Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief (2/2)

The day I finished the book, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, my friends and I watched the movie as a comparison. I found myself doing a lot of the same things I did while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. Every couple of minutes I would raise my hand and comment “er….that didn’t happen”.

---------Spoilers ahead for book as well as movie.--------

Percy Jackson, the movie, felt like a complete disconnect from the actual story. It’s almost a guarantee that a lot of great things will be left out of the movie, but some of the most important things in the book didn’t even exist in the movie. Ares puppeteering didn’t take place, in fact Ares wasn’t in the movie at all. He was kind of a big deal in the book. Kronos also wasn’t in the book, he’s the one pulling the strings behind Luke’s betrayal (and the entire Olympian doomseday prophecy). Clarisse is introduced as Percy’s major rival, yet she’s nowhere to be found in the movie. Pair that with the additional (yet more understandable) content left out, such as Cerberus, the Furies, and the Hephaestus trap, and the actual relevance toward the book is disappointing.

On top of things taken out, the movie added random things in too. In the book, Nereid offers Percy the three pearls just before he leaves for the underworld. The movie takes this and makes it the central plot point. In doing so, the Hydra is randomly thrown in, and upon reaching the underworld (and skipping through the majority of it), Persephone shows up and helps them escape. That doesn’t happen in the book, in fact, the entire second half of the movie was completely different. Percy’s mother escapes the underworld, no problem, Hades isn’t missing his Helm of Darkness, Grover volunteers to stay behind and get raped by Persephone in the underworld, Hades never finds out the truth behind the theft, and Luke openly admits to the theft and claims to be the mastermind behind the whole plan.

And even further than that, a lot of the character portrayals were just unlikeable. I can understand making them teenagers rather than children. Children are going to age much faster than they’ll be able to make these movies (then again, Harry Potter managed). Aside from that though, the demographic is a little more widespread. While 11-year old Harry Potter was in school for most of the first few books, these 12-year olds are traveling the country, battling dangerous beasts in search of an ultimate quest. But if you move past that, the individual characters were quite different from how they were in the book.

Starting with Annabeth, she came off as a mix between Annabeth and Clarisse, and there was a weird love-connection between her and Percy throughout the movie. I don’t know if they hook up later on, but it was not at all implied in the book. Grover is supposed to be scared, fragile, and unconfident in the book, feeling he has something to prove after screwing up bad previously. Yet, in the movie, he’s confident, he’s arrogant, he acts like Percy’s protective older brother willing to take on the world, and the truth of his past is never mentioned. Zeus is forgiving and even somewhat charitable, not demanding Percy leave after having just spared them of war. Hades is easily tricked and not scary at all. Charon is exactly what he should be like in the original myth, not how he’s described in the 21^st century, the list goes on and on. And that’s not even counting Annabeth’s brunette hair, Medusa’s Caucasian appearance, and countless other physical discrepancies.

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Ultimately, however, I’m left with a different feeling with Percy Jackson than I was Avatar.  Although Percy Jackson made almost all of the same mistakes that M. Night made with The Last Airbender, there were two major differences. First, I felt that the production value was higher with Percy Jackson. The visuals were better, the acting was much better, and it just had that finished finesse you expect to see in a film these days. Second, the film was decent as a stand-alone movie. Despite how much was changed from the book to the movie, the plot wasn’t rushed, the revised plot still worked out, and it actually made sense. If Percy Jackson the Book had never existed, this could actually be a decent movie. Unfortunately though, it just makes and my friends wonder just how they plan to handle the next four movies.