Alien Vault

*This is for the 2019 edition*

So many moving parts, coincidences, and geniuses at work to form this wonderful, wonderful film. I'm grateful to Nathan for this comprehensive history, as it's never bogged down by superfluous details that would bore the casual reader, but entices you at every page to either watch it for the first time or to revisit it with new perspective.

Fantastic set photos, good reminder that Dan O'Bannon was so incredibly influential despite his apparent constant battles with the industry, a definitive spot to point out how H.R. Giger's name is supposed to be pronounced, and oodles of especially important tidbits to pay tribute to one of the richest films ever made--full stop.

It's a film history book that'll have you cherishing each page. Well done.

I haven't read the first edition, but I suppose that this adds some extra tidbits regarding the most recent films Scott has helmed (and it's very kind of Nathan to explain just what happened to Blomkamp's involvement just before PROMETHEUS) as well as what the future might hold for the series.

If you're on the fence about buying it, don't fret. It's everything you hoped it would be.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Quarto Publishing Group, becker&mayer!, and Epic Ink for the advance read.

A lot of vital elements came together in the casting, design, production and direction to make a 1979 film launch the behemoth that is the Alien franchise. This collection of fascinating behind the scenes photos, artwork and interviews takes the fan and the casual viewer through the history of the production with an updated chapter on the recent Ridley Scott films.

Something about the alien brutal killing machine vs the complex shades of humanity is so captivating to me. It’s frightening and yet mesmerising. After reading the Alien Vault, I need to go and re-watch my dvd’s again as my favourite lines and scenes were constantly in my mind throughout. Ripley will always be one of my favourite film heroes.

Fantastic companion to the Alien movie - recommended if you're a fan of the movie and want to see some behind the scenes information and pictures!

The photos and info about Alien were interesting to read about. I did struggle to keep reading because it was very wordy and the print was small.

This is the ultimate guide for any fan of the 1979 classic, Alien. It’s a beautifully presented, comprehensive look at the concepts and designs found within the film, from the xenomorph’s biology to the Nostromo’s engineering.
It would make for the perfect gift for the sci-fi fan in your life.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Eeeeeeh!

Okay, sorry, but I never thought my wish would be granted for this book and I'm so thrilled I got to read it!

Alien is one of my all-time favorite movies and this book is an absolute treat to read.

It's a great behind the scenes look with wonderful pictures and illustrations!

Alien Vault by Ian Nathan, Veronica Cartwright is the ultimate read for any Alien film fan. It features lots of information about the film and lots of behind the scenes pictures.

Anyone with even a vague interest in the Alien world will absolutely devour this book! The background on such an iconic movie is fascinating and I found myself eagerly turning pages to see what other tidbits I could find. It is amazing how immersed in this book I became since, while I find books like this interesting, I don’t tend to get caught up in them in the same way I do a novel. This, however, kept my interest. The chosen images were intriguing, well-organized, and informative. I feel like this book is a great celebration of a great movie and cinematic world, and it made me want to watch them again!

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the review copy!

This book is a must have for any fan of the Alien series. Filled with on set and behind the scenes photographs and sketches, the authors bring that one-of-a-kind experience that most movie goers never get to have.

i received an advance reading copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Alien Vault is a great, comprehensive account of Alien's production history, giving the film its cultural context - in late-70s film, where science fiction had become cool again - and going on a deep dive into the making of the film itself before capping the journey with a brief look at its legacy both on- and off-screen.

I'm hardly an Alien purist - I love the films, but tend to stick to Alien and Aliens more than any of the others - so perhaps some of the information in the book won't be as much of a surprise as it was to me, but I really enjoyed the journey that Nathan brings you on. I didn't know much about the creation of the Alien story - the name Starbeast was familiar, but that was it - and it was so interesting to see the machinations and rewritings at work at the heart of a classic.

The book is filled with great pictures - very important! - of concepts, behind the scenes shots and other related images, all of which transferred nicely to a digital print. This is rarer than you would think.

A lovely little read for Alien fans, with enough detail to keep momentum up until the last page.

It's rare to see a movie, especially sci fi/horror, get such a brilliant tribute book. Beautifully designed, exhaustively researched, with full color and full page photos on nearly every page, and so many wonderful behind-the-scenes and rare images. It's a loving and thorough tribute to the first Alien movie, fully authorized and with great interviews with the cast and crew.

The book is broken down as follows: Forward, introduction, Birth, Nostromo, Perfect Organism, Ripley, Legacy, Reverse Engineering, Appendix. As can be seen by the chapter titles, various aspects of the film are explored: from the props to the alien, the Ripley character, legacy films and influences. Each chapter contains so many images: concept art/drawings/blueprints/storyboards/stills/candids. It's really remarkable how much was preserved over the last 40 years and then collected here.

Each chapter is thoroughly discussed - it's not all pictures but has some real substance in the writing itself. All the images are annotated and relate directly to what is being examined in the text. Full background information is given on everything from Signourney Weaver's biography to several pages devoted to Giger's influence on the alien design. You'd never have realized just how much goes into a movie, especially this particular movie, until you start reading.

Movies are made so differently now that this is such an amazing resource of how films were made in the days before computers did most of the load lifting for special effects. All aspects of the film are covered here in glorious detail. Definitely one of the best movie-related books I've ever read. And due to the rare nature of the images, one that is rewarding upon every reread. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

Thank you to Quarto Publishing Group- becker&mayer Epic Ink for granting my wish via NetGalley of a temporary digital edition of ‘Alien Vault: The Definitive Story Behind the Film’ by Ian Nathan with Foreword by Veronica Cartwright in exchange for an honest review.

This is the complete story behind the creation of Ridley Scott’s SF masterpiece, ‘Alien’, and its legacy updated and reissued on its 40th Anniversary.

This is a fabulous book with many anecdotes and details about preproduction and filming and contains many on-set photos, storyboards, sketches and other documentation including H.R. Giger’s concept artwork, blueprints for the Nostromo, and costume design.

The majority of the book is dedicated to ‘Alien’ though the final chapters look at its legacy in terms of the original follow-up films and continuation in books and comics and graphic novels; and finally the ‘reverse engineering’ as Scott returned to explore the origins of the alien universe with ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Alien: Covenant’.

As a lifetime fan of SF in film, I have had a long relationship with this film, so it was amazing to learn more of its origins. I first saw ‘Alien’ during its original U.K. release and was stunned by it. ‘Alien’ was my first owned DVD and I have lost count of the number of times I have watched it over the years. Back in the late 70s, I had already discovered the unique vision of H.R. Giger, so it proved interesting to read more of the background to his involvement in this project.

I consider this would make a brilliant gift for any fan of ‘Alien’ and of SF film in general. While I was reviewing a digital edition I could imagine how polished the hardback would be especially with its stunning cover artwork.

Alien Vault is a great addition to anyone’s collection who loves the Alien franchise, especially the original movie that started it all.

I happen to love Alien, and was excited to be able to read this as an eARC from NetGalley. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review.

Alien Vault is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Alien, complete with pictures detailing the set, makeup, deleted scenes, and more. As much as I enjoy the movie, I didn’t know too much of the making of the movie, so for me this was a fascinating read. For a more die-hard Alien fan, this may be old territory being covered.

The book also (briefly) covers the other movies in the franchise. This part wasn’t quite as interesting just because it was a brief overview of the other movies. Since they were being included in the book, I’d have liked to see more behind-the-scenes details for those movies as well, or not included in the book at all.

I am assuming this book will be a coffee table size book, so this would be a great addition for someone’s collection. I think it would need to be that size for the pictures to make the best impact. This would make a great gift for a fan of the Alien franchise!

Alien Vault gives the reader an in-depth look at the making of Alien – inarguably (as in I’m not hearing otherwise) one of the single greatest cinematic masterpieces to ever grace the Silver Screen (happy 40th, boo!). Apparently this book was previously published in 2011, but this updated edition contains chapters on Prometheus and Covenant that the previous version necessarily lacked.
This book is fully authorized and fully loaded with the anecdotes, set photos, and behind the scenes information.

As far as I can tell, there is no new information here outside of the addition of the Prometheus and Covenant chapters that I mentioned earlier, and that’s okay. I don’t own the 2011 version – but I damn sure plan to own this one.
Visit the late artist’s website for more amazing/grotesque art and information.

The photos are beautiful – among my favorites were the candid shots of cast and crew, the amazing design sketches by Giger, and the Ridleygrams. It was all fascinating, to be honest. There’s a lot of information packed inside these pages. And while there’s plenty of glossy photos, it is also quite wordy – information-heavy is my jam, though!

I’m in love with Giger’s art, and with the entire universe that was realized by Scott and Giger – although this book also serves up the important reminder that one should never forget about the importance of Dan O’Bannon.

I will be purchasing this book the moment it hits shelves. I need a good, gory, acid-blood-filled coffee table book to keep my home feeling appropriately…alien.

An interesting and engrossing look at a giant in modern cinema. I would be glad to enjoy this book as a reader or use it in a course on horror or film.

Bordering on the semi-official status, this tie-in to the problematic space horror series rightly concentrates on the initial film, especially as it manages to tie in with its 40th birthday. It's not really able to offer much that's brand new, although a lot of the key players get interviewed in 2016/2017, and the writer is one of the head honchos of Britain's Empire magazine. So it all boils down to a retread, if one that is certainly of the authoritative kind. Here the history of the film's production is heavily detailed, and fans will relish what they don't know, or haven't seen amongst the images. Bizarrely yacking on about the modern prequels more than it does the "Aliens" effort from Cameron, it is never really able to let rip and say how pants many of the sequels' ideas actually were. And such is its glorification of the original that the idea of a wooden setting for the third film gets about one sentence. But if you are in the market for a detailed documentary about the birth of the death of great monster movies, this is probably it.

Alien Vault is a fantastic book companion to the Alien movie with some information and pictures from subsequent movies too.

Definitely worth a read and recommended to fans of the Alien movie and want to see the behind the scenes pictures, drawings and information..

I received this book from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

I discussed Alien, Ridley Scott's seminal science fiction masterpiece, on a Mythgard podcast last year. Alien is one of my favorite films. No matter how many times I watch the film, I can't help but be drawn into Scott's dark, dreary vision of our future. Like Star Wars, another science fiction classic from that era, the story behind the scenes is almost as interesting as the film itself. In Alien Vault, Ian Nathan chronicles what it took to make a film unlike anything else before or since.

Alien is very much Scott's vision and the movie would have been very different without him, but Alien Vault undermines the auteur approach to understanding the film. Many of the key figures - from scriptwriter Dan O'Bannon to artist H.R. Giger - were already attached to the project before Scott. I was fascinated to learn just how much some of these individuals contributed to the project. I wasn't aware of just how much David Giler and Walter Hill were responsible for taking O'Bannon's script and infusing the characters with a sense of world-weariness and verisimilitude. Ron Cobb's ship designs also tend to get overlooked. Alien Vault is filled with concept art, set photos, and shots from the movie to help bring the story behind the story to life. 

Alien Vault was originally published more than a decade ago - the version I read is the rerelease for the 40th anniversary of the 1979 film. For the most part, the book was not update for the rerelease (it even refers to Giger as alive at one point). However, the book does contain an epilogue that covers Ridley Scott's two prequels: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. I actually found this chapter quite interesting, even if it was based more on publicly available interviews and less on unpublished behind the scenes information. The book does a good job acknowledging the mixed reception to those films while not getting bogged down in the fan reaction.  

Alien Vault does its job and provides an overview of the making of the classic film. However, it's hard to call it the definitive book about the subject given the release of J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Alien earlier this year. For fans wanting an incredibly detailed look behind the scenes, I'd recommend Rinzler's book. For fans wanting a more concise account, Nathan's book is more than sufficient. 

[Note: The publisher provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.]

Im just gonna get right into it here, this was basically a childhood dream come true.
I grew up watching the movies and following the story line of Alien. I've had the change to read comics and other books as well and even see directors cuts of the movies and I even got to see that new version of Alien 3 where they tried to fix the graphics but they really did (lol) but this was so so so special to me!

Being able to get a real behind the scenes, not just in pictures (which were soo cool) but also
read the history and explanations and how my favorite monster, the Xenomorph came to be.

Also Sygourney Weaver is my childhood Alien ass kicking hero and Im so glad she auditioned for the role of Ripley and won everyone over with her badassness.

If you're a fan definitely check this out!

This was so cool!! Fans of Aliens need to read this!! I even showed my husband. I need to purchase this now.

A must buy for any enthusiasts of film, sci-fi, and horror.

Ian Nathan has put together a fantastic behind the scenes look at Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking film, including how the film was put together, set designs, production art, photographs, and actor/character arcs.

As an addition, Nathan finishes the book with details on the film's multiple sequels and prequels.