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A review by erebus53
Alita: Battle Angel - Iron City: The Official Movie Prequel by Pat Cadigan
3.0
This is a novelised prequel to a film I have seen so I wasn't going in completely blind.
As always I'm thankful for the narrator (Brian Nishii) having a clue about how to pronounce Japanese names. Too many audiobook producers don't seem to care about or notice this sort of thing, but it's a trend that seems to be slowly righting itself, as Audiobooks become more popular.
I feel like this content straddles a line of "written for young people" and "content for science fiction fans and anime/manga fans". As a science fiction model it doesn't flesh the world out much. We get the same enclosed, bottom-looking-up view of the world as you do in other things like Maze Runner, Divergent and Hunger Games... a sort of "potted world". This isn't always bad, but you'd hope that it would give more scope for fleshing out the characters and actually describing some of the differences of the world.
I guess that, because it's a novelisation, a lot of the look and feel of the places is left out of the book because they expect that you will have watched the movie, but I like for my books to be the deluxe version... a chance to get more detail. This is really a lot more plot driven than thematic, or character driven. Hugo feels like a cardboard cut-out, and even his internal conflicts seem lacking in nuance.
It's... OK. There don't seem to be any huge gaping holes, except for in the hearts of the characters... and that's part of the point I guess.
As always I'm thankful for the narrator (Brian Nishii) having a clue about how to pronounce Japanese names. Too many audiobook producers don't seem to care about or notice this sort of thing, but it's a trend that seems to be slowly righting itself, as Audiobooks become more popular.
I feel like this content straddles a line of "written for young people" and "content for science fiction fans and anime/manga fans". As a science fiction model it doesn't flesh the world out much. We get the same enclosed, bottom-looking-up view of the world as you do in other things like Maze Runner, Divergent and Hunger Games... a sort of "potted world". This isn't always bad, but you'd hope that it would give more scope for fleshing out the characters and actually describing some of the differences of the world.
I guess that, because it's a novelisation, a lot of the look and feel of the places is left out of the book because they expect that you will have watched the movie, but I like for my books to be the deluxe version... a chance to get more detail. This is really a lot more plot driven than thematic, or character driven. Hugo feels like a cardboard cut-out, and even his internal conflicts seem lacking in nuance.
It's... OK. There don't seem to be any huge gaping holes, except for in the hearts of the characters... and that's part of the point I guess.