Thursday, October 20, 2005

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - Terry Brooks

I'm not even linking to this one. Stop looking at me like that. I found it for $5 in a remaindered pile, and I had a SW hankering. Don't worry, I suffered the full consequences of my folly.

Never read any of Brooks's novels, and have no desire to change that. The only piece of writing I've read of his was a short story in Legends II, which completely failed to impress me. It was far too simple, too easy, and reminded me of stories I'd written when I was in high school. (They weren't very good stories.)

Admittedly, Brooks was given a crap story to begin with here. The movie of EpI is just sloppy, and I'm being nice there. I'd come to this book assuming that he had fixed it up a bit. Made it more palatable.

Noooo.

The first page should have warned me, but I'm an idiot. Either he, or his editor, in fact both of them, need to be taught about commas, and shifting perspectives within a sentence. I'm not fond of the latter, not at all, but it is possible if you use commas wisely. Unfortunately, he doesn't use commas. At all.



Okay, so it isn't well written, I can deal with that, I said, and promptly ignored everything that happened on a sentence level, which left me with the characters and story itself, which really wasn't much better.

Oh, Anakin.

We hates him, we does.

You thought he was bad in the film, he's seriously bloody ugly here. He's perfect. He's a golden haired angel, with such a big heart, and everyone loves him, and he loves everyone, and he helps out little old ladies, and total strangers and is soooooo good it made me want to vomit and smack him around. Children aren't like that. Sometimes they are, but not ALL THE TIME. They're children. In fact, NO BODY is like that. Not all the time, and not in the depths of their hearts, but noooo, Anakin is peeeeeeerfect.

Surprisingly, I didn't mind Jar-Jar Binks. Perhaps because I had to concentrate to figure out what it was he was saying. I have picked up the unfortunate habit of saying "Okie-day!"

And then, about half way through, I just stopped. It wasn't worth my time. I even knew how it ended, fancy that.

Verdict: Don't. Just don't. Jedis can't save this.

4 comments:

  1. You should not have said that about Anakin. Because we all now know that to annoy you we should be prissy-perfect. And borrow children who can pretend to be prissy-perfect for large periods of time. And we will do it just to watch you explode inside. Your friends are like that. (well, this one is)

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  2. *looks at you like that* :p

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  3. I don't believe you actually tried to read that :p

    That movie was enough to put me off the entire (new) series. I'd hate to live through several hours of it.

    In Brooks' defense, his early shannarra stuff was delightful. Or it was when I read it 10+ years ago, and my tastes haven't changed much..

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  4. Stop that. All of you. I did say it was $5, didn't I?

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