Review: Transformers Movie (2007)

Review: Transformers Movie 2007 - The Novel

A few days ago I read the official novel of the Transformers Movie and I wanted to give my impressions to all Transformers fans that may be considering to buy this book.

Plot:

The novel pretty much tells the story of the movie without any significant changes. Seeing as most fans will probably know the movie plot inside out by now you won't be getting a summary here. I'll just mention some of the things in the novel that are different from the movie or have been added:

The All-Spark Cube is called Energon Cube in the novel, probably because that was supposed to be its name at first.
Scorponok pretty much slaughters most of Captain Lennox' unit in the desert before being forced to retreat.
After the Autobots' arrival on Earth Optimus Prime first adresses Sam in Chinese/Mandarin. The reason is that the Autobots downloaded all of Earth's languages and Prime tried the language spoken by the most people first.
Agent Simmons of Sector Seven is pretty much a dick here, too, but he isn't portrayed as a complete joke.
There are allusions to romantic feelings between Glen (the black hacker) and Maggie (the NSA analyst). Maggie is also described here as being rather unassuming instead of the blonde Barbie doll she was in the movie.
Agent Simmons mentions that not all of the machines brought to life by the Cube are immediately evil, but it seems to be the more frequent case. For some reason cell phones always turn out evil. In another sentence it is mentioned that the Cube can give life, but not intelligence, which is why most of the primitive machines brought to life are little more than wild animals.
Barricade's failure to show up for the end fight is explained. After Optimus Prime flattened Bonecrusher he is attacked by Barricade, but takes care of him, too.
Megatron doesn't simply tear Jazz apart, he also rips out his Spark.
The brief eruption of the Cube doesn't just give life to a Playstation and a drink machine, it also animates an entire store full of cell phones and a truck filled with game consoles. What happens to all these new life forms isn't explained here, either, though.
The novel gives no hint that there is any animosity between Starscream and Megatron. Megatron's sentence that Starscream has disappointed him again is missing. When Megatron dies Starscream gives a scream of dismay.
Optimus does not recover a splinter of the Cube from Megatron's remains.
In one of the final scenes we see how Mikaela ends things with Trent and then joins Sam to drive off in Bumblebee.')

Style:

Alan Dean Foster is an old hat in the Science Fiction genre, but this novel gave the impression that it was little more than some boring side project for him. His writing style is extremely dry and unengaging. Especially the fight scenes are given little to no details (Prime deals with Bonecrusher and Barricade in the span of a single page).

Also, he often changes the point of view in mid-chapter without warning. As a result you often need a few lines to notice that the story is now told from Bumblebee's point of view instead of Sam's.

All in all, not Foster's best work.

Final Judgement:

Okay, but you neither learn anything really new, nor is the novel worth reading when taken by itself. I think if you haven't seen the movie beforehand, you'll have lots of trouble visualizing any of the scenes.

Bottom line, if you're a hardcore fan looking for any tidbits of new information regarding the movie, you can pick this thing up. Otherwise, don't bother.