Book Review: The Art of X-Men: The Last Stand

May 12, 2009 by Parka

The Art of X-Men: The Last Stand: From Concept to Feature Film is very similar in style to the art book published for the second X-men movie. It needs more depth.

To save some time explaining what's inside, I'll quote the product description:

This lavishly illustrated filmbook boasts more than 360 illustrations, including striking movie stills and unique set designs, concept drawings, costume sketches, and storyboards, appearing exclusively in this edition. Beginning with an introduction by director Brett Ratner, text includes commentary about the production of the movie, along with an original history of the X-Men by Peter Sanderson, the comics historian and author of X-Men: The Ultimate Guide, illustrated with archival Marvel comic-book art.

The writeup by Peter Sanderson takes a look at the history of X-men, which was created in 1963. Considering the amount of history X-men has, it's not inaccurate to say that the writeup in the book is rather brief. It does go through the main gist and takes a look at the main characters. There are stories like how the characters are created, the differences between the comics and the movies, for example Mystique is Nightcrawler's mom in the comics but not the movie.

There's a good amount of art in the book. Unfortunately, there's also a good amount of film stills. Good thing is all are captioned and informative.

That's all. Just history and art. There's no production stories, not much anyway, of how they shot the movie on ground.

If you're intending to get the book, the paperback version is more worth it for the price.

Thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.