Expectation Management

[orichalcum]

If the Star Wars Episode III trailer excited you and made you hope desperately that this might somehow be a good movie, this spoiler-ridiculously-light (much less so than the trailer)  paragraph from the novelization may help quench that anticipation: (from DailyKos)



"From the shadow of a great pillar stretching up into the reddening afternoon that leaked through the vaulted roof of transparisteel over the Atrium of the Senate Office Building, she watched senators clustering in through the archway from the Chancellor's landing platform, and then she saw the Chancellor himself and C-3PO and yes, that was R2-D2!---and so he could not be far behind. . .and only then did she finally find him among them, tall and straight, his hair radiation-bleached to golden streaks and on his lips a lively smile that opened her chest and unlocked her heart."

Comments

[gee-tar.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the novelizations of both Empire and Jedi sucked too. I forgot who wrote them, but it made Terry Brooks' writing look brilliant in comparison. Alan Dean Foster ghosted a decent version of "A New Hope" though (despite a couple of minor contradictions to the movie).

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

There was also a sucky novelization of New Hope, of course—comparing the two was... informative. My favorite moment was reading the dust-jacket copy from Jedi, though. Since it wasn't actually in the novel, they felt they had to observe ad-copy conventions, which produced the following (approximate) sentence: "As Luke walked up to the gate of Jabba's castle, he seemed alone, but knew that The Force™ would be a powerful ally." Unfortunately, that was the best part of the novel. (Though the Babelfish-quality French translation of it that I acquired later in life has its own peculiar comic value, as well.)