Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) Novelization Review

Title: Terminator 2 Judgment Day
Tagline: "He's Back."
Based on the screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher
Novel by Randall Frakes
Page Count: 256
Published: June 1st, 1991 (Spectra)



Do you think Arnold was told this would be the cover?
 

  In the spring of 2016, I went on a massive Terminator binge. It's such a rich franchise and always worth wallowing in every few years. Now I wasn't too fond of the rebooted sequel in 2015 and felt that took the whole Time Travel aspect a bit too far. But we aren't gonna focus on the films right now.

  After listening to the Terminator (1984) novelization on youtube, I was dazzled by the splendid prose of Randall Frakes and William Wisher. But, with the rarity of the first novel, I haven't felt the urge to purchase it yet, being that the price of it ranges from $35-$50 on Ebay. Even so, after I complete the audiobook, I will review the original on this blog by the end of the year, so be sure to check that out.

  Now onto T2.
 
  Randall Frakes wrote this book without the aide of William Wisher, who co-wrote the original with him. And the the loss of him is felt. Randall Frakes does excel in many areas, mainly with action scenes, technological phenomenon, and metaphors. The man has a military pedigree and he's able to flesh out the carnage in graphic detail, and overall the prose is great. However, he does fall into a lengthy tedium in this book, starting with the intro of John and his foster parents and it doesn't end until the arrival of the terminator and John at the asylum.

  In this lull, Frakes commits a slew of writing sins--beginning sequential sentences with the same word (usually "THE"), unleashing a series of cliche phrases ("Parted like the red sea." "Every nook and cranny." "Flung like a ragdoll.")

  But those are all minor gripes. The man also provides the reader with a ton of scientific, technological, and mechanical terms that i've never come across. And if anyone knows me, I do enjoy learning new words to add to my thesaurus. I'll take them. Frakes's affinity for motorcycles was also blatant. Much of that material was bloated and verbose.

  Alright, enough of my critique on the writer. Now onto the extra info we learn in the novelization.

  In the opening chapter, Sarah Connor is traversing the arid landscape of the mexican desert. It's essentially an introspection on the events of the first film and her accepting the onus of being a messianic mother to John Connor.

back cover.

  In the following chapters, we jump ahead to the future--July 11th, 2029. All of these scenes aren't in the film, featuring the apocalyptic world of ruined cities and rampant robots engaged in warfare with humans. There's some great action here and tremendous thrills to get you amped up for the rest of the book.

  We learn that Sarah Connor was killed along with her convoy in combat by HKs in Mexico. With solemn grace, John takes the news as if it's just another casualty. Or so that's the front her puts on to other soldiers.

  John Connor and the resistance exact a successful assault on Skynet's main hub, all during a simultaneous raid on the Colorado compound where Skynet's computer grid is destroyed. Once they breach the complex, he encounters Kyle Reese. He has indifferent feelings about Reese, because of the oddity of the situation. Nonetheless, he had gifted Kyle with the original pic of his Mom, while giving out other copies of the photo to other soldiers. It's kinda weird, but it's meant to be a piece of inspiration to the soldiers except most probably used it to jerk off to. It had to the number one source of porn to the guys, just like how boys will use a Sears catalog to get aroused.

  Anyway, John and his soldiers locate a room of deactivated terminators, with two missing. They also notice the time machine was recently used, meaning they hadn't entirely thwarted the machines. Surprisingly, this future John Connor isn't as adept with technology as the 1991 John Connor. So he instructs his techies to enable the machine for activation. If it weren't for the Tech Specialists analyzing and cracking Cyberdyne's data codes, they would not have conquered the machines.

 Of course, Kyle Reese volunteers to go back to 1984 and save John's Mom from Termination. This scene is replicated in Terminator Genisys and probably featured in the screenplay for T2, but it's unclear if James Cameron ever filmed it back then. Knowing his existence depends on Kyle Reese being sent back, John approves the mission. Kyle is swabbed in "Conductance Jelly" and shipped back.

  While inside this room of deactivated terminators, the squad is baffled to find a strange liquid metal substance. None of them had ever encountered a liquid Terminator before, and this kicks off the events that led to them reprogramming and sending back a T-101 to protect John in 1991.

  With the extended prologue out of the way, we now enter the scenes depicted in the film. Additionally, all the deleted scenes featured on the 2-disc dvd are included into the novelization. Yes, that includes the Kyle Reese ghostly hallucination and the plotline of how the liquid terminator can involuntarily morph into whatever metal he touches. I abhor that one and am thankful it was axed from the final cut.

  I must get to the important background info on Miles Dyson and the rise of Cyberdyne. Miles Dyson grew up in Detroit and had aspired to be a basketball player growing up. After that inevitably fell through, his High school counselor made him retake his SATs, which he ended up scoring high in Math. So high, in fact, he received a federally funded scholarship to CalTech in Pasadena, California. It turns out he had a " tremendous affinity for equations & formulae". During grad school, Cyberdyne wooed him to join their company and that brings us up to date on that.

  But how did Cyberdyne become a juggernaut in the Technology sphere?

  If you remember he ending to Terminator (1984), the T-101 is crushed in a compressor machine and left for the cops to clean-up. Well, it turns out that that company was called Kleinhaus Electronics located in LA. The next morning, Jack Kroll came to work and stumbled upon the destruction while the cops were there taping off the crime scene. Out of sheer curiosity, he slipped past the line unnoticed and purloined a few of the items--the severed Terminator Arm and a bit-sized wafer chip.

  After discovering its amazing features, he along with his co-worker Greg Simmons quit Kleinhaus Electronics, borrowed a ton of money, and started Cyberdyne. It took them a few years of studying the labyrinthine chip's many complexities before they ever turned a profit. Sadly, Jack Kroll died of a brain tumor before ever fully succeeding, though he did create the template for the wafer circuit. For a span, the company was in limbo until the talented Lab Tech Miles Dyson came along.

  Eventually, they went from a micro-company to megamillion dollar corporation. Dyson was only one of three people ever to work on the futuristic circuitry. Greg Simmons was now the CEO and considered as more of a salesman and money raiser than an adept code writer.

  Another intriguing scene added to the novelization was the freak-out of Dr. Silberman. This is the hyper-realistic psychologist that never believes Sarah's warnings of Terminator machines and time-travel warfare. When Silberman witnesses the battle of Terminators in the hallway, he's petrified an left speechless in the scene. He's never seen again in the movie, but in the book that revisit him in a hysterical panic. While being wheeled onto an ambulance, he raves about how the Terminators are real and he was wrong the whole-time. I prefer the naysaying Silberman. Even faced with the surrealism, I feel Silberman is so indoctrinated by societal beliefs that he would try and make sense of the whole otherworldly instance.

  Let's skip to the ending.

  After the termination of the liquid metal terminator and the execution of the T-101, Frakes gives us an epilogue set in the distant future. The year is 2029 and a 45 yr old John Connor is a US senator with two kids. There was no Judgment Day and the Machines never rose to dominance. Instead, Sarah records a tape talking about how lucky mankind is for averting the cataclysm. Still, she broods about how one day mankind will unwittingly create machines to overtake mankind, but for now it was at least postponed for awhile.
 

Overall grade: A-
 
 

Halloween III: Season of The Witch [1984] - Novelization - Review

Based on: Halloween 3: Season of The Witch (1982)
Genre: Horror_Sci-Fi_Witchcraft_Halloween

The night no one came to the theater.



Backcover Plot: The streets are quiet. Dead quiet as the shadows lengthen and night falls. It's Halloween. Blood-chilling screams pierce the air. Grinning skulls and grotesque shapes lurk in the gathering darkness. It's Halloween. The streets are filling with small cloaked figures. They're just kids, right? The doorbell rings and your flesh creeps. But it's all in fun, isn't it? No. This Halloween is different. It's the last one.

Throughout the novelization, an exorbitant amount of ink is spent in the malaised mind of Dr. Challis. In the beginning, he constantly stresses over his alcoholism, the turbulence of his divorce, and the disconnection he has with his kids. Moreover, the unremitting hype for Halloween this year has him scorning the world everytime that irking jingle rang. No need to get into detail, but the book needlessly expands upon his misfortune to the point of frustration. It almost felt like I was the one paying his child support.

 

It seems as though Challis constanly went over his misery on a daily basis, counting his troubles and woes.  After getting called into the hospital, I was amazed he didn't blow off his head before chapter 3.

 

One additional scene has him shopping for the masks that he eventually gives to his kids; where as in the film, he just shows up and gifts his kids with silver-shamrock knockoff masks, only to have them shun them in favor of the ever popular silver-shamrock ones.

Now that i've read the novelization, I notice the undertone of Challis' aversion to children mirroring that of Conal Cochran. And I only needed Dennis Etchison to hammer it in my head for a series of paragraphs to accomplish this.



'Get me childproof everything.'

Once again, Etchison delivers a savory death-by-fire scene.  I'm, of course, referring to the scene where an android torches himself in the hospital parking lot. It's as though Etchison was born to describe fire and light. NASA needs to attach this guy to a rocket and have him prose the cosmos on a looping voyage. Frankly, It would be much better than the blurry images they provide.

Excerpt Time: "Challis rocked back and shielded his face as the entire car exploded and an enormous mushroom cloud erupted into the night sky. A fire ball rolled heavenward, orange at the center and then deep red, veined with black smoke, seering trees and lighting up the night with the terrible beauty of an unearthly glow." - Jack Martin's Android death scene in parking lot.

One thing Etchison Nails is the jolly, daft attitude of the Kupfer family. Ostensibly, Challis is affable to the bunch. Inside, their annoyance scrapes at the last remaining nerves the Man's got.

After arriving in Santa Mira, Challis' suspicions are on high alert from the start. A lot of small extra info is revealed about the town; a number of businesses are talked about, and how Cochran supports them all. It appears as though Cochran led a massive Irish Exodus to the town, forcing all the locals out of employment and involvement. 

For the last two acts of the story, much of the dialogue is additional or altered. By that, i mean it's additional drivel spoken by the silly clowns that have embarked at ground zero for samhain sacrfices on halloween.

The most noticeable omission from the film was the absence of the autopsy scene in which Challis phones the female doctor in regards to the results. Remember, She was then executed by an android? Yeah, that was expurgated entirey and replaced with a frantic phone call by Challis to his surly ex-wife, warning her of the dangers of the Silver Shamrock masks. She blows him off curtly, calling him a drunk, jealous fool. She was only half right in her claim, though.

Upon busting into the toy factory, Challis stumbles into Cochran's mancave; a tinkerer's paradise as it's described.

Instead of getting background narrative on Cochran, they make him more garrulous in the final act.

In comparison to the nefarious performance of Dan O'Herlihy, this approach diminishes his evil presence. Like i stated before, we're only viewing the story from one perspective--Challis'.

At one point he expresses how his ancient ancestors (Irish Celts) would be astonished by the technical progress he and his team of docile androids have accomplished. He admits they lacked the ability to harness their power.

In Cochran's epic speech revealing his intentions and motives, Cochran has several additional lines, although I think it came off much scarier in the film. He gets pretty brash when he maligns humans and the christian religion. When Challis inquires about which Pagan God Cochran worships, he even directly profanes Jesus!

So much of the dialogue is altered (slightly) throughout his polemic on the blasphemy of the contemporary Halloween. Also, he mocks mankind's inability to understand the rudimentary workings of their own anatomy.

Here's a good one: When Challis asks him why he's targeting the children, Cochran tells him it's because they are less defiant, wretched, and come out of the dirtiest part of women

Finally, a gray suit is present, three masks in hand, for Cochran to choose a skull mask.

Jumping to the finale, Challis and Ellie escape the exploding factory just in time. Challis cogitates on the magnitude of the situation, knowing that the ancient evil they had just destroyed was only one manifestation of evil. Knowing that Evil will endure forever in many forms for many Halloweens to come.

Overall, I was disappointed with the narrow-sighted narration of the novel. It seems as though Etchison was instructed by John Carpenter to not expand upon Cochran's origins or background. Due to its pagan subject matter, Halloween III: SOTW happens to be one of my favorite horror films of all-time. In the end, the film is far superior to the novelization.

Screenplay: Tommy Lee Wallace (Nigel Kneal & John Carpenter)
Author: Jack Martin (AKA Dennis Etchison)
Release Date: October 1st, 1984
...

My Rating: B+