A while back, Rogers mentioned that a guy he knows is producing a film version of Meg by Steve Alten and when I saw it sitting at Goodwill for the princely sum of seventy-nine American cents, I laid my cash down and made with the reading. It's about this giant shark that's causing a bushel of havoc, which may sound familiar to anyone who's ever been within 20,000 feet of Jaws, but there's a critical difference: this is a 60-foot-long, 45 ton dinosaur shark. Yes, that's right, a giant dinosaur shark. Wait, correction - a 60-foot-long, 45 ton, pregnant dinosaur shark
Yes, Meg is glorious in its awfulness, displaying its alternately lean and turgid prose proudly, mocking your attempts to find a consistent tone. There's not an action movie or bad thriller novel cliche left untouched as our title character destroys small submersibles, surfboares, small boats, a yacht, a research ship, and what was that last thing...um...oh yeah! Meg sinks a nuclear submarine. Every character in this book is such a thin, thin collection of adjectives with the occasional verb that lets you know that they are Good or Bad and you can't help but smile a bit as the true hero of the book starts to take them out en masse in her quest to make sure that we know she's number one in the ocean, at least until those cute widdle baby dinosaur sharks start splashing around. It's hard to care for the supposed protagonist, Jonas Taylor, as he seems to be there primarily to inform us of how dangerous Meg is - he's a more of proactive information pamphlet that you'd pick up at the aquarium than a real character and the tacked-on "romance" in the book is the sort you'd see in a particularly atrocious gum ad, where Dentyne makes a girl's knees wobbly after her initial spurning of our handsome lead character.
I read this 350-page book in two and a half hours,tops, and I'm not a real speed-reader. Alten's sentences start and end with a maddening regularity and I was reminded heavily of Dan Brown's DaVinci methodology of making sure that the nonreader that picked the book up off the spinner at Wal-Mart or at the airport feels they're smart because, you know, they're reading a genuine novel while people who read more than three or four books a year that aren't fishing or home-repair related are saddened that this sort of tripe becomes a bestseller. Short chapters, short sentences, with the occasional bit of pseudoscience (or pseudohistory in the case of Brown) that appeal to the same people who watch CSI regularly and think real police work is just like that1.
Anyhow, I can see how Meg is going to make the sort of movie that gets people into theaters, but as I've already seen Deep Blue Sea, my tricked-out-knockoff-of-Jaws quota has been filled for the next few decades. Besides, that shark in Deep Blue Sea killed Samuel L Jackson - what's a nuclear submarine compared to him, motherfucker?
1Yes, I know a lot of my intelligent friends love CSI like a crazy pop star loves kids and monkeys, but they've got to know that it ain't like that in the field, even if we wish that collecting bullets and looking through a microscope in a well-lit laboratory was that awesome to behold. The show takes place in the Jerry Bruckheimer universe, where The Rock was a documentary and Armageddon is treated as good science fiction, and I've never liked that particular reality very much. Besides, I deeply suspect that Reno 911 is much closer to the truth when it comes to criminal justice in the state of Nevada.
Yes, Meg is glorious in its awfulness, displaying its alternately lean and turgid prose proudly, mocking your attempts to find a consistent tone. There's not an action movie or bad thriller novel cliche left untouched as our title character destroys small submersibles, surfboares, small boats, a yacht, a research ship, and what was that last thing...um...oh yeah! Meg sinks a nuclear submarine. Every character in this book is such a thin, thin collection of adjectives with the occasional verb that lets you know that they are Good or Bad and you can't help but smile a bit as the true hero of the book starts to take them out en masse in her quest to make sure that we know she's number one in the ocean, at least until those cute widdle baby dinosaur sharks start splashing around. It's hard to care for the supposed protagonist, Jonas Taylor, as he seems to be there primarily to inform us of how dangerous Meg is - he's a more of proactive information pamphlet that you'd pick up at the aquarium than a real character and the tacked-on "romance" in the book is the sort you'd see in a particularly atrocious gum ad, where Dentyne makes a girl's knees wobbly after her initial spurning of our handsome lead character.
I read this 350-page book in two and a half hours,tops, and I'm not a real speed-reader. Alten's sentences start and end with a maddening regularity and I was reminded heavily of Dan Brown's DaVinci methodology of making sure that the nonreader that picked the book up off the spinner at Wal-Mart or at the airport feels they're smart because, you know, they're reading a genuine novel while people who read more than three or four books a year that aren't fishing or home-repair related are saddened that this sort of tripe becomes a bestseller. Short chapters, short sentences, with the occasional bit of pseudoscience (or pseudohistory in the case of Brown) that appeal to the same people who watch CSI regularly and think real police work is just like that1.
Anyhow, I can see how Meg is going to make the sort of movie that gets people into theaters, but as I've already seen Deep Blue Sea, my tricked-out-knockoff-of-Jaws quota has been filled for the next few decades. Besides, that shark in Deep Blue Sea killed Samuel L Jackson - what's a nuclear submarine compared to him, motherfucker?
1Yes, I know a lot of my intelligent friends love CSI like a crazy pop star loves kids and monkeys, but they've got to know that it ain't like that in the field, even if we wish that collecting bullets and looking through a microscope in a well-lit laboratory was that awesome to behold. The show takes place in the Jerry Bruckheimer universe, where The Rock was a documentary and Armageddon is treated as good science fiction, and I've never liked that particular reality very much. Besides, I deeply suspect that Reno 911 is much closer to the truth when it comes to criminal justice in the state of Nevada.
