Prometheus: The Art of the Film

This makes an interesting and fairly useful reference to complement the film, but it also has much to offer in the way of insight into how the concepts of the film were developed.Prometheus remains a critically divisive film, but whether you accept it as an addition to the Alien series or not, it is undeniably a beautifully conceived and designed piece of work with outstanding visual detail. The book presents a good range of documentation; fewer original drawings/traditional artworks than many – myself included – would have liked, but although Scott likes to work using traditional film-making techniques his design team generally follow industry trends; much of the concept artwork is therefore digitally realised. No matter; there is a wealth of visual information, well supported by accompanying text to provide a narrative on costume, hardware, sets and CGI. I found the genesis through discarded ideas and early designs to be a fascinating process and the commentaries help explain points that aren't made explicit in the film which adds greatly to its understanding.As these types of book go, this is a decently presented volume which certainly enhances one's enjoyment of the film; as an art book, it just misses the five star rating but is certainly worth having if you appreciate cinematic science fiction concept design.

This is a great-looking book, a hardback presented in landscape format. The content is beautifully presented but I am a bit disappointed by the lack of content. Its design is firmly on quality rather than quantity, so it looks wonderful, has lots of large pictures, but it lacks the sheer number of pictures I was expecting.I have many movie artwork books, and they are all packed with hundreds of concept design sketches, paintings, models and photographs that show initial concepts and ideas, and shows how they evolve to finished entities in the movie. In this case I was expecting an array of design sketches and paintings for costumes, sets, spaceships, vehicles, creatures, landscapes and so on. These are all represented, but I don't get any sense of the designers' thinking.One of the great things about these books is looking at all those wonderful designs that go into a movie; especially all those that fell by the wayside, were too whacky or expensive, or which give a glimpse of plot lines that were eventually abandoned. The problem with this book, for me anyway, is that these things are simply not there. For example, it shows just four designs for spacesuits, when we know from countless other such books that hundreds of designs would have been drawn. Similarly for spaceship design, there are just a couple of concept designs on offer, when surely this big, expensive and crucial piece of the movie would have been the subject of a vast amount of design work, generating a mountain of sketches, paintings and models that this book ought to have showcased. It's not all bad though - far from it. We get about 23 drawings, paintings, models and photos of the rover vehicle, plenty of alien designs, and an enormous number of landscape images. I'm just a bit unhappy with the things they chose to leave out of the book.On the words side of it, Ridley Scott's foreward is informative and impressive, and sets out his thinking for the whole movie. The remaining text is also informative, though it generally amounts to little more than captions. Interestingly, Ridley Scott refers to "The Book of Alien", an excellent book that showcased hundreds of the design drawings of the kind missing from this book - a collection of artwork that formed his starting point for designing the spaceship in Prometheus.The artwork is incredible, well worth a look, and a credit to the artists and designers. It's just that this book doesn't give any real impression of the huge amount of design work they did on this movie. That said, for a collector of such books, this one is a treat - just not quite as in-depth as it could have been.

As a keen fan of sc-fi movies I've collected a fair number of "art of" books and this is a pretty good addition. It does help explain some of the thinking behind the film that wasn't obvious from viewing Prometheus, and the quality of the images are generally very good. My only criticism is how dark some of the pictures are, making them all look a bit similar. However that's how they were filmed so I can't really complain.On the other hand the books strong point for me is seeing how huge some of the sets were and how they were constructed. Obviously Scott had a decent sized budget to create the different internal and external environments and it gladdens the heart that a lot of these were practical and not all entirely CG.All in all, not a bad book for the coffee table but not one that I'll look at as much at as the original Alien artbook. It is also fantastic value for a hardback at £12.99 and I would still recommend it for anyone remotely interested in sci-fi movies and conceptual art although it's not good enough to award it 5 stars.

I really love these books, especially when they include photos from behind the scenes, as well as the artwork. This is a fantastic book, to complement a fantastic film. It tells the story of the film from pre-production to the building of the massive sets, through the filming, to the finished article. One amazing thing I found out was that director Ridley Scott, kept the CGI to a minimum, and actually built all the sets, vehicles, and interiors of the alien pyramid, and spaceship from scratch. They took up so much space they had to continue building outside the massive sound stages at Pinewood to finish the realistic sets! No wonder it looked so spectacular! There are chats and photos with the cast and crew including the brilliant Noomi Rapace, (what a fantastic actress,) as well as a Forward, (and some of his own drawn Story Boards,) by the great Ridley Scott himself. I rate this book very highly, and it is equal to the similar fantastic 'Pacific Rim' movie volume. (If only this had a slipcase as well!) 5*****

This is a very nice book with plenty of quality imagery included. You also get a decent amount of insight into the creative process leading to the final visuals of the movie.However, as Stephen Citynskyj mentions in his review, there seems to be a lack of sketches and conceptual drawings, and in my opinion, perhaps a few too many photographs of the finished sets/scenes from the film. I also own quite a few 'art of' books from many films and games, and they all have a wide variety of character and environment studies which give clear and constructive processes which lead to the end results, but I feel with this book there could have been much more of this type of work included.I'm not disappointed, as such, as I feel it makes a great addition to my book collection and the print quality is great (and from an artist/designer point of view there are quite a few exceptional offerings) and at £12.99 I'm more than happy with the price, but when a book has 'The Art of..' in its title, I feel a bit more 'art' should be evident.