by Pittacus Lore
p. 2010
It doesn’t happen often that I decide a movie is better than the book it’s based on. I may find it equally impressive (like Lord of the Rings or Palahniuk’s Fight Club), entertaining in vastly different ways, and I certainly find many literary counterparts vastly superior to their film adaptations (none stand out more than the Harry Potter series), but when it comes right down to it, I liked I Am Number Four’s movie attempt better.
I zoomed through this simplistic book—about a teenage alien living a secret life on Earth while running from those who destroyed his planet—in a couple days, at a friend's behest, so we could see the movie and compare. For some reason, my friend fretted that the movie would ruin the book, but after absorbing those 440 pages, I still couldn’t figure out just what would be ruined… nor could I shake the feeling that I just read the alien equivalent of Twilight.
It’s not a bad assumption. Co-authors Jobie Hughes and James Frey (of A Million Little Pieces fame, a.k.a. that book that turned out to be mostly fake that made Oprah look foolish for endorsing) published the book—already touted as the first in a coming series—under Frey’s new company, Full Fathom Five, a veritable book workshop designed to pump out novels that siphon off a bit of the success of those vampy series by appealing to young adults of the female persuasion. Neither Hughes nor Frey get their name anywhere on the book, having published it under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore, who is also a designated figure in the story’s mythology, the unseen godlike figure with all the answers. I’m willing to bet Pittacus Lore is more Frey than Hughes, seeing as the contracts Full Fathom Five authors had to sign were highly exploitative, but then, isn’t the whole business of writing down to adhere to a fad just one giant exploit anyway? So, tipping their hat to true talent and the written craft, Hughes and Frey struck out to market their half-assed wares with cheap techniques, and books everywhere died a little inside.
That’s not to say I Am Number Four is an atrocious novel; it’s not. It’s just… lacking completely in poetry or subtlety. In fiction writing 101, we are told to ‘show,’ not ‘tell,’ encouraged to describe a scene rather than narrate and do all the work for the reader. It’s strange to say this, because Four actually balanced dialogue and description quite evenly, yet somehow this dynamic duo have still failed to both ‘show and ‘tell.’ There’s just nothing memorable about the descriptions or the dialogue. Hughes and Frey spend too many lines describing blasé daily activities and awkward encounters in short, punctuated sentences that leave no impact:
“Our eyes stay locked. The crowd around us swells to ten people, then twenty. Sarah stands and walks to the edge of the crowd. Mark is wearing his letterman jacket, and his black hair is carefully styled to look like he rolled straight out of bed and into his clothes.
He pushes away from the locker and walks towards me. When he is inches away he stops. Our chests nearly touch and the spicy scent of his cologne fills my nostrils. He is probably six one, a couple inches taller than I am. We have the same build. Little does he know that what is inside of me is not what is inside of him. I am quicker than he is and far stronger. The thought brings a confident grin to my face.”
Two tiny paragraphs and… 12 complete sentences? What the? And the dialogue? In spite of the realistic addition of swearing, which I appreciated, as censorship has always bothered me in fiction, both written and live action, the dialogue just sounds so awkward, especially between protagonist John and vanilla love interest, pretty blonde ex-cheerleader/current-photographer, Sarah. Their maudlin melodrama is what first set off my Twilight radar. Here is an excerpt, when John and Sarah meet after being away for eight days over Christmas vacation:
“She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don’t want to let go of her. We stare into each other’s eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.”
Egads! Sweatpants and no makeup? How could a girl even dream of allowing herself to sink to such hideous levels of dishevelment?! It’s a good thing Sarah’s just so naturally pretty that she doesn’t have to worry about a thing like obsessive attention to hygiene. This isn’t even the only time Sarah is referred to as pretty despite her ‘casual’ appearance. At a parade earlier in the book, ex-cheerleader Sarah is taking pictures of her former teammates and John notes, “despite the fact that she’s wearing jeans and no makeup, she’s far more beautiful than any of them.”
God forbid a girl wears casual clothing at a social event. And way to unconsciously reinforce the stereotype that a benchmark for ‘pretty’ is your social status. Sarah was so pretty, she beat out the CHEERLEADERS for goodness sake! And without MAKEUP! This much attention to cosmetic appearances was not paid to the male characters in Four. It’s shit like this, book, that lets me know without even looking that you were written by two guys.
Everything else about this book is easily digested, but every time I have to sit around for another chapter of Sarah and John Schmaltz Fest 2010, in which the pair walks around ‘flirting’ and glancing at each other significantly, I think I may hurl. Earlier I praised Four for it’s realistic swearing, but romance is where a little creative license is required. Nobody wants to read about two pretty 15-year-olds making doe eyes and expressing ‘I wuv you’s’, not even most literate teens. At least their relationship isn’t psychologically damaging or over-dependent. Sarah is so boring I nothing her, but I can’t hate her. She is willing to let John go by book’s end, and John will no doubt reexamine the relationship, given what his mentor Henri told him about their people and the lifelong bonds they form… with their own kind only. I appreciated this unconventional—if pessimistic—approach to young love. Teens should learn to reexamine their relationships more often. [Sadly, the movie did a complete 180 on this conversation, with Henri implying that Sarah could be ‘the one,’ despite her and John’s differences. This was one of the few things that bothered me more about the movie].
One thing I liked about the book that I didn’t realize until the movie left much of it out was the interaction between John and Henri. Though the writing was terrible enough that I never really got the sense of urgency in their mission, nor was anything said that will stick with me, I nonetheless admired their rapport. Henri is not John’s father; he is his guardian and mentor. He doesn’t sugarcoat, but everything he does is for John’s own good. A lot of their interaction in the book is done while exposition dumping and training in order to hone John’s alien powers, called Legacies. The movie just decided to avoid this by not explaining anything about their planet’s history and having John just suddenly… be awesome. At everything. Without even trying. This is the part where the movie loses me the most. Even aside from the fact that we’ve lost a lot of good bonding scenes, it makes it seem like John didn’t even have to try to gain his powers. And what better thing to teach kids than that barely trying will yield success? At least in the book, John earned his powers.
[Major Spoiler]
And on the subject of getting gypped out of Henri, the movie killed him off much earlier than the book, on the way back from an information hunt in Athens rather than at the end of the final battle. In the end, it doesn’t really matter when Henri was killed, as it was infinitely predictable in both book and film that he was going that way anyway, in the age old rule of mentors and parental figures biting it early so that the young protagonist may finish growing up on his own. But still, movie, what a waste of Timothy Olyphant!
[End Spoiler]
Movie-Henri was just as cool if not cooler than book-Henri. He lacks the French-type accent book Henri supposedly had, in favor of Timothy Olyphant’s southern drawl, but on the whole, I think it’s a trade up. I just wish they had utilized him more. I found Sarah Hart infinitely more tolerable as played by "Glee"’s Dianna Agron. I guess I was biased, but then I don’t care much for Quinn Fabray; it’s Dianna that manages to exude this likeable pluck and vulnerability that lend more angles to a character that came off flat in the novel. It helps that we actually get to see her photography, a little window into her character. To say she’s a budding photographer in the book means nothing. It’s just a cheap device to make a pretty girl seem deep. It’s still a cheap device in movie form; it just flows better.
The best performance after Tim O., of course, probably came from the newcomer playing John’s only friend, nerdy Sam Goode, also the only actual 15-year-old in the cast. Novel Sam was likeable, if idiosyncratic. He was a conspiracy theorist with a missing dad and no friends until the mysterious new kid came along. His interest in the otherworldly is how he got involved in the main plot. The movie took Sam in a completely different direction, [Mild Spoiler] leaving out Sam’s interest in conspiracies and shoehorning him into the plot through happenstance, but I liked the change they made about Sam’s dad. In the movie, he made an attempt to bring the 9 chosen children from John’s planet together and failed, and when the kids go off at novel’s end, Sam seems to be taking on that role himself, a much more fitting and literary character movement than the novel gave him. [End Spoiler] Sam is definitely the kind of geek that most of us can relate to, on the outside, but totally enthused about looking in. And in a movie that you really ought not to take seriously, that type of outlook is appreciated.
Footballer and ex-boyfriend of Sarah, Mark James, was infuriatingly cliché, right up until his much-appreciated redemption act at story’s end. The movie followed this same pattern, though his role was diminished. And fellow Lorien evacuee Number Six had just about as much personality as she did in the book, which is to say, almost none, but with the potential to be more. She probably won’t get anything good, if Hughes and Frey remain at the helm, and she’ll likely be broken down by her physical aspects first and foremost, but at least she kicks more ass than Sarah.
[Major Spoiler]
Finally there’s the dog, dubbed Bernie Kosar after a football poster that hung in the room of John’s Ohio home when he arrived. Not for one minute while reading Four did I believe that Bernie Kosar was anything but an alien ally of the Lorien people. Of course, everyone else except John knew this too, but still, so many obvious things happen with the dog that John is oblivious to that he almost comes off as an idiot for not picking up on things sooner. And dear God was it ever maddening to keep reading “Bernie Kosar” in the book. Why it couldn’t be shortened to Bernie or BK is beyond me. Thank God the movie realized how stupid that name was and only mentioned it once, never bothering to call the dog by its name from that point on. It’s fight scene (in advanced form) at the end was pretty epic too, though Bernie seemed way cooler looking in the book.
[End Spoiler]
I Am Number Four and its ensuing sequels could be so much better in someone else’s hands. Someone not willing to sacrifice quality to cash in on a fad. The writing style is boring and spartan in its use of short, unembellished sentences. Too much time is spent explaining the things that don’t need explaining in good novels. Nobody cares that you did the dishes before watching a movie and holding hands with your girlfriend before going out and having a conversation with mentor dad on the porch. If the point of this scene is the conversation, then skip to the conversation. We the readers are capable of understanding a lot if it’s conveyed in a subtle manner. Frey and Hughes lack that subtlety, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re out to make a buck and they’re using a surefire model for success. Take one part boy with dangerous past, add in pretty ‘average’ girl, toss with geek friend, cliché nemesis, and wise mentor in small town America and voila: Young Adult Romance Adventure Novel. Enjoy your meal. You’re paying much more for it than you realize.
