Xenocide Book

Really interesting as a sort of in-between document of the first X-Men movie--it bears much in common with the finished film, obviously, but there are a lot of vestiges of the 1999 script still hanging around. Makes me grateful for the movie we got, though, which had a lot of on-the-set rewrites that ultimately improved the hell out of it.

The easiest example is comparing how Logan and Rogue meet each other. In the movie, she watches him fight in a cage match and then helps him out in a not-for-money fight--and while he obviously doesn't need anybody's help in a fight against the local yokels, it's an active part. In the novelization, she comes up to him in a bar-cafe because she's afraid of the guy she just hitched a ride from, and he saves her from the creep...who turns out to be a serial killer with two previous victims. Rogue's much more of a damsel in distress there, and it's genuinely kind of disturbing how the serial killer not only gets away, but she literally never goes "wow, I now know where TWO DEAD GIRLS are buried, maybe I should tell the authorities???" Just a really bad idea all around, and I'm glad they replaced it with a shirtless Hugh Jackman pounding people in a cage for money.

Generally speaking, this book is just all-around dumber than the movie it's novelizing. The writing is about as bad as you'd expect from a novelization, with the added weirdness of trying to depict material as sensitive as the Holocaust in Dick-and-Jane prose. Also, the toad line is even worse in this book.

And yet, I'm giving it two stars. When it wasn't a complete and utter drag, it was neat to see one of my favourite movies (don't judge me, Goodreads, I really like X-Men) in development here.