Quote from: TheBATMAN on Oct 05, 2018, 12:46:07 PM
Finally finished this and it's been a while since a read a novel that has been this badly phoned-in. Both authors just seem completely bored and want to get through it as quickly as possible. Some really random character exposition on minor players like a radar operator and one of Traeger's red-shirts, yet nothing whatsoever on any of the main cast. Most of the trimmed dialogue from the trailers is reinserted here but no real new scenes of note, aside from how fugitive dies and is hanged by the Upgrade. Funny how the best comedic scenes from the movie like the shotgun scene and the painting scene are missing too.
Couldn't agree more. I've read the first 100 pages of this book. Here are some thoughts so far.
- The first sentence is just the word, "Space." Generally, the writing at the syntactic level is clunky and relies a lot on full stops to influence the pace the reader is absorbing it and to create emphasis, particularly with a heavy use of fragments. That's fine, but it happens
constantly through the first few chapters. There's also a ton of lineation (case in point, pg. 14 when "A spaceship." is its own paragraph for emphasis), which is a fundamental element of poetry...not prose. There are a lot of weird parentheticals everywhere. The use of present tense for scenes in which a Predator is a focalizing character is unnecessary, and it comes through rough in chapter 9 when there are paragraphs that alternate back and forth between Rory and the Upgrade. Also, in this scene, for some reason there's inconsistency in that some of the Predator moments become italicized for no discernible reason. Then the formatting actually breaks to a new scene, which is just the same scene with Rory. There have even been a few typos, which...come on. That's not a nitpick at all; this is a professionally printed book within a licensed property, not a self-published endeavor. Editors get paid to fix this shit, so that when
we pay for it we get a polished piece of writing. That's just pure laziness, and I don't really accept the excuse that this book may have been under a time crunch. We learn to proofread when we're children. After Bug Hunt, I'm not willing to cut Titan any slack in this department.
- I disagree with the choice of the two writers they've used here, Golden & Morris. I'm predicting that they're going to have a hard time conveying the humorous tone that the film asserts as I move forward with this read. When Shane Black's dialogue is unaltered in the novelization, I find the one-liner style to be a bit inconsistent with everything else that comes through somewhat flat. The comic relief feels incongruous, which I did not feel was the case for the movie.
- As mentioned, it gets the year of Predator 2 wrong as 2005 on pg. 75. There couldn't be a more simple detail to get right, to be honest. It's in giant white letters at the beginning of Predator 2.
- The narrative's outlook on Autism Spectrum Disorder is introduced on pg. 33: "Once [Rory's] mom had said she thought neuro-typical people were like cavemen, and kids like Rory were the future of humanity." Looking to see how this comes up in oncoming passages as I read more.
- Paged ahead and saw that a character was named Bruce Willis.
- There are an assortment of awkward, mismatched, or distracting similes in the first 3rd of the book. Here are my favorites so far:
1.
QuotePg. 12: "Seconds later, another SUV, as black and highly polished as the first, shimmered from the heat haze, as if beamed down from the USS Enterprise."
2.
QuotePg. 89: "She was relieved when Traeger's aide, Sapir, appeared, rushing up to them with a look on his face like his grandmother's ghost had just whispered sweet nothings in his ear."
3. (this one is so amazing I've been text messaging a screenshot of the page to people)
QuotePg. 2: "Sparking and hissing, the ship's been through hell and when it hits the outer limits of Earth's atmosphere there's a whump of resistance, like someone's awkward dad just did a belly flop into the swimming pool."
- In terms of differences from the film, I haven't noticed much, but regarding the character of Shawn Keyes:
Spoiler
There is dialogue that explicitly indicates he is the son of someone who had been part of a contact team, but Peter Keyes isn't named (although Casey looks at a photo and describes their strong familial resemblance). Also, Shawn Keyes gets decapitated by the Predator, and a nameless tech takes his place from the movie where he says to Casey that 'it can't get away' as she makes her escape.
