In 1976, Twentieth Century Fox bought a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon entitled Star Beast. Three years later with Ridley Scott at the helm, Alien was unleashed on unsuspecting filmgoers. En route to back to Earth, the crew of the starship Snark intercepts an alien transmission. Their investigation leads them to a desolate planetoid, a crashed alien spacecraft, and a pyramidic structure of unknown origin. Then the terror begins…

In the forward of book editor Randy Stradley makes a point to say that they had to go back to the drawing board a few times because of how difficult it was to forget what was actually made by the creative minds (Moebius, Giger) after the script was purchased and development started on the movie itself. While I applaud those efforts, I still feel like this book is too close to the movie that ended up on film for me to suggest it for anyone. It has great art and there’s some very very minor differences from the movie, but at the end of the day, it’s the same script with some names and genders changed.

That being said, it’ll look great up on my shelf next to the Alien3 Original Screenplay adaption, which was a much different, more notable, and much more enjoyable.

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