It's time for the first post of the second off-week of the month, and for once, I decided I've done enough movie reviews. To depart as little as possible from formula, I'm going to do another novelization review, specifically that of Willow. As a bonus, it happens to be from Wayland Drew, the author of the Dragonslayer novel, which I previously held up (well before posting a review of the movie) as perhaps the finest of its kind. Unfortunately, lightning did not quite strike twice.
For the background, I already covered a lot of this when I reviewed the movie. Willow was the last of the 1980s fantasy wave, and unlike many of its predecessors, it made a lot of money. It also got a lot of merchandising I can vaguely remember, including an NES game and a now-notorious toy line that I would probably have loved if I had gotten any. A novelization was presumably inevitable, though no tale seems to tell how the task fell to Wayland Drew. Per the lore, the novel is based on a script sold to Lucas more than the film, which is really on par for novelizations. As it happened, it was published immediately after a novelization of Batteries Not Included (a movie that never quite fit in my plans so far) in 1987, and the year before his last confirmed novel Halfway Man in 1989.
Going in, what interested me most was that such a comparatively obscure author was chosen to novelize a major film. Sure, vintage novelizations were anything but prestigious, and the semi-respectable novelizers like Alan Dean Foster (see the Aliens novels post) were busy enough that anyone else looking to do a job was unlikely to be turned down. Still, Drew presented an odd choice, an author with a modest profile and output whose work (apparently including Halfway Man) often fell outside the sci fi/ fantasy genre. The obvious connection is that a good part of the ILM crew had worked on the effects for Dragonslayer (and for that matter Batteries Not Included). If just one or a few big names at ILM had read the book, it might well have been enough to give the author an inside track with Lucasfilm and perhaps Lucas himself. Therefore, it's plausible that Drew was approached or even talked into it, at a time when he was by all indications getting out of the business. Whatever the backstory, Willow was his last ride, and certainly interesting on those terms alone. While I'm at it, here's the back cover.
Moving onto the book, I will admit I'm doing this on shorter notice than other posts like this. With other novelizations, I have gone in with at least two readings and normally a block of weeks or even months to think things over before posting about it. This time around, I'm starting the post before I technically finished reading it even once. On the other hand, I had been able to go through the majority of the book faster than any I've read in a long while, which I found more than enough to comment on the quality. As a bit of further context, I finished one more rereading of Dragonslayer not long ago. One more thing I will freely admit is that, if anything, the earlier novelization made me a little more critical of the present book. In those terms, Willow is in some ways more polished, but seems aimed at younger readers, which would certainly have been justified. What's more difficult to account for is that it seems more conventional than the film it's based on, complete with a number of convenient and comforting genre tropes that the finished film was bold enough to move away from.
On the plus side, there is inevitably a lot more worldbuilding and general depth in the novel. There's a lot more backstory for Madmartigan, Bavmorda and Sorsha, including a full account of the villainess's relationship with the father of the princess. There is also a whole story-within-a-story tale of a revered Nelwyn hunter/ warrior who barely gets a name within the film. We also get an expanded view of the powers of the magical infant, who seems to charm animals and the elements just by being what she is. Occasionally, things get more grim and graphic than the film despite the "kid-friendly" tone, conspicuously the implied fate of a group of mothers and children imprisoned by the queen. It's here that things get hit or miss by simple familiarity. I find this most in the portrayal of Tir Asleen, which in the movie is just a big, distant castle. Here, it's so hidden away by magic that leaves its very existence conceivably in doubt, calling to mind the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty or the cautionary Lord Dunsany tale "Carcassonne". In addition, the revealed destruction of the castle is attributed to a spell of Bavmorda that you can easily predict will be reversed at her defeat. It's all unquestionably effective, but as already noted, it brings in familiar elements the movie did just fine without.
One more thing on the "con" side is a strange sort of temporal distortion that gets more pronounced toward the end, something I had noticed this before with the Dawn of the Dead novelization. Here, it's most notable with the courtyard fight, which is as far as I got. In the film, it's an almost comically over-the-top sequence with one of the most surreal monsters on record. In the book, the whole battle is covered in 10 pages, including only 3 with the Eborsisk. It's understandable that an author working with only pages in a script would fall short of the vision of a director, yet this is more egregious than usual. There's a further odd touch in the handling of the trolls, who represent perhaps the most intriguing combatants in the film. In the book, they're introduced much earlier, specifically as rather pitiful servants of Bavmorda. In an impressive touch, one of them actually talks, revealing an even more malign personality than might be expected. What gets weird is that the book describes the transformation of a troll into a "gibbering, jiggling mass of shapeless goo", without connecting it with the Eborsisk, which is portrayed as laying in wait the whole time. It removes several of the movie's more striking improbabilities, but on the whole, what we got on screen was more satisfying. One more thing is that the segment in the book ends at page 241 of the novel's 276 pages, and if you know the movie, there's a lot more that must have been crammed into even less space.
On the whole, this remains one of the more surprisingly impressive novelizations to be encountered. For me, it raises the niggling doubt how much of the universally accepted notoriety of 1980s novelizations came from those who had really read a significant number of them. There's no reason to doubt many if not most were as bad as people say, but even in the iffy ones, there's plenty that's interesting, insightful and just plain bonkers. It's exactly why I intend to keep my collection and add to it when I can. With that, I'm done for another day. That's all for now, more to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment