TAKEN

By: Chris Wyatt
Review Date: Monday, December 09, 2002

Thomas Cook's choppy, disconnected novelization of the Scifi Channel's TAKEN tries too hard, and accomplishes too little. Cook crams all 20 hours of the miniseries into a 350 page document, which results in a book that manifests all the obvious problems attendant to such an ill-conceived venture.

In the book, three separate families all become entwined in an alien conspiracy. The Crawfords are involved because one of their number is on an army base in Roswell in 1947 when the crash happens. The Keys are involved because one of their number witnesses foo fighters while flying runs in World War II. The Crawfords become involved because one of their number has an affair with a human-looking alien (think STARMAN) and gives birth to a half-alien child (think MORK AND MINDY).

Over the course of 50 long, long years all three families operate (sometimes together, sometimes separately) in different capacities with relation to the reality of alien life. These years come and go with little cohesion. The entire novel plays out like a series of brief episodes of tired alien lore archetypes.

Most of the characters are one-dimensional, but when truly interesting characters do surface, they come and go in the blink of an eye. By the time you've begun to get interested in them, their stories are over. Furthermore, the transitions from one generation to the next are always jerky. Several times in the book the action jumps forward so awkwardly, and has such gaps, that the reader has to check back to make sure that pages didn't get somehow stuck together.

The alien conspiracy that, supposedly, glues the plot together is so basic, and the surprise revelation explaining why the aliens are on Earth is so silly that the novel almost redefines the term anticlimax.

Steven Spielberg's name brands the TAKEN miniseries on TV. Yet, Steven Spielberg's name is nowhere to be found on the TAKEN novelization...let's just say that Steven Spielberg is a smart man.

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