Admittedly I'm only one (fairly long) chapter in so far but to be brutally honest I'm really not enjoying this.
Far too much dumb shit has annoyed me already. For instance:
Spoiler
- If you're going to recreate scenes from one of the movies, for f*ck's sake make them match the movie. The opening sequence set during and immediately after the ending of Predator 2 is littered with inconsistencies. Most glaringly, instead of emerging from a tunnel in an apparently deserted area of town, we've got the Predators' ship exploding out of the ground in the middle of a neighbourhood, leaving a massive crater, demolishing buildings and killing scores of innocent bystanders. (Aside from not matching the film, this doesn't gel with the Predators' established M.O. of only killing worthy adversaries and staying hidden as much as possible either.) There are also said to be dozens more bodies down in the crater, implied to be mutilated Predator victims, yet we never see any evidence of these in the movie. And Garber watches Harrigan rise from the ashes on the surface outside when this happens deep underground long before Garber arrives on the scene in the film. Incorporating movie scenes and getting them wrong like this has been a pet peeve of mine since River of Pain, and this book's all over it. All you'd need to do is watch the scene in question, even once, and you'd catch most of these.
- The inclusion of Sean Keyes and Dutch has thus far felt entirely tenuous. Keyes, Jr. in particular makes no sense being around at the end of P2. He's said to be the Regional Director of OWLF, yet if the actor's age is even remotely accurate to his character he'd be in his mid-20s at the time. Regional Director at that age? Moreover, the film gives the distinct impression OWLF is a small, clandestine unit operating off the books, so it seems highly improbable it would even have Regional Directors. Is that not a bit... official?
- Similarly, Dutch's appearance at the scene doesn't make a whole bunch of sense, at least not the way it's portrayed in the book. He basically steals an OWLF chopper from a government building to get there instead of just, you know, driving. Garber even flies it for him. And no one cares.
- Considering an entire OWLF team just got massacred by one of the creatures, it doesn't make a lick of sense that Keyes recruits just one soldier for protection when he goes to investigate a potential Predator encounter elsewhere in the city. If OWLF can boss the military around like that, why not take the entire unit?
- And if OWLF can boss the military around like that, why do Garber and the other surviving agents run off at the end of Predator 2 as soon as the cops show up?
I really hope this picks up once it moves on to more original material because I quite like the concept of following one soldier over several years as he goes through assignments around the world and climbs the ranks, uncovering more about the Predators as he goes. But so far this novel has read like bad fanfic.
