TRANSFICTION >
TRANSFORMERS
MOVIE ADAPTATION
Written by
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
Based on the screenplay by ROBERTO ORCI & ALEX KURTZMAN
From a story by
ROBERTO ORCI & ALEX KURTZMAN and JOHN ROGERS
The Allspark, the mysterious source of all Transformer life, has long been lost to the stars. Now... it has been discovered on Earth. Already the Decepticons are here, attacking a military base and hacking into computers aboard Air Force One in their desperate hunt for both it and their missing leader Megatron. In the guise of a beaten up Camaro, Autobot scout Bumblebee guards Sam Witwicky, a high school student unwittingly in possession of an artefact that could lead the Decepticons to the Allspark. As the search intensifies and Optimus Prime lands on Earth with the other Autobots, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance as the two groups of transforming robots battle it out...
R E V I E W
The last novelisation of a movie I read must have been... 'Batman Returns', something like that. It's been a while. I eventually realised just how pointless these tie-ins are, and if Alan Dean Foster's bland recap of the 'Transformers' movie is a typical modern example then nothing's changed since I stopped reading these things. Like every other one I've read, 'Transformers' is padded and dull, and fails to recapture the atmosphere of the movie or match the spectacle of watching it.
Much of the problem lies with Foster's complete inability to rouse his prose from its flatlining drone or imbue any of the characters with a personality. Like 'Ghosts of Yesterday' the Transformers are utter nobodies here, bereft of even the sketchy characterisations we saw in the film. There's a real disconnect thanks to Foster's habit of using descriptions rather than character names: I'd rather read about Skorponok and Jazz than 'the metal scorpion shape' or 'the bipedal mechanoid'. (Believe me, you will be sick to death of the word 'bipedal' once you're done reading this book.) This weird evasiveness is bearable enough in the early stages, when the Transformers are still shadowy and mysterious, but later on there's no attempt to flesh them out, something a novel format would be ideal for. Thesaurus fan Foster seems to go out of his way to use as many synonyms for 'robot' as possible, and it's bloody annoying. My non-favourite example of this habit is when he describes a moustache as 'decorative lip hair'.
All the funniest scenes from the film die a death on the page - minus the performances, relying only on the air conditioner hum that is this book's dialogue, there's not a laugh to be had, and what makes things worse are Foster's own smug attempts at humour. None of the human characters are as engaging as they are on screen: he makes Mikaela a hell bitch, Maggie a shrill cow and Glen an irritating prick. Sam and his parents barely register. I liked the more serious take on Simmons, though, whose character here actually suits Foster's formal, stiff style.
There's very little sense of wonder here, no impact, no awe. The transformations are given extremely short thrift - an extended drone about Miles washing his dog, which was a quick chuckle in the film, gets a couple of paragraphs that contrive to rope in words like 'cephalopod', but Barricade's first reveal is done and dusted in a sentence. God it's flat. Every scene, whether action or dialogue, trundles along at the same pace. Things only seem to speed up at towards the end because you'll be racing through the pages in order to get the thing finished. Not to mind read, but the guy seems as bored as his readers.
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