16 September 2013

Monday book post

Between traveling for DragonCon and catching up on everything afterward, I haven't had much time to finish reading anything recently.

I'm currently reading the official Pacific Rim novelization, which is based on an early draft of the script (because of the lead time needed to get the book written, through editorial and revision, and printed, so it comes out around the same time as the movie). I'm not very far in (Newt is getting ready to drift with the kaiju the first time), and the writing fails to impress.

First, the narrative voice for Raleigh makes him a douchey jock asshole. I suppose it's *possible* that douchey things are going on in his mind in the movie, but the way Charlie Hunnam portrayed him is very not like the book. That could be a thing that changed as the script was revised.

Second, the exposition is absolutely David Weberian in its clunkiness. Yes, I know movies have a lot of pictures that need to be described, but you really don't have to disrupt the flow of the novel to explain how things work.

Third, what is copyediting? (You can also see some of the Weberian exposition in this photograph.) In the third to last paragraph, the big one there at the bottom, narration-Raleigh says there were no Mark V Jaegers like Striker Eureka when he was a pilot. Then at the very top of the next paragraph, he says he went on a mission with Striker Eureka once. JFC, you can't contradict yourself on the same page! Was this thing even copyedited??

On the positive side, I am a sucker for fake documentation, so all the dossier pages stuck in make me happy. Also, the section from Newt's perspective (the only one I've read so far, anyway) is something I can imagine movie-Newt thinking, and it's well in his voice. And the image of Sasha and Aleksis playing Ukrainian hard house (music) and pissing off the Weis amuses me forever.

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