elfs | Tragically bad novelization: Iron Man

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.