Tragically bad novelization: Iron Man

[elfs]

On a whim, and with only a quarter, I picked up the novelization for the movie Iron Man, by Peter David.

It's a terrible book. Wikia has a rundown of the differences between the book and the movie, but as I read it I realized that David was working off a pre-production script and not the script as shot; scenes in the book are not in the movie, and the battle scenes are heavily revised.

But more than that, David is little more than a stenographer for that original script. When Alan Dean Foster was doing all of those novelizations in the 1980s, he at least reached into his characters and tried to figure out who they were and what they wanted. There's none of that in David's book. It captures none of the signficance of characterization seen in Robert Downey Jr's performance or in better-written novels like Adam Warren's Hypervelocity. David's settings are flat cardboard, perfunctorily described sets in which dialogue takes place. There is more thought about who Tony Stark is and what he does in a single issue of the comic book than there is in this entire novel.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

That's a shame. Peter David has done far better work; he *did* get inside Londo Mollari's head in his adaptation of In The Beginning, and made the book better than the movie... which, while not unusual, is no mean feat when the guy doing the movie is JMS...

But then again, it's Iron Man. Not Spidey or Bats or even that goody-two-boots from Krypton... or Daredevil or GA or GL. Iron Man was never about the characters, it was about social commentary, first on the Cold War, and then on white-collar crime. DD coped with blindness, a much more personal thing. GA and GL had their political byplay, but each had some fairly serious personal lives, and being Golden Age characters, there's simply much more *depth* there.

Not that we should let Peter David get away with that... but let's put it this way: I bagged seeing the flick for being uninteresting. Bad guys and good guys collide, things go kaboom. Yeah? Give me something with some better (or at least more familiar) tropes. Oh, I dunno. A-Team I went to see, just for that. On the cheap, granted, but...

Point being? Everybody does a contractual obligation album novel every once in a while. That Peter David would commit such a thing? That's a bit of news.

Not what I'd have expected to hear.

[(Anonymous)]

Several of his other books in other SF universes have been pretty amazing, and really got inside the heads and backstories of the characters. his trek book Imzadi (if I'm spelling that right) was amazingly good.

oh well I guess even good authors from time to time decide to 'just phone it in' good to know to avoid this one

[elfs.livejournal.com]

To be fair, part of that may have been the script's fault-- and whoever gave him guidance. Because some of what makes the film interesting is getting to see the development process, something that's hard to write (although I've tried, and mostly succeeded, I think, at getting the flavor of discovery across to the reader).

One of the impressions I get is that the draft script had Stark setting up a double life-- the old, flat Stark still the public face, the engaged and concerned Stark only visible in private. But in the movie, from the press conference on, Downey played Stark as fully engaged all the time, whether in front of a crowd, his closest friends, or alone. Things like performance and ad-lib can change the impression a lot.

Also, it doesn't feel like David did much research or got much help from Marvel. The technology reads like a 1970s primer on Iron Man, before Marvel got serious about its pseudoscience and did a bang-up job of satisfying the geeks as well as the collectors.

Writing a novelization to what's in the can is a lot better than writing to a draft script-- you don't disappoint the audience that wants both more insight into both the characters and settings, and wants to retain some of the pleasure of the film. David's work on this book is a perfect example.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Serenity was taken out back and beaten to a pulp.
"X said in Chinese ..."
I asked Keith R.A. DeCandido if there was anything he'd change, since he said he did it in two weeks. He said nothing. I never wanted to read a single book by him after that.

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

guh. Yes, I read that one. It didn't even have matching descriptions of the Agent between book and screen...

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

Shades of Terrence Dick's 'book-a-week' Dr Who novelisations?

At least it couldn't get worse.

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

C'mon. Taking anything from the movie, out, could only make the book less bad.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

I'll bet you $5 that it's nowhere near as bad as the novelization of Doom.

And I don't mean the movie. I mean the video game. Back in 1995.