"Peter Jackson cut Tom Bombadil? How dare he! Who does he think he is?" - Internet, 2001
Percy Jackson & the Olympians - The Lightning Thief is the first in a series of young adult novels by Rick Riordan about a 12 year old boy named
Harry Percy, who finds out
his parents are wizards his father is Poseidon and he has special
magic demigod powers, so he goes to
Hogwarts Camp Half-Blood, plays
Quidditch capture-the-flag and teams up with clumsy but loyal
Ron Grover the satyr and smart and loyal
Hermione Annabeth, daughter of Athena. The "similarities" to Harry Potter don't stop there and include
some Slytherins children of Ares, mythological creatures that have no idea how to fight and can be bested by pre-teens, adult authority figures who are dumb as rocks, and a film adaptation!
The book is pretty much what you'd expect. Percy has dyslexia (because his brain is hard-wired for Ancient Greek not English) and ADD (because his mind fogs out all the random mythological things that happen around him) and keeps bouncing from school to school. His home life sucks because his mother is married to
Vernon Dursley Gable Ugliano (Ugliano, really?), a crude and smelly dirtbag (his overly foul human odor actually masks Percy's demi-godness and protects him! TRUE STORY!)
You might wonder how any of this plagiarism is legal, but I'm still wondering how Harry Potter didn't get sued seven ways to Sunday by Tim Hunter...
This is Tim Hunter. Yeah, I had the same reaction.
Anywho, the book drags on the mystery of which god is Percy's dad for a few chapters, even though it's blatantly obvious to anyone reading. Percy is good at swimming and kayaking, controls water, heals when he's in water and it still takes some time for his guardians to figure out that his dad is Poseidon.
Zeus' lightning bolt has been stolen, and as son of Poseidon, Percy is the main suspect. Riordan tries to keep you guessing as to the identity of the god pulling the strings, but the best guess is Hades framing Poseidon, so the kids set off on their quest to the Underworld. But first Percy is given a vague prophecy telling him to not trust gifts from his friends, casting suspicion on Grove and Annabeth, Luke, son of Hermes, who has given Percy some flying sneakers, Chiron, protector centaur who has given Percy a pen-sword and anyone they meet along the way.
The quest takes a few stops in a statue garden (I wonder who lives there), the St. Louis arch, an off-road diner for a meeting with Ares and a Las Vegas hotel before the gang arrives in the Underworld. I thought Riordan had done a pretty good job mimicking the early Harry Potter books up to this point but he continued straight through the unsatisfying ending of half-explanations and exposition.
At the end of the day, because Percy, and more importantly Grover and Annabeth don't have the same charm as Harry, Ron and Hermione, the book can't even match the level of Harry Potter.
The movie on the other hand... is a contender for the most horrible adaptation of all time. To anyone who has ever nit-picked any other adaptations casting, or timeline or mash-up of comic book stories, I demand you read this book and watch this movie and realize would a truly terrible adaptation looks like.
The names of the characters are the same, Poseidon is Percy's dad, and there are battles with a minotaur and a medusa, but everything else is different.
Little changes in scenes create giant nonsensical plotholes. In the book version, the mom is snatched enroute to camp Halfblood. In the movie version she can't enter the camp due to her lack of god-blood, which causes her to get snatched. But if she can't enter the camp, why did Grover stop to get her first and bring her with them? GAH!
Minor quibbles like hair color (Annabeth's now a brunette) and race (Grover is now black) never bother me but a questionable decision to age the characters to the 16-17 range does. The guardians know that Poseidon is Percy's dad at the beginning of the book, and so does Zeus. Ares' children, so Annabeth is made tougher to take on the early-novel tough girl role. The prophecy and the secret mastermind and Ares himself are also removed from the story, taking away all suspicion and tension with them.
With the secret mastermind missing, I'm left wondering just how the ACTUAL lightning thief managed to pull off the heist by himself.
And the oft-repeated "Percy can't fly because Zeus will become aware of his presence and strike him down" is completely abandoned so that Percy can wear the winged sneakers in the movie and have his final battle take place in the air.
ALL OF THIS could still be forgiven if the movie had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. But it fails on every level. The special effects are on the level of a
Sci-Fi SyFy made-for-TV-movie and the acting...oh, the acting... is an abomination in the eyes of god and man.
Logan Lerman (Percy) and Brandon T Jackson (Grover) spend the movie having a who-has-less-talent battle. I don't know who won, but the audience lost. In what particularly offensive scene, Percy wakes up after his encounter with the minotaur, thinking it all a bad dream and relating it to Grover, before realizing that Grover is standing in front of him on satyr-legs. Percy jumps back, "you mean it's all true? My mom... my mom is gone?" Horrible dialogue, but delivered with such a lack of emotion, that it can only be explained if Logan has never experienced the death of a family member.
Or known someone who has. Or took acting lessons. Or watched TV.
Clearly someone had blackmail photo or really big paychecks for really little work and wasted money on Sean Bean (Zeuss), Kevin McKidd (Poseidon), Uma Thurman (Medusa), Pierce Brosnan (Chiron), Joe Pantoliano (the evil step-dad) and even Rosario Dawson (Persephone). That money would probably have been better spent on acting lessons for the kids, a big-boy computer for the special effects department, or a studio executive with the balls to say "THIS MOVIE IS AWFUL AND SHOULD NOT BE RELEASED"
This movie should only be watched as a bad example.
Tune in next movie review for: Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
