Snakes on a Plane

Christa Faust

Snakes on a Plane is the biggest Internet phenomenon since "you got urban legends in my email!" "you got email in my urban legends!". It promises to have the biggest August opening weekend since... well, ever. And you know it's going to be horribly cheesy. But you had no idea how cheesy. Now, thanks to the wonder that is the pen of Christa Faust, you can find out.

Now, let me say here that I do not in any way blame Christa Faust for any of the many, many problems here. This is a novelization. She took what she had and she ran with it, and I am perfectly willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that, if anything, she improved on what she was given. (More on this later.) It's Heffernan and Gutierrez, the original scriptwriters, who deserve your scorn here. Some of the pieces of dialogue that Faust let shine through from this screenplay are absolute howlers. We may have the finest unintentional comedy on our hands since Night of the Lepus. That's what I'm hoping, anyway.

Now, how Faust improved it: this is your basic survival thriller in the seventies-disaster-flick mold. (Insert standard references to John Godey's 1978 novel The Snake here.) And if it had been written as a straight seventies-disaster-movie-survival-thriller novelization, it would read like, well, you know, and be pretty bloody awful. Thank Heaven for Christa Faust, however, who wrote large chunks of it in the style one would expect from a hardboiled detective novel. I'm not sure why such a simple change works, but it's like the things they do in silly home improvement shows; it accents the cheesiness of the whole concept, brings into focus the idea (which I hope is not lost on Heffernan and Gutierrez) that this is great parody material here, and shoves the whole thing, kicking and screaming all the way, into a corner where it can sit and jeer at itself.

It's fun, it's stupid, and it may actually be better than the movie (I won't know for another two and a half weeks). Check it out.