Iron Man by Peter David

I was at the library a few weeks ago and just happened to stumble upon the novelization of the Iron Man movie. I was unenthusiastic at first--a novel based on a movie based on a comic--there's only so many iterations a story can go through before it runs out of steam. But I picked it up anyway, read through a few paragraphs, and remembered that I really liked the movie, had wanted to see it a second time, but probably wasn't ever going to get around to it. So, with nothing to loose but a few hours of my time, I took the book home with me ^_^

Overview
It turned out to be basically a line-by-line retelling of the movie. Tony Stark is a genius weapons designer who idealistically believes that his weapons are only hurting bad guys until he gets kidnapped by terrorists who used his own weapons against American troops. Tony then does some serious re-thinking of the universe. This re-thinking involves, among other things, the creation of a mechanized suit of armor with incredible destructive and defensive capabilities, which he uses to convince the terrorists of the error of their ways. (Or maybe he blows them all up, one of the two)

Recommended for: Meh. The movie was excellent, (you should really see it if you haven't already) and I'm assuming the original comics are also pretty good. I can't really recommend the book, though. Maybe if you need an extra dose of Iron Man, or you really want to know what's going on but can't get your hands on either the movie or the comic.

Parental Worries: The movie was PG-13, and that fits the book as well. Tony is a playboy who likes his liquor, and people get blown up, shot, and otherwise roughed about in traditional action-movie style.

Ramblings
Don't get me wrong--I did enjoy the book, but only because I'd enjoyed the movie and was able to play it back in my head. The novelization was not all that great. There's literally only two, maybe three places where you pick up information that wasn't available in the movie, and for the most part they're either obvious or inconsequential. Everything else is a straight re-write of the script. There are some novelizations that add significantly to a movie, but this wasn't really one of them. For example, I thought the novels for the first two Star Wars prequels were vastly better than their movies, although Iron Man was a much better movie, so maybe that's an unfair comparison.

One more beef before I sign off--all of the action scenes in the book were written in italics, as if we couldn't figure out that a change in POV had taken place. That's entire pages written in italics, which gets old really fast.