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duffypratt 's review for:
I Am Number Four
by Pittacus Lore
This reads like a really silly movie. It's a mash-up of space aliens, fantasy, and high-school romance and doesn't do any of them particularly well. The inside cover proclaims that the book is real. So, a group of aliens left their planet maybe ten years ago and came to hide on Earth. They are hiding from another group of aliens who destroyed planet Lorien about 100 years after destroying their own planet. How did any of them travel so far so fast. The closest any of these planets could be too each other is many, many light years. Yet, the travel seems to be instantaneous. That's without even getting into the time-warping properties of traveling at near relativistic speed.
Planet Lorien is "10 times smaller" than Earth. How smaller? By diameter, by surface area, by volume? Why does this matter. If it's smaller, it also presumably has less gravity than earth. Creatures on a planet with less gravity would not have to develop as much strength in their adaptations. Yet, the Loriens are super-strong. Why??? Because any crap that the writers want to make happen in this book, they can make happen, at any time, and with no plausible explanation whatsoever. For example, there's a stupid charm at the heart of this book that makes it so the Lorien kids can only be killed off in a particular order, kind of like a game of nine-ball with aliens for object balls. At one point, the main character asks why there is this limitation, and why the charm didn't make him invulnerable. (Apparently, it took him 15 years to come up with this question.) And his know-it-all teacher tells him "Because there are limits." That's what passes for explanation in this book. How about this, create a charm that says X can't be killed until Y is dead, and then a charm on Y that says Y can't be killed until X is dead. Does the magic code for this "real" universe have error checking that would catch that?
Then there's the romance. Screenwriters deliberately write their characters without any real personality. That way, any star who signs on can play the lead. This is deliberate on the part of moviemakers, and it has to do with the economics of selling a movie. Put too much personality into any main character and you severely limit the number of actors who can play the role. Make the character a cypher, and it doesn't matter much whether the lead is played by Tom Cruise or Adam Sandler. The only excuse I can give for the almost complete lack of character given to the main leads here is that the book was written with the object of selling to the movies, and not so much as a book.
That theory would also explain the annoying and pointless first person present narrator. What's so bad about the past tense? I don't understand this new fetish for writing in the present tense. I guess the writers think it makes stuff more immediate. But to me, it just feels more artificial. And, since scripts are in the present tense, it just screams movie treatment.
From the review, it sounds like I hated this book. But I didn't. I thought it was what I said up front: a typical silly, implausible hollywood movie. And as such, its too light and breezy for me to hate. I blew through it very quickly. I thought it was fast paced, and at times it was even engaging. But I could never get drawn into it because it was all too ridiculous and inconsistent, and because it topped cliche on top of cliche. I haven't seen the movie, and the book does not make me want to rush out.
Planet Lorien is "10 times smaller" than Earth. How smaller? By diameter, by surface area, by volume? Why does this matter. If it's smaller, it also presumably has less gravity than earth. Creatures on a planet with less gravity would not have to develop as much strength in their adaptations. Yet, the Loriens are super-strong. Why??? Because any crap that the writers want to make happen in this book, they can make happen, at any time, and with no plausible explanation whatsoever. For example, there's a stupid charm at the heart of this book that makes it so the Lorien kids can only be killed off in a particular order, kind of like a game of nine-ball with aliens for object balls. At one point, the main character asks why there is this limitation, and why the charm didn't make him invulnerable. (Apparently, it took him 15 years to come up with this question.) And his know-it-all teacher tells him "Because there are limits." That's what passes for explanation in this book. How about this, create a charm that says X can't be killed until Y is dead, and then a charm on Y that says Y can't be killed until X is dead. Does the magic code for this "real" universe have error checking that would catch that?
Then there's the romance. Screenwriters deliberately write their characters without any real personality. That way, any star who signs on can play the lead. This is deliberate on the part of moviemakers, and it has to do with the economics of selling a movie. Put too much personality into any main character and you severely limit the number of actors who can play the role. Make the character a cypher, and it doesn't matter much whether the lead is played by Tom Cruise or Adam Sandler. The only excuse I can give for the almost complete lack of character given to the main leads here is that the book was written with the object of selling to the movies, and not so much as a book.
That theory would also explain the annoying and pointless first person present narrator. What's so bad about the past tense? I don't understand this new fetish for writing in the present tense. I guess the writers think it makes stuff more immediate. But to me, it just feels more artificial. And, since scripts are in the present tense, it just screams movie treatment.
From the review, it sounds like I hated this book. But I didn't. I thought it was what I said up front: a typical silly, implausible hollywood movie. And as such, its too light and breezy for me to hate. I blew through it very quickly. I thought it was fast paced, and at times it was even engaging. But I could never get drawn into it because it was all too ridiculous and inconsistent, and because it topped cliche on top of cliche. I haven't seen the movie, and the book does not make me want to rush out.