Dave's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Book Rant

     The Veiled Threat by Alan Dean Foster
     The Junior Novel by Dan Jolley
     The Official Novel by Alan Dean Foster

     Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/FallenBooks

     Be warned, there will be some spoilers in the full reviews, although I
don't intend to go into plot details overall.

CAPSULES

     The Veiled Threat: Del Rey Books - Well, it's not bad, but it's not
really good either.  Lots of setup, very little payoff, and a tin ear for
fight scenes.  Some nice character-building bits, though.  Mildly
recommended.  $7.99/$9.99Cn
     The Junior Novel: Harper Entertainment - Very stripped-down adaptation,
as one might expect, but it makes generally good choices about what to leave
out and what to keep in (as opposed to the comic, which sucks at this).  A
fairly quick read if you want to know the general plot but want more detail
than a Wiki entry's likely to have.  It also has a clear, full shot of The
Fallen himself.  Recommended.  $5.99/$6.99Cn
     The Official Novel: Del Rey Books - The fight scenes are about as
glossed-over as in The Veiled Threat, and some of the obvious "pander to the
teenaged audience" innuendo scenes are unpleasant, at least those don't seem
to be Foster's fault.  Good detail and filling in backgrounds, although a
number of characters are mis-named or simply unnamed.  Recommended.
$7.99/$9.99 (although Target has it for $5.99)


RANTS

     The Veiled Threat: One of the big problems I had with Ghosts of
Yesterday was that it not only went nowhere in particular, it was clear by
the time I finished reading it that it didn't actually fit in with the movie
it was supposed to be a prequel to.  Veiled Threat at least fixes the second
problem.  Oh, there's a few places in the Junior Novel that seem to
contradict it, but these are fairly small points and the Junior Novel may
well be wrong.  [Correction: It was pointed out to me that at the time I
really only complained about Ghosts of Yesterday disagreeing with the prequel
comic.  It was only later that it became painfully obvious that Ghosts of
Yesterday had less to do with the movie than most fanfics do.]
     Unfortunately, it doesn't really try to fit anything significant into
the space between movies.  So you get all these new characters show up with
massive bullseyes painted on them, but nothing much to show for it.  Reign of
Starscream at least tried to do something major only to get foiled.  But this
is more like the Alliance comic, in that it meanders around, has a few
inconclusive fights in which non-movie characters wander in and get killed
off, and ends up on an unsatisfying note.  It's painfully obvious which
characters will die, and how quickly, simply by considering whether they've
got toys coming out.  I was actually a little surprised that Salvage and
Longarm survived, since they're non-movie toys from the previous movie.  But
I was not at all surprised that Macerator and Beachbreak got jobbed.
     Most of the reason to read this book is the character-building given to
the humans, as the Transformers themselves only get a little bit here and
there.  In particular, there's two "geeks and nerds who are trained to kill"
that get a lot of screen time, but don't even appear in the Junior Novel, so
either they're not in the movie or they have tiny roles.  Either way, Foster
does get to spend time working on these guys without worrying about getting
contradicted by late changes in the movie.  :)  Former-Agent Simmons also
gets a lot of time, and it really helps cast his behavior in the movie in a
clearer light.
     The fight scenes, on the other hand, read like something done as
placeholders, with the intention of coming back to flesh them out later.  I
mean, sure...doing fight scenes in text is HARD.  I hate doing it myself, for
all that I'm told I do it pretty well.  But Foster didn't even seem to be
trying here.
     All told, if you don't have a tall stack of to-be-read novels (which I
do, but I jumped this ahead), and think you'll have time to read it before
the movie, go for it.  But don't make it a big priority.

     The Junior Novel: Dan Jolley's got some Transformers experience under
his belt already, such as the TF/GIJoe crossover comics (vol I and II) from
Devil's Due, and is generally a comics veteran (Firestorm, Micronauts, GIJoe,
Voltron) with a strong emphasis on licensed properties.  This isn't his first
junior novel adaptation either, he did the JN for Iron Man.
     A JN comes with the same sort of limitations as a comic adaptation, with
only 160 pages of low-density text to work with.  Unlike a regular novel,
where you can go into all sorts of depth on things that are only hinted at on
the screen, a JN is a summary with some selected dialogue.  Some things
simply have to get cut (like a scene that did make it into #1 of the comic
adaptation).  But Jolley does a good job of at least devoting a line here and
there to even the minor scenes, and where the first issue of the comic left
me confused in places (and convinced to not buy the remaining three issues),
I was generally satisfied with the job Jolley did here.  The whole story
seems to be there, complete with subplots, and if the fight scenes are also
kinda light, at least there's a good reason.
     Two bits of spoilery content I want to note.  First, there's a photo
gallery of various characters, including a good clear shot of The Fallen.  He
looks like a Makuta from Bionicle.  Seriously.  He'd work better as a
Bionicle tie-in toy than anything Hasbro's usual engineers would be able to
come up with.  Second, I am amused that someone else thought of the idea of
having a Decepticon hide in plain sight as a stealth plane hanging in the
Smithsonian.  Jetfire in the movie, Skyjack in my 1998 fanfic
(http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Fanfic/Watchman).  No, I don't think
Kruger, Kurtzman or Orci is reading my fic and ripping it off, it's the sort
of good idea I expect to see come to people independently.  ;)  And yes, I'm
mainly bringing this up so that no one emails me to "alert" me to it.
     Oh, and the character I've seen as "Wheelie" in some toy promo stuff is
called "Wheels" in the novel.  I like Wheels.  He has his priorities in
order: obey the hawtsome "Warrior Goddess."  We'll have to wait and see if
Wheels becomes Wheelie in the actual movie, or if he stays Wheels.

     The Official Novel: As expected, it's pretty much the same plot as the
Junior Novel, but with additional scenes and a few minor contradictions
caused either by Jolley and Foster working from different versions of the
script or from Jolley needing to make alterations to tighten things up.
     Hrm.  While reading the novelization, I decided to finally look up some
of the key locations, to see if they were real (like Hoover Dam) or
fictionalized (like Mission City).  Turns out Diego Garcia is a real place, a
joint US/UK naval base...and the site of some controversy about forty years
ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_Diego_Garcia  I have to
wonder if the movie will inadvertantly bring this issue into the public eye,
simply by reminding people that the place exists and giving advocates an
opening? 
     As mentioned in the Capsule above, the fight scenes aren't a lot better
than in The Veiled Threat, although having the movie script to work from
seems to have helped a little.  One odd thing about the book is that there's
places where Foster goes out of his way to NOT name characters.  For
instance, I know from trailers that Blackout makes an appearance, but in the
relevant scene of the novel he's merely "the helicopter Decepticon" and
similar descriptive non-namings.  None of the Devastator components are
named.  Ransack briefly appears (which may be a non-movie scene Foster added)
but is not named.  It's like Foster were told that a bunch of names were
tentative, and simply avoided using them entirely in most cases (although he
does name Arcee and Wheels, who are apparently Chromia and Wheelie in the
toys).  Oh, and speaking of names, the USS Zumwalt is brought up.  The real
Zumwalt has only started construction, with delivery expected in 2013 if it
doesn't just get cancelled due to cost overruns.  Yes, I wiki'ed that too.
     All in all, though, a decent read.  And if Bay ends up cutting from
scene to scene a bit too rapidly in some cases for them to make sense, at
least now I know the missing connections.  :)

     Dave Van Domelen, "We aren't dealing with geeks and nerds here."  "Yeah,
yeah we are.  We're just dealing with geeks and nerds who are trained to
kill." - Lennox and Epps, The Veiled Threat