Lit The novelizations of the prequel trilogy

I find these books to be a fascinating element of Star Wars in that they make me question many many things about SW fans, and OT purist types in particular.

Even though I think the PT films are mostly great, I find it extremely strange that there are people who hate the PT who seem to dislike the prequels even as books- since that way you get rid of GL's controversial direction, and you also get both a second opinion on the dialogue (the author), not to mention the benefit of any good book- which is going into more detail than a film can provide.

And after all, some of the core things in the PT that people complained about were actually first mentioned in the novelizations of the *OT*. (Trade politics, Palpatine's political career, The Sith(tm), etc...)

I am mostly talking about Terry Brooks and R.A. Salvatore's books since Mathew Stover's adaptation-
1. Gets talked about all the time.
2. Is the worst of the 3 IMO. Stover's prose in the book is in a style that I can only describe as "try-hard". (Strangely the style works for the prologue, which gives me goosebumps, but it falls apart into overwroughtness after that IMO) (Also Stover's characterization of Dooku is bizarre and crap compared to Sean Stewart IMO).

R.A. Salvatore's Attack of The Clones in particular is really good.
I love that it includes key deleted scenes like the scene where Padme refuses Dooku's offer to join the confederacy.

Imagine if only the Phantom Menace novel had come out in 1999, no film.
Imagine that the prequels were just Shadows of The Empire "movie without the movie" Multimedia projects.
Would you still dislike them?
Episodes 1 and 2 being my focus here.

 

I mean maybe, if Lucas had let the Prequels go the way of the post ROTJ era it would have definitely been a unique take...had the Novels told the base stories of the Prequels...Again maybe, I think Attack of the Clones would have eased things when it came into Padme mindset and why the heck she even falls for a guy like Anakin, and for Episode 1 .....I think a lot of the little nitpicks people complain about like acting and dialogue and pacing would have been avoided.

But hindsight 20/20 so who knows.

 

I think that Stover gets Dooku down perfectly.

"Thank you, General. That will be welcome."

"Gracious as ever, my lord. Grievous out."

Count Dooku allowed himself a near-invisible smile. His inviolable courtesy—the hallmark of a true aristocrat—was effortless, yet somehow it seemed always to impress the commonrabble.

Courteous

He called upon the Force, gathering it to himself and wrapping himself within it. He breathed it in and held it whirling inside his heart, clenching down upon it until he could feel the spin of the galaxy around him.

Until he became the axis of the Universe. This was the real power of the dark side, the power he had suspected even as a boy, had sought through his long life until Darth Sidious had shown him that it had been his all along. Thedark side didn't bring him to the center of the universe. It made him the center. He drew power into his innermost being until the Force itself existed only to serve his will.

Narcissistic

"Surrender." Kenobi's voice deepened into finality. "You willbe given no further chance."

Dooku lifted an eyebrow. "Unless one of you happens to be carrying Yoda in his pocket, I hardly think I shall need one."

Arrogant

 

Idk mane, I don't like how caricatured he seems. Your examples are okay, but there are some passages about his inner thoughts with things like being superior to everyone else blah blah blah that seem drawn from nothing in the films, just thin air.
Stover's Dooku feels like a cartoon character compared to Stewart's Dooku.
Stover leans even harder into cartoon-ness the whole book through than Lucas does and I don't like it.
Lucas for example had the sense to delete the "The transmission was garbled he said to leave you in pieces" line from his final cut, while Stover seemed to like it.

 

I know ,I think the writing by stewart was brilliant

 

On the other hand, that seems to fit Vader's appreciation for puns on Mustafar from Rogue One.

 

Yeah but Mustafar itself was out of character in Rogue One.
It didn't look like the same planet.
Totally different color pallete, no giant mushrooms.

 

Vader's one-line slaughterfest on Mustafar is so funny. I love the silent slaughter in the film that occurs concurrent to Palpatine's speech. But there's something darkly amusing about Anakin murdering the Separatist leaders while making Obi-Wan style quips.

But the best one is:

"You fought a war to destroy the Jedi. Congratulations on your success."

Sent from my SM-G950W using Tapatalk

 

I read all of the novelizations before the films came out.

-TPM led me to expect a better film than we got (although in retrospect it tallied pretty well). In a sense it's like a book of the "Phantom Edit" and benefits from fewer "gags" and a consistently mature perspective via Qui Gon. But then again I like TPM better than a lot of people do, for all its faults.
-AOTC led me to expect both a better film than we got and a film that was light years better than TPM, which was way off base. Anakin's slaughter of the Tuskens shocked and chilled me and I couldn't wait to see how that went down on film, not knowing that it would be oddly flat after the stilted bummer of the whole romance plot. The "mystery" aspect also seemed more coherent in book form. I wouldn't call the book awesome on its own but I recall it as a better telling of those canonical events just because so many choices in AOTC as a film tanked so badly, but a lot of those oddball missteps somehow didn't make it to the page or read better than they looked (the droid factory, Dooku vs. Yoda etc.)
-I may be the only one other than the OP who dislikes the ROTS novel, but it really annoyed me on multiple levels, not least of all spending too much time on EU references and almost none on key events like the climactic duel and actual fall of the Republic, which were, like, the whole reason for the Prequels to exist. I'm not the biggest fan of the film either, but at least it belatedly gets the job done on those fronts with appropriately grandiose drama.

 

The Episode I novelization does a great job of locking onto Anakin as its actual protagonist. It has scenes of him on Tatooine at the beginning, dreaming about going off into the stars. After he goes to Coruscant, things like the Senate scene happen from his POV, and he isn't relegated to being a background player with no idea of what's actually going on, like he is in the movie. It's something that Lucas was kind of going for in the film but consistently failing at because he kept getting distracted by other, shinier things.

The Episode II novelization has some extra scenes of the Lars family, turning young Owen and Beru into actual characters, but otherwise it's largely a beat-for-beat retelling of the script. Not a lot going on.

Hard to say. Without Jake Lloyd's performance, Anakin wouldn't have been as hated by the fan base. Jar Jar too, probably. A lot of characters wouldn't have have seemed so underdeveloped, like Nute Gunray and Rune Haako (and would have seemed less racist, too). Darth Maul would have been less memorable without his visual aspect. The over-reliance on CGI and the motion-restricting green-screen-heavy sets wouldn't have been present. The stilted dialogue/acting would have been absent, too. All in all I think it would have been an improvement. An interesting story unfettered by Lucas's bad directing, and with his script-writing touched up by an experienced SF/Fantasy author. Yeah, it would have been OK.

 

I promised myself I would keep thread civil, but the most consistently baffling aspect of modern first world life to me is that the PT is seen as worse than ANH or RotJ.
Lucas did not have any kind of co-director on the set of ANH, and we know that Kasdan is a complete hack now.
If anything, Hamill's acting is more hammy than Christensen's, etc. (And that's another insane thing. Since when was acting something people cared about in serial style sci-fi?)
The OG Star Trek crew were way worse than any Star Wars acting.(Shatner ranged from great to godawful).
That made no sense to me when I grew up and realized that the PT isn't held in the same regard as the OT.
It's like, Star Wars acting was always spotty as hell (Luke's NOOOOO that doesn't even match his mouth movement etc etc etc).

 

Lucas didn't fail, he chose not to make the movie from Anakin's POV after initially considering it.
Terry Brooks talks about this.

 

I don't know where you get that this is something that Lucas was going for in the film. Padme is the protagonist of the film, she makes the decisions the narrative hinges on, she experiences the hero's journey (the only character in Star Wars to complete the arc in a single film, too). Making Anakin the protagonist isn't succeeding where Lucas failed, it's telling a different story.

 

Something that doesn't get talked about often is the scene in the TPM novel where Anakin helps an injured Tusken. It's interesting not only because it shows Anakin's compassion for others before his darker side starts creeping in, but also because it makes you wonder how much Terry Brooks knew about what was going to happen in Episode 2.

 

I feel like most of the people that dislike the PT saw the OT as young children and were therefore immune to any objective understanding of things like acting or writing - the films were simply a magical window into a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Then the PT comes along and suddenly they have the ability to be critical, and then they compare their adult understanding of the PT with their nostalgic childhood memories of the OT. This is the problem with most sequels and remakes of cultural landmarks that appeal to children, I think. You can return to the setting, return to the characters, but rarely can you make someone’s brain go back to that same place they were before they truly understood the world. I think I was the perfect age for the prequels, 11 for TPM, 14 for AOTC, 17 for ROTS. I imagine if I was 11 when TFA came out I’d have a much better opinion of the ST, lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I'm not a PT hater, but to claim they're better movies than the OT is insane. Doubly for AOTC. Triple for the people who think TFA is better than the OT, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyways on the topic at hand, I don't think that the ROTS novelization is bad, far from it (especially in the criteria for a direct film adaptation) but at the same time, I think it's been over-hyped. It's not even the best Star Wars novel Stover did - solidly his third.

AOTC novelization is forgettable, which is a shame because I think with Vector Prime Salvatore showed he could do some good things with the GFFA, and I think his writing had more range in VP. Maybe he felt (or was made) to have a bit less scope with AOTC given it was adapting Lucas, or maybe he didn't feel like tipping the boat too much after Vector Prime. I do think it was a bold choice to bring back the author of VP for a movie novelization, though.

The TPM novelization is my favorite by far, and is also the only Star Wars novelization I read before the movie came out, which maybe shapes things a bit. I liked the additional bits, as already mentioned. I liked the new view of the galaxy and the Jedi, but also of familiar things on Tatooine, the little nods to the earlier EU - I think the above comparison of it to the Phantom Edit is spot on. Plus, I feel like it is an important entry in the EU itself, as the first work not only of the prequel era, but at least making some nods to the old history while giving hints at a new view of the Star Wars universe, and of course the first entry in the new Del Rey regime.

 

Lucas' direction in TPM is better than his direction in ANH. He paid more care to directing actors.
A problem with ANH is characters not seeming to have really internalized their losses.
Leia is making snarky quips hours/days after her entire civilization AND her parents are murdered.

 

"The OT" is three different movies, each of them very different from each other. I think if nothing else it could be argued that The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith are each of them a better crafted film than Return of the Jedi was. I think it could also be argued that each of them matches the tone of A New Hope better than The Empire Strikes Back did. There are lots of arguments about what makes a movie "better"; we don't need to cast aspersions on anyone's sanity.

 

First, you're confusing directing with writing. Ewan McGregor at the least was very critical of Lucas' ability to actually direct the actors in the prequels.
Second, they're different tones. ANH and the OT in general is supposed to be a golden age space opera pulp. TPM and the prequels try to be both that as well as serious political allegories and the one harms the other.
Third, you can make those same claims about the prequels. Why is Jar-Jar laughing when his species is being hunted by robot invaders? Why doesn't Lars care that his stepmom has been kidnapped by sand monsters? Why does Padme not run fleeing from her boyfriend when he confesses to her that he's a mass murderer? Why do Yoda and Obi-Wan decide to hide Luke with Vader's only other surviving family members?

 

How does the one harm the other?
And how is that any different than the OT, anyway?
Since we know that all the political stuff was in the backstory from day 1, it follows that Lucas was making a trilogy that could be tonally consistent with that backstory.

Also, all your examples are either wrong or disengenious OR problems created by the OT.
Jar Jar is your closest to a real point, but it's nowhere near as egregious as my Leia example. (Upon reading the post below me it seems that this point is also false.)
Owen and Cliegg have already resigned themselves to her death, and Owen is not portrayed as carefree.
Padme has known Anakin since he was a child and has even met his mother. She understands the pressure he's under.
And the Luke with the Lars problem is an OT created problem.

 

That doesn't really contradict what he said, though. Harrison Ford was also very critical of Lucas' ability to direct the actors in A New Hope; Trevor finding his direction in The Phantom Menace "better" doesn't mean "beyond criticism".

There is nothing golden age space opera pulp about The Empire Strikes Back. It's one of the reasons Pauline Kael slammed the movie in her 1980 review: She may not have loved the pulpy nostalgia inherent in Star Wars '77, but when Empire got rid of it she rightly wondered what the point of the series was anymore. "The OT" isn't anything "in general", they are three very different movies.

EDITED TO ADD: I went to double check my Kael reference and now I don't know who I've confused her with cuz her review of Empire is actually pretty positive. Sorry!

That didn't happen.

Because "she's been gone a month"; he cares, but he's had time to adjust to his grief.

Same reason the women in The Searchers (the movie being referenced in this sequence) don't: they're products of a messed up racist society that puts less weight on the lives of "others".

That's more a logistical beat than an emotional one; either way you can't argue with results cuz Vader never found the kid.

 

I haven't read them since the years they came out but I have several bits stuck in my head, Anakin saving a Tusken Raider in TPM novel (pretty sure, it's been almost 20 years since I read it), and by contrast him Force chucking a boulder at the Tusken camp in AOTC novel. The Sith novelization sticks in my head more, I remember it took 100 pages for Dooku to meet his demise when it's like 12 minutes in the movie, but also a very cool detail when Mace's pose confronts Palpatine he yells about treason and murders while he takes them out and then sabers the recording device in his desk so he has audio "proof" that the Jedi were trying to take over.

 

Stover's novelization is great. And I am already an ROTS and prequel fan so I don't think it "improves" it so much as it makes it even better.

 

For the most part yes. But it has a few weak points over the movie, like Dooku´s characterization going from a fallen idealist who is still a little bit sympatehic to being Palpatine 2.0, like having an extreme humancentristic view he never displays anywere else. This in combination Dooku begging for his life(which Christofer Lee actually considered OOC, getting it removed from the movie) ruins the character for me.
The rest of the book is great but I really don´t like the treatment it gives to Dooku.

 

"try-hard", really? Because it's a bit different? ok