Dave's Transformers Rant Transformers Movie Novelization by Alan Dean Foster Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/MovieNovel1 (yeah, 1...I figure there will be a sequel and a novelization thereof) After various efforts to find this before the street date, what happens? I end up not reading it until May 29-30, and could have gotten it without finding a store that broke street date. Ah, such is life. :) CAPSULE A really good read, and provided that the final movie didn't make major changes to the plot, my worries about the movie sucking are much allayed. This is not the same Alan Dean Foster that hacked out Ghosts of Yesterday, that's for sure. Strongly recommended. $7.99/$10.99Cn RANT Okay, I've already covered elements of the plot in my review of the Junior Novelization, but that book made some serious deletions in order to get in at a lower wordcount, and chose to focus mainly on the kid character in what was left. There's four basic plot threads in this story, which do interact and cross over at times. 1. Sam Witwicky, Mikaela Banes and Bumblebee. This is definitely the "A plot" of the four, but doesn't dominate as totally here as in the Junior Novel or other adaptations aimed at younger audiences. It's a bildungsroman, to be all pretentious. Or, to be more comprehensible, it's a coming of age story, where Sam goes from callow youth to young man. Bumblebee is his catalyst, and Mikaela the goal that motivates him long enough for him to grow up. 2. Lennox and Epps. The soldiers who Scorponok wants HUGZ from. This is really Lennox's odyssey, and I use that term deliberately. Off at war in a foreign land, Lennox has a wife and child to get back to, but first he must travel the world and face fearsome monsters. He may not be as clever as Odysseus, but neither is Lennox a dumb grunt. When he intersects with Sam's story, he takes on the "Han Solo/Roy Fokker" role of the guy who can fight well enough to let the kid survive until it's The Right Time. 3. Maggie Madsen and the spooks. Sexy geek girl with a rebellious streak, she's there for the older guys in the audience (who might feel skeevy lusting after a high school girl) to drool over. I dunno if the actual script will be up to it, but Foster's story definitely at least gives the illusion that she knows what she's on about. While Sam is in the standard Heroic Myth and Lennox is in the Odyssey, Maggie is solidly in a 1950s B-movie monster/alien fest. She's the renegade scientist who figures things out first, but can't get The Establishment to listen to her (although, in the 50s monster movies, the role was generally given to a guy) until things really hit the fan. She's the sort who would figure out that the alien cockroach people are susceptible to sonics, or that cold can defeat the ooze creature. Kinda hidden in her background (it actually comes up more clearly in the Junior Novelization, but is referenced here) is that she was in the NSA at one time, but got booted for disrespecting her boss. 4. The Decepticons. Yeah, we really never get inside the heads of the Autobots, they're mainly around as adjuncts to the Sam, Lennox and Maggie storylines, so we find out their story through the humans (although there's a couple Autobot-only scenes). But due to their role in the story, the Decepticons have to get viewpoint scenes or nothing at all. I suppose they could have been portrayed as purely unknowable menaces, but Foster at least gets inside their heads while showing them in action. They're mainly in the same movie Maggie is, as the monsters. All told, the interweaving plots work pretty well. Monster movie aspects tinge everything, of course, but coming of age and odyssey stories work perfectly well in the context of monster movies. And Maggie's story follows the usual path of the monster movie, with her being vindicated, believed by The Establishment, and in the end thanked for helping save the world. Meanwhile, Sam grows up, Lennox goes home, and the monsters are sunk to the bottom of a trench and nuked to make damn sure they never come back. So of course, they'll be back. And now, here's the notes I made as I was reading. Various amusing quotes, inferences, etc. Probably not intelligible if you don't have the book in front of you, and definitely more spoilery than the review has been so far. You Have Been Warned p 1: Almost Lovecraftian, but noooot quite. Also, missed a beat to go for Wells on the cold and vast intelligences. p 12: William "Wild Bill" Lennox. So close, yet so far. GIJoe's is William Hardy. p 14: My Little Pony mentions. Tends to shift focus in a scene with little clear indication (blank lines, *** lines, etc. would be nice). p 28: It's clear the Junior Novelization was either working from a different version of the script, or made some different adaptation decisions. Scorponok pops out during the battle here, but came out long afterward in the Junior Novel. p 29: Also, the Junior Novel had Blackout defeated by lasers before cutting away to Sam Witwicky, but leaves the SOCCENT battle unresolved here. p 38: Heh. Okay, now it's clear that Sam's meeting Bumblebee wasn't chance. Bumblebee salted himself into Bobby Bolivia's lot after trailing Sam from school. p 42: Re: Bumblebee's paint job, "Like, bright enough to generate its own reflection." Heh. p 62: "That's assuming what I was looking at were actually its imaging sensors and not some kinda smart-ass visual decoy." Clever. Well, I'm only 66 pages in, but there's already more good writing in this than in all of the TF prequel novel. At a guess, I'd say ADF started this one first and had plenty of time to do rewrites, but had to hack out Ghosts of Yesterday in a few weeks after Cian got the last minute heave-ho. p 72: Okay, Sam's junkie Chihuahua named Mojo was fun enough, but his friend Miles has an immortal toad. "/He won't die!/" p 83: "He was a serious grease monkey. Loved my mom, loved cars, loved working on both." Great dialogue, I hope Foster's just lifting these bits from the script and not having to compensate for dull movie dialogue. No page number here, but it strikes that Maggie the techie is totally in a 50s monster movie here. She's the scientist with the whacked out but essentially correct hypothesis that no one will believe. p 124: Scorponok, meet the AC-130 "Spooky". Booyah. p 128: "Miles, I bought Satan's Camaro!" p 141: Burger King gets product-placed. I wonder who'll be doing the movie tie-in meals? ;) p 143: "OH SHIT! OH SHIT! OH SHIT!" - Sam's got it all over Spike. Heh. p 144: Man, and I thought eBay snipers were bad. p 165: Ironhide is the tooth fairy. Just sayin'. p 172: The Allspark is called the "Energon Cube" here. Guess that was a later script revision that didn't get through to Foster. p 178: Okay, the lasers from the Junior Novel seem to have been an invention of that writer. Strictly real-world weaponry here. The high heat vulnerability is derived from the effects of hot magnesium-coated sabot rounds, not lasers. p 188: I still haven't seen any indication what state the town of Tranquility resides in, but it's in an earthquake zone, so probably SoCal. Checking Google Maps yields no municipalities namd Tranquility, though. p 193: Okay, Ironhide is a very *bloodthirsty* Tooth Fairy. p 208: "I'm not authorized to communicate with you. Except to tell you I can't communicate with you." Heh. p 210: "We cannot take sides in your adolescent gender battles." - Prime p 220: Tranquility is 250 miles from Hoover Dam. So, Tranquility is most likely a Los Angeles collective member. Possibly a fictional stand-in for Placentia, which has a similar-meaning name. :) Checking Wikipedia's entry for Placentia, it does sound like what little of Tranquility is described. [Later note: the actual locations used for Tranquility are Rialto CA and Redondo Beach CA...which are at far ends of Los Angeles. However, Rialto is on the road out of town to Las Vegas, which works.] p 221: Aha, here it's explained WHY jamming the Allspark into a Spark is a Bad Idea. At least it's foreshadowed. p 234: "WE HAVE WORKED 322 SAFE DAYS" sign. 323 days ago reallllly sucked. p 258: "How'd you know my ID?" "Look, I TOLD your people I got this hacking problem!" p 268: Another case of early script. Brawl is called Devastator here. p 282-3: Innnteresting. The Junior Novel had Prime tell Sam to shove the Allspark into Megatron's chest. Here, he tells Sam to stick it in his OWN chest, choosing suicide over letting Megatron win. And Sam comes up with the "stick it to Megatron" idea himself. p 289: Heh. Not only are the defeated Decepticons dropped in the ocean with nukes strapped to them, but they're dropped somewhere that will proceed to cave in on them, burying them under a mile of rock, just in case. The older the audience for these things, the more thoroughly the Decepticons are defeated, eh? Seriously, in the little kiddie books, all the 'Cons flee. In the mid-level stuff, Megatron is defeated soundly and most of the 'Cons flee. In the Junior Novelization, Brawl is melted and most of the others get the dump-and-nuke treatment (while Starscream flees). And here, it's dump, nuke, bury. In the movie itself, will they also steer a few asteroids onto the dumpsite? ;) Dave Van Domelen, notes at least Lennox didn't have to fight off any suitors once he got home. Just has to make sure Ironhide doesn't kill the neighbor's noisy dog or something. Later Update: I'm told the nuking may have been removed from the final script, in order to make it easier to bring Megatron back for the sequel. Personally, I think nuking him makes it EASIER to come back for the sequel (atomic blast interacts with lingering AllSpark energy to blow him through a wormhole and also upgrade his power), but eh.