop and John Carpenter books), so I knew I could expect a premium product here. 

The book is dedicated to H. R. Giger, who died this year, and you will have plenty of opportunities to watch his incredible designs in The Archive. It's a great tribute, and it really shows how much the movies owe to Giger's work. The imagery of all the movies have roots in his iconic initial designs.

Giger's stuff isn't the only concept art featured, though. There's quite a lot of illustrations by other artists, including concept sketches by Moebius (Jean Giraud). You can see them in the gallery at the bottom of the page.

While the visual parts of the book are great, there are some really interesting text pieces featured here. The one that I found the most interesting, was the introduction "In conversation with Sigourney Weaver", where Weaver talks in-depth about Ellen Ripley, her work on the character, and how she interprets Ripley. Also about how working with Ridley Scott isn't exactly easy... It's a long interview and a fantastic read.

Other interesting parts detail the ideas behind the designs of everything in the Alien franchise: from the xenomorphs, the engineers, the space ships, the androids, the locations of each movie, the weapons used, the power loaders... EVERYTHING. It's a lot to take in, and it's nice just having this book around to read a bit and look at the photos whenever you please.

Weaver also appears later on in the book, talking many aspects of the movies. The designers, special effects people, Ridley Scott and a whole lot of the crew also chime in with interesting stuff. Even if the book features some information and photos that you may have seen in other books, I'd rather have them here in with the new stuff  than have to buy more books to get everything.

Below, you can check out a gallery of my crappy photos of the book. Sorry, but it's damn hard to photograph glossy paper. You can believe me the book looks beautiful. In the gallery you'll see everything from storyboards, to concept art, set pics, dudes working on the "Kiiiill meee..." Ripley clones, and what almost was: James Remar the colonial marine. And H.R. Giger at work. Enjoy.

This is a great book, and if you're not yet done with Christmas shopping, and know an Alien fan, I'm sure they will want this badly. It's over 300 pages of Aliens, and all of it looks fantastic. Get that book. GET IT NOW.


The review copy was provided by the publisher, Titan Books. Do you have this? Will you get it? Leave a comment and tell us, or just leave a comment to ooh and ahhh!

Tagged: books, Reviews.

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