(no subject)
Mar. 22nd, 2016 01:55 pm
Mar. 22nd, 2016
Things #1: "The Shannara Chronicles" is most definitely NOT going on my Hugo noms next year, and it's going below No Award on the final if other people's taste is Doctor-Who-level horrible and it gets nominated.
I had high hopes. TV miniseries doing an adaptation of "The Good Terry Brooks Novel" by Terry Brooks! Starring John Rhys Davies and Manu Bennett! And, uh. Um. Well....
Remember that scene you loved, the one you thought was exciting and awesome when you were a small child and read Elfstones? Remember those characters you though were awesome, the epic battles in the desperate defense against the army of demons? The suspense, heroism, the high drama?
Got all those clearly in your head? Yeah, none of them are in the TV show. They've all been replaced with high school subplots. Involving, in one episode, a LITERAL HIGH SCHOOL. Where one of the characters finds a bunch of old D&D dice. They spend a whole episode on the LITERAL high school and about 5 minutes on the D&D dice, but leave out the entire demon army until 15 minutes from the end of the series. Worse, remember how Elfstones was the book that broke with being a Tolkien pastiche and tried to be something more? Well, Chronicles Of Shannara is not that. It's fanfic on the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, and as bad as they were compared to LotR? That's how bad Chronicles is compared to them.
Everything that was good or fun in the book is gone. The actors playing Wil, Amberle, and Eritrea do their best but the best of them is Amberle and she's, like, "good for MTV", not good. Manu Bennett has less to work with than he did in Spartacus and John Rhys Davies chews all the scenery but he's got a small part, so it's really not enough.
And then there's the pacing. Let me put it this way: I'm 95% sure JJ Abrams was an uncredited script consultant, because *wow* it's bad. It's Star Trek Into Darkness bad. It takes weeks to ride south to find the bloodfire but then one day to ride back, and on that day it's sunset for the whole time *and* then still sunset for several hours after they arrive. From the Elven city to the spot where the demon army comes through is At The Speed Of Plot which would be fine except it keeps taking DIFFERENT amounts of time. The main source of suspense in the book is whether or not the small party ofHobbits heroes can get the One Ring seed of the Ellcrys to Mount Doom the Bloodfire before the demon army fights through the combined forces of Good Guys and kills the Ellcrys, releasing them forever. Except, in the TV show? The demon army doesn't move, and the Elves make no attempt to stop them. It takes until after the Bloodfire is found for the demons to even *begin* to move towards Arborlon, and that's actually okay because the Elves set their very first line of defense *inside* the city, inside the Ellcrys' garden itself, like 30 meters from the tree.
And, I mean, then there's just the DUMB. OurHobbits heroes fall into the LITERAL HIGH SCHOOL to have some more tweenager drama, and explain away the prom decorations and shit as "a pocket of the old world, preserved undisturbed for thousands of years". Not TWO SECONDS LATER there's a flood of bats leaving this mysteriously guano-less "perfectly sealed" "perfectly preserved" high school gymnasium. Because it occured to nobody that maybe there shouldn't be bats there.
It was just bad.
Thing #2: Sheila Gilbert.
I finished books 3 and 4 of that, and yeah, everything I said about the constantly-jarring lousy editing, worldbuilding mistakes, inconsistencies from sentence to sentence let alone scene to scene or book to book? It continues, constantly. It even gets worse, as Jim Hines makes an understandable-but-critical mistake when pulling from one of 2014's Hugo nominated novels because he clearly hasn't read it.... and nobody checks. Nobody caught his error. He hinges *his entire overarching series-long plot* on a detail that, if you've *read* the book he's pulling from, doesn't work that way. At all. It's like he used a Wikipedia summary, and his editor clearly didn't even ask.
They're still entertaining novels but they're facepalmingly-badly-EDITED novels, with constant failures of internal consistency. And I know Jim Hines thinks Sheila Gilbert did a great job and is nominating her himself, but no. If those 4 books are examples of her work, she's *not* "Best Editor". There are a great many editors where I have no idea if they're good or not, because I can't see their work. When I'm looking in the right place I *can* see Sheila Gilbert's work, and it apparently sucks.
I had high hopes. TV miniseries doing an adaptation of "The Good Terry Brooks Novel" by Terry Brooks! Starring John Rhys Davies and Manu Bennett! And, uh. Um. Well....
Remember that scene you loved, the one you thought was exciting and awesome when you were a small child and read Elfstones? Remember those characters you though were awesome, the epic battles in the desperate defense against the army of demons? The suspense, heroism, the high drama?
Got all those clearly in your head? Yeah, none of them are in the TV show. They've all been replaced with high school subplots. Involving, in one episode, a LITERAL HIGH SCHOOL. Where one of the characters finds a bunch of old D&D dice. They spend a whole episode on the LITERAL high school and about 5 minutes on the D&D dice, but leave out the entire demon army until 15 minutes from the end of the series. Worse, remember how Elfstones was the book that broke with being a Tolkien pastiche and tried to be something more? Well, Chronicles Of Shannara is not that. It's fanfic on the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, and as bad as they were compared to LotR? That's how bad Chronicles is compared to them.
Everything that was good or fun in the book is gone. The actors playing Wil, Amberle, and Eritrea do their best but the best of them is Amberle and she's, like, "good for MTV", not good. Manu Bennett has less to work with than he did in Spartacus and John Rhys Davies chews all the scenery but he's got a small part, so it's really not enough.
And then there's the pacing. Let me put it this way: I'm 95% sure JJ Abrams was an uncredited script consultant, because *wow* it's bad. It's Star Trek Into Darkness bad. It takes weeks to ride south to find the bloodfire but then one day to ride back, and on that day it's sunset for the whole time *and* then still sunset for several hours after they arrive. From the Elven city to the spot where the demon army comes through is At The Speed Of Plot which would be fine except it keeps taking DIFFERENT amounts of time. The main source of suspense in the book is whether or not the small party of
And, I mean, then there's just the DUMB. Our
It was just bad.
Thing #2: Sheila Gilbert.
I finished books 3 and 4 of that, and yeah, everything I said about the constantly-jarring lousy editing, worldbuilding mistakes, inconsistencies from sentence to sentence let alone scene to scene or book to book? It continues, constantly. It even gets worse, as Jim Hines makes an understandable-but-critical mistake when pulling from one of 2014's Hugo nominated novels because he clearly hasn't read it.... and nobody checks. Nobody caught his error. He hinges *his entire overarching series-long plot* on a detail that, if you've *read* the book he's pulling from, doesn't work that way. At all. It's like he used a Wikipedia summary, and his editor clearly didn't even ask.
They're still entertaining novels but they're facepalmingly-badly-EDITED novels, with constant failures of internal consistency. And I know Jim Hines thinks Sheila Gilbert did a great job and is nominating her himself, but no. If those 4 books are examples of her work, she's *not* "Best Editor". There are a great many editors where I have no idea if they're good or not, because I can't see their work. When I'm looking in the right place I *can* see Sheila Gilbert's work, and it apparently sucks.
