Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The 25th Anniversary edition of The Star Wars Trilogy breaks no new ground or make any editorial changes to the three movie tie-in novels based on the screenplays for Star Wars (now known as A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. There are no adjustments or rewrites to make the novels match the Special Edition re-releases of 1997. It isn't even the first time all three novels are collected in one volume...there are mass-market and trade paperback three-in-one editions. The only new features are the cover art by Ralph McQuarrie, the conceptual artist whose paintings "sold" George Lucas' "out of this world" ideas to leery 20th Century Fox executives and short intros to each novelization by Lucas himself. Whether or not those were written for the 25th Anniversary Edition or if they appeared in other reissues of the novels isn't important; what is important is that the 25th Anniversary Edition's elegant package recaptures the magic of reading the Classic Trilogy....
Like most novelizations of popular movies, the authors (Alan Dean Foster being the ghostwriter for George Lucas, Donald F. Glut, and James Kahn) have adapted the screenplays to Episodes IV, V and VI with a certain sense of unity, yet each writer has a distinctive style of his own. On the whole, the best writer is Foster, who had, before Star Wars, adapted the Star Trek animated series into the Star Trek Logs series. Very few Star Wars authors, with the exception of Timothy Zahn and a few others, capture the essence of the characters and situations of the movies as well as Foster. Glut is almost as good a writer, and his style is not all that different from Foster's. Kahn's style is minimalist. I like the Jedi novelization, but there is a strange sense of connect-the-dots permeating it all the same.
All right, so we aren't talking great literature here, and I do know that the writers work from drafts of the screenplay that are different from the final shooting script. That's why Luke Skywalker's comm sign in the novel of A New Hope is Blue Five; in the movie the callsign is Red Five. And the novels do expand the storyline and "restore" deleted scenes....the literary equivalent of a DVD extra features disc, you might say.
I rate this book 5 stars not because it is brilliantly written or philosophically meaningful, but rather because it recaptures the magic of reading those dog-eared paperbacks, but with a bit more class.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Star Wars Trilogy, Episodes IV, V & VI
Get 27% OFF
Click here for more information about The Star Wars Trilogy, Episodes IV, V & VI
No comments:
Post a Comment