Movie posters are works of art with a job to do: one sheet to grab your attention and lure you in! It is fascinating to see the different approaches they take to entice you into seeing the film. This book presents posters from a hundred of the most famous sci-fi movies, arranged chronologically from the Art Nouveau painting for Fritz Lang’s 1927 vision of the future, “Metropolis”, to CGI posters for 2014 films such as “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner”.

Movie posters are as indicative of the age as much as the films themselves and this collection reflects society’s attitudes towards space, new technology and fears/aspirations for the future. The first “Golden Age” of sci-fi movies is set against a backdrop of the commencement of the Cold War, fears about the power of the atomic bomb and the effects of radiation, and speculation about alien visitors following the spate of suspected sightings in that period. Sensationalist 1950s posters were often lurid designs peppered with multiple adjectives with exclamation marks in dramatic large text. These sold sci-fi disaster movies full of monsters and alien invasions. The films were usually crude B-movies where the poster promised much more than the film could actually deliver. Viewed from a modern perspective, such over-the-top posters are quite amusing and good fun. In many instances, the poster is better than the film is!

One rare quality movie from the 1950s is “Forbidden Planet” (1956) which has its neat and well-drawn poster of Robbie the Robot illustrated on page 40. Although better than many posters of the time, it uses a classic 1950s populist trick of having Robbie carry an unconscious girl in his arms even though it never happened in the film. So many posters used this design you would think it was a requirement! “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, “Invaders from Mars” and “Creature of the Black Lagoon” all have a poor damsel being carried about by the main antagonist.

There is an uplift in the quality of poster art in the late 1960s which is illustrated by two very different examples. On page 52 is the poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey” showing that Stanley Kubrick chose an official NASA space program artist, Robert T. McCall, to produce a wonderfully realistic vision of astronauts exploring the moon for the poster artwork. On the previous page is the poster for the camp and sexy “Barbarella” featuring a painting by acclaimed fantasy artist Boris Vallejo.

Thanks mostly to the release of “Star Wars”, the 1970s and 80s was the era of the sci-fi blockbuster. George Lucas had numerous artists produce posters for his film and this book features Tom Jung’s and Tom Chantrel’s versions. The great multiple-character/multiple-element design became the “Star Wars look” which was copied many times for subsequent science fiction movies. Where the artwork left no room for credits this was solved by simply by throwing a frame around the picture and putting the text in the border at the bottom.

Another notable design from the blockbuster period was Bob Peak’s poster for “Star Trek the Motion Picture” (1979). This has a classic “floating heads” composition with a vertical rainbow of energy beams - likely a reference to Star Trek transporter’s “beaming up”. Although a very different film, a very similar composition is used in the poster for Luc Besson’s “The Fifth Element” (1997) on page 90 of the book.

The 1990s saw increased use of computer-generated posters which are “assembled” from photos rather than painted which I think is a pity. Good examples would be “The Matrix” (1999) and “Serenity” (2005), neither of which I consider particularly interesting. A more successful modern poster uses a single dramatic picture to sell the film. Accompanied by clever taglines, these can “tease” the film by selling an attitude whilst revealing virtually nothing about the plot of the film. I think that “Interstellar”, “Cloverfield” and “Inception” all have posters that successfully pique the interest.

Because of the use of CGI images for modern posters, I find the first half of this book more pleasurable to look through. Notwithstanding, a hundred posters is a lot and this pretty much guarantees that your favourites will be included. There is certainly good nostalgia value in looking at quality poster art for your favourite movies. After an introduction which serves as a potted history of sci-if poster development, each poster takes a full page and is accompanied by a single-paragraph summary. A full index is included complete with a list of “useful websites” for further information.