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seriousficPlot: There's an ancient artifact that doubles as superweapon fuel. Get the artifact before bad guys do. Rinse. Repeat. Maybe my literary tastes are stagnating, but goddamn, ancient world--why are you always making your idols and shit out of superweapon shit? This plot just seems really familiar to me (bonus points for being a meteorite). I can see why it happens: you want to blend the Indiana Jones "we gotta get this artifact!" plot with the modern techno-thriller "totally plausible superweapon, guys!"... but fuck it, just do "if they get their hands on the Mayan Cross, they'll be able to command an army of sexy vampires!" I'll give you points for being original. And for sexy vampires.
So apparently Matthew Reilly is the literary equivalent of Michael Bay, using the purely imagined world of literature to stage larger, longer, more-er action sequences. I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but for a book with the intention of being a summer action movie, this really overstays its welcome. It's something like seven hundred pages long! This book is big enough to stun a dingo in the midst of a baby-napping! That's like a four-hour-long summer blockbuster! Even Peter Jackson would say "hey man, c'mon, I've got work in the morning."
And it's not a Nolan thing where the plot justifies it being that long, no. It's like they wrap the thing up, find the artifact, kill all the bad guys... then suddenly they realize they got the wrong artifact and now a new gang of bad guys is after it. WTF? It takes a pretty silly story (I don't believe a seaplane could dip its wings into the water so that a boat ramped up its wings and then hit a helicopter) to an insultingly silly story.
Let me just count off some of these things. Okay, so our initial villains are Neo-Nazis out of East Germany with a plot to wreck the economy. Fine. Then we get a bunch of evil US Navy guys who kill the US Army guys because they don't want the Navy to be shut down. And I know there've been stories about rogue military units before, but there, it's generally the central conceit of the story. I don't believe, piled on top of all the other stuff in this book, that you could convince a bunch of US soldiers to kill their countrymen just so they'd keep their jobs.
Also ridiculous is that we get the obligatory former flame of the hero on the expedition, who dun him wrong (ended a long-distance relationship by revealing she had met someone else and was going to get married to him, come on!) who turns out to be an evil psycho in addition to a bitch-slut-whore. Multiple unearned, unmotivated, "you're hot!" romantic pairings that come off like an Oprah show: "You get a girlfriend! You get a girlfriend! You get a girlfriend!" That's really silly. "Well, all my friends and co-workers were killed horribly, as were yours... wanna get a beer?" "I'd like that." Evil brother. Amateurish writing - maybe it doesn't bother anyone when a book with no pictures had stuff like "Bang!" and "Thwack!" in the text, but stuff like wanting to get across that something's spooky, so you just go "it was a spooky village" or whatevs. The fact that the premise has the US of A literally building a world-destroying superweapon as a deterrent--wouldn't that prompt the other nations of the world to prepare some kind of strike against them, just to save the world? The fact that the villains go from rogue East Germans, to rogue Special Forces, to militamen (you can tell they're the mostest evil because their leader raped a woman orally and vaginally). The hero wears a jetpack for the second half of the book and doesn't realize it.
This is getting long. The hero is meant to be an Indiana Jones type "college professor everyman thrust into danger," without the secret badass side, but in an interview at the end of the book, the author (comes across as a none too self-aware fanboy) thinks of him as looking like Brad Pitt and he has a jealous evil brother without the same Looks. So, extraordinarily handsome everyman. And the book drops in the Aliens-type squad of military cliches into an action-adventure context, which doesn't work as well, because now we have our everyman hero doing the same stuff as his eight friends, which makes him feel less special or impressive. It's not an ensemble situation like The Avengers, either--more like Captain America was just randomly teamed up with four other super-soldiers, none of whom had any interesting personalities or character dynamics.
Luckily, Marvel would never do anything that silly with their characters.
Eh, skip it.
So apparently Matthew Reilly is the literary equivalent of Michael Bay, using the purely imagined world of literature to stage larger, longer, more-er action sequences. I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but for a book with the intention of being a summer action movie, this really overstays its welcome. It's something like seven hundred pages long! This book is big enough to stun a dingo in the midst of a baby-napping! That's like a four-hour-long summer blockbuster! Even Peter Jackson would say "hey man, c'mon, I've got work in the morning."
And it's not a Nolan thing where the plot justifies it being that long, no. It's like they wrap the thing up, find the artifact, kill all the bad guys... then suddenly they realize they got the wrong artifact and now a new gang of bad guys is after it. WTF? It takes a pretty silly story (I don't believe a seaplane could dip its wings into the water so that a boat ramped up its wings and then hit a helicopter) to an insultingly silly story.
Let me just count off some of these things. Okay, so our initial villains are Neo-Nazis out of East Germany with a plot to wreck the economy. Fine. Then we get a bunch of evil US Navy guys who kill the US Army guys because they don't want the Navy to be shut down. And I know there've been stories about rogue military units before, but there, it's generally the central conceit of the story. I don't believe, piled on top of all the other stuff in this book, that you could convince a bunch of US soldiers to kill their countrymen just so they'd keep their jobs.
Also ridiculous is that we get the obligatory former flame of the hero on the expedition, who dun him wrong (ended a long-distance relationship by revealing she had met someone else and was going to get married to him, come on!) who turns out to be an evil psycho in addition to a bitch-slut-whore. Multiple unearned, unmotivated, "you're hot!" romantic pairings that come off like an Oprah show: "You get a girlfriend! You get a girlfriend! You get a girlfriend!" That's really silly. "Well, all my friends and co-workers were killed horribly, as were yours... wanna get a beer?" "I'd like that." Evil brother. Amateurish writing - maybe it doesn't bother anyone when a book with no pictures had stuff like "Bang!" and "Thwack!" in the text, but stuff like wanting to get across that something's spooky, so you just go "it was a spooky village" or whatevs. The fact that the premise has the US of A literally building a world-destroying superweapon as a deterrent--wouldn't that prompt the other nations of the world to prepare some kind of strike against them, just to save the world? The fact that the villains go from rogue East Germans, to rogue Special Forces, to militamen (you can tell they're the mostest evil because their leader raped a woman orally and vaginally). The hero wears a jetpack for the second half of the book and doesn't realize it.
This is getting long. The hero is meant to be an Indiana Jones type "college professor everyman thrust into danger," without the secret badass side, but in an interview at the end of the book, the author (comes across as a none too self-aware fanboy) thinks of him as looking like Brad Pitt and he has a jealous evil brother without the same Looks. So, extraordinarily handsome everyman. And the book drops in the Aliens-type squad of military cliches into an action-adventure context, which doesn't work as well, because now we have our everyman hero doing the same stuff as his eight friends, which makes him feel less special or impressive. It's not an ensemble situation like The Avengers, either--more like Captain America was just randomly teamed up with four other super-soldiers, none of whom had any interesting personalities or character dynamics.
Luckily, Marvel would never do anything that silly with their characters.
Eh, skip it.
