Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Terry Brooks

This is quite obviously the novelisation of the movie and closely follows the movie story line as would be expected. As I see it there are two approaches that can be taken when writing a novelisation, have it identical to the movie or embellish on various points.

The second method is preferable I feel, as it adds something to the experience rather than just watching the movie again in words. This is the approach taken in the starwars novelisations that I have read so far (episode 1 and 2, I am yet to read the original trilogy ones).

When this novelisation was initially released in hardback it came out in a number of different covers with the various main characters on it, this probably confused some people but was a cool idea.

I of course went for the Darth Maul cover, as it was the coolest in my opinion, obviously this was what a lot of other people though too, because when the paperback version came out it had the Darth maul cover on it.

It is nice to have a durable copy of a book; unfortunately hardback versions take up a lot of room on shelves and hence are not good for those with a tight space budget.

This was one of the first starwars novels I read, so I was pleased that there was a fairly large section that explained the history of the Sith, this was not in the movie to anywhere near the extent it was covered in the book, and it gave me a better understanding of the extended starwars universe and its history.

One of the other areas that were expanded upon in the book are the pod races, this has more information on the various competitors and some technical additional information on the engines that each of them are using in the big race. This is quite interesting, but I don't know how it could have been worked into the screenplay.

We also see a lot more of the Nemodians in the novel than we did in the movie, however this is probably not as interesting as some of the other expanded areas.

The final part that was seriously extended upon was Anikin's part; there was a lot of “scenes” with him walking around the part of tattoine he lived in talking to people, including a random pilot character and his friends.

It does give a better sense of the young character and works well in a written form, some of this could have easily fit into the film, and might have been nice however being non-essential to the overall story it would also be the type of scenes that would be cut down first when trying to shorten the overall length of a film.

Somehow Jar Jar is also less annoying than in the movie, this may be because you can mentally edit him a bit, I'm sure he is written much the same way as he appeared in the film.

This, like the episode 2 novelisation is well worth reading, especially as an introductory lesson on Sith history.