Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster ghostwrote the novelisation of the original Star Wars film in 1976 but credited George Lucas. It was a horribly written book with little fidelity to the final film, yet I can see the reasoning behind bringing him back to pen the relaunched franchise. After all, The Force Awakens is a scene for scene, carbon copy of A New Hope. J. J. Abrams took fans quite literally when they said they wanted the new films to be more like the original trilogy. This is not a film review, but as the book is a faithful adaptation of the film, elements of the plot will undoubtedly fall under criticism. Foster was not even allowed to watch the film before he wrote the book, he only had the script and a few film stills to work with, so it is a mark of achievement that the end result was not worse. As it stands however, the plot and writing are lacklustre and derivative.

The new story follows all the old beats of the original Star Wars film, down to the smallest level of detail. The protagonist is a Force sensitive, bandage swaddled desert dweller with dreams above her humble origins, the Empire has returned as the First Order, rendering the efforts of the previous films futile, and a perky droid is holding important data that the villains want to retrieve. Oh, and there's a new Death Star, but this one is planet sized. The repetition here has no clever mythological resonance in the vein of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's monomyth has often been lumped with the franchise to bestow it with philosophical gravitas and I am sure everyone is heartily sick of by now. If you have seen the film, the book has very little added value outside of a few deleted scenes which some fans might find engaging. Personal I found it tedious to read. The characters are flat, politically correct representations of diversity, the plot is full of holes, and the dialogue is beyond awful. "Snow is cold!"

Rating: 2/5