We watched Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief last Friday. I was so excited since I enjoyed the books, and would like to see how they look like in the movie. Maybe there are some changes like age and hair color, but I still want to see how the movie goes with the adaptation.
Warning: May contain spoilers.
I didn’t really expect the screenwriters to adapt each event from the book. Movies only have like one and a half to two hours to run, so it is impossible for them to include everything from the book to the movie. They may have to drop some storylines and/or incorporate some new ideas. I have already made peace with myself that when it comes to movie adaptations, these can happen, so I don’t expect that they would be religious enough to follow the book. But somehow I didn’t expect that they will be dropping a lot in this case.
What was good
- One of the things that I really wanted to see in this film is how it illustrates the events/creatures/character behavior from the book. I often wonder if it would be similar to what I have thought while reading it. That’s why I really feel great that I was able to see how a minotaur really looks like, and how Grover eats tin cans and bleats when worried or excited. I also find Percy cool that he really looks like a very disturbed child.
- Percy’s dyslexic manifestations also worked for me, since I don’t really know what a dyslexic person feels when trying to read a phrase.
What was bad
- I really thought Annabeth does all the thinking while they are in this quest. She is Athena’s daughter after all, so she must be the one who always have a plan. In this film she was more of the fighter kind of girl, maybe to avoid the stereotype image of girls who always do the thinking? I think Annabeth in the movie was out of her original character.
- They eliminated some complicated stuffs that might have been elaborated on future sequels. Maybe they thought that in case this movie won’t be a hit, this movie may stand on its own without the need to follow it up with sequels. I learned from Glenn that this movie was heavily promoted in Singapore, and I think some people in the advertising wants this movie to be a hit just so a sequel may happen. Well according to some news, Sea of Monsters is in the works, but I guess they still don’t want to be complacent and incorporate a conflict that might have look cool, like who really wants the Lightning Bolt? Who really wants to let the gods fight among themselves and send Olympus to its end? If they would tell me that it’s just Luke who thought and planned all of that, I wouldn’t believe them. It takes more than a demigod to skillfully plan that one out.
- Some characters are missing. I wanted to see how Clarisse bullied Percy on his first day in Camp Half-Blood. I also wanted to see Mr. D, who always mistakes Percy’s name. It’s also disappointing that Ares didn’t show up. Maybe they don’t want to complicate the story that much since they don’t have much time to solve them all.
I may be seeing the movie wrong, since I am always comparing it against the book. But I just thought that maybe, if some conflicts were left untainted, this movie might go pretty well. I am just afraid that Percy Jackson might follow the footsteps of Eragon: no certainty of a sequel at all.
