A review by phileasfogg
Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, by George Lucas
4.0
My excitement over the new Star Wars movie led me to finally read this, about thirty years after buying it.
I had hoped it would be awesome, like the movie. These movies are like the Iliad and Odyssey of our civilisation (yes, I'm still excited). It might be a bit much to expect a movie novelisation to rise to the levels of Homer (or a good translator thereof), but this was still pretty disappointing.
The dialogue stinks. I dare say there's a story behind this, if I cared to Google it. My guess was that the book was based on an early version of the script. And that the actors, reading a script in which the dialogue was similar to that in this book, changed their lines to something a human might, and could, actually say. I wonder if that means Harrison Ford is responsible for that notorious line about parsecs?
Apart from dialogue, the prose style is a little below my idea of workmanlike. There's lots of 'saidism'. Sometimes it seems like nothing can just happen, without being diluted by unnecessary adjectival and adverbial clauses. And there's an occasional 'I don't think that word means what you think it means.'
Fairly surprising for a modern reader is the human chauvinism, the narrator's plain hatred of non-human life forms. Whoah. Instead of a threshold to a world of wonder and danger, the cantina sequence seems focused on the disgusting alienness of the aliens.
But it's Star Wars, and it's a good story even when indifferently told.
I enjoyed seeing a little more of Luke's background than the movie shows. His relationship with his childhood friend Biggs adds a lot. The raid on the Death Star is my least favourite bit of the movie, and the book improves on it by letting us get to know the pilots a little.
I had hoped it would be awesome, like the movie. These movies are like the Iliad and Odyssey of our civilisation (yes, I'm still excited). It might be a bit much to expect a movie novelisation to rise to the levels of Homer (or a good translator thereof), but this was still pretty disappointing.
The dialogue stinks. I dare say there's a story behind this, if I cared to Google it. My guess was that the book was based on an early version of the script. And that the actors, reading a script in which the dialogue was similar to that in this book, changed their lines to something a human might, and could, actually say. I wonder if that means Harrison Ford is responsible for that notorious line about parsecs?
Apart from dialogue, the prose style is a little below my idea of workmanlike. There's lots of 'saidism'. Sometimes it seems like nothing can just happen, without being diluted by unnecessary adjectival and adverbial clauses. And there's an occasional 'I don't think that word means what you think it means.'
Fairly surprising for a modern reader is the human chauvinism, the narrator's plain hatred of non-human life forms. Whoah. Instead of a threshold to a world of wonder and danger, the cantina sequence seems focused on the disgusting alienness of the aliens.
But it's Star Wars, and it's a good story even when indifferently told.
I enjoyed seeing a little more of Luke's background than the movie shows. His relationship with his childhood friend Biggs adds a lot. The raid on the Death Star is my least favourite bit of the movie, and the book improves on it by letting us get to know the pilots a little.