by J.W. Rinzler

Titan, out now

Everything you could possibly want to know about James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley’s Scott’s classic.

In the nearly 35 years since Aliens came out, I’ve seen it in pretty much every format – drive-in cinema, ordinary cinema, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, extended, live with orchestra, book, comic book, audio prequel – that it has to be one of the films I’ve seen the most. I’ve read articles and books about it – but even with all that foreknowledge, there were still things in the first fifty pages of JW Rinzler’s text that I didn’t know.

This is exhaustive, and a book that you will want to spend your time delving through – and probably more than once. The illustrative material on its own justifies the price, but the text, which doesn’t hesitate to use side panels to wander off along tangents, is well constructed. Alongside fresh interviews, there’s a good use of archive material, and extracts from assorted script versions.

What comes across is the demanding nature of the movie business, particularly with someone like Cameron at the helm – there are reports of people falling ill, and the stress of production getting to some. The sheer breadth of the discussion within the book is something that couldn’t be replicated as a Bluray documentary, even one of feature length – something like the importance of what size shoe Sigourney Weaver wore to her meeting with Cameron would take far longer to set up than the sentence it does in the book, for example.

Rinzler’s book on the first film set a high standard; if anything, I’d say he’s exceeded it for this volume. Whether any others of the series warrant this treatment is open to debate, but there’s no doubt that any Aliens fan will want this on their bookshelves.

Verdict: Beautifully put together, this is the definitive account of one of the classic SF movies of the 20th century. 10/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order The Making of Aliens from Amazon,co.uk