Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief Review

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Payton Shiver
March 25, 2010
Filed under A & E, Opinions and Views

A new character has entered the fictional world ruled by the infamous lightning scarred Harry Potter and dragon-rider Eragon.

Percy Jackson is getting ready to be kicked out boarding school. Again. After being attacked by a boring math teacher who turns out to be one of Hades’ personal Furies, Percy is thrown into the mythical world of Greek gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus… A world that turns out to be not such a myth from his textbook after all.

Percy soon finds out he is a demigod, or half human, half Greek god. His father is one of the big three in Greek mythology, Poseidon. When his father’s brother, Zeus, has his famous lightning bolt stolen from him, the Greek gods begin to prepare for war…And Percy Jackson is the prime suspect.

Percy and his friends Annabeth and Grover are given ten days to find Zeus’s most prized possession and return peace to Mount Olympus. Percy Jackson must face more than just a simple cross-country quest into Hades domain. He must come to terms with the father who abandoned him, solve the riddle of the Oracle which warns of a betrayal of a friend, and save the fate of the mortal world as well as Mount Olympus.

Rick Riordan weaves a tale of mythic proportions and adventure in this page turner. While the critical verdict heard around the world of cinematography is, “Percy Jackson is no Harry Potter,” in the literature world, Riordan has created a hit. Where J.K Rowling wrote for herself, the Percy Jackson series grew out of a sequence of bedtime stories Riordan invented for his son Haley.

Haley was diagnosed with learning disabilities at age eight. Although Haley was having trouble in school, he loved the Greek myths and asked his dad to tell him some stories about the gods and heroes. Riordan spiced up the typical Olympic gods and created award-winning stories.

In 2005, The Lightning Thief was published. Christopher Columbus, the director of the first two Harry Potter movies directed The Lightning Thief, which automatically means every action movie he directs from now until Kingdom Come will be compared to Harry Potter.

As with all books that spawn movies, the avid reader will always find the movie’s flaws. As for the most dedicated, we tend to tear the flaws apart. The first few inconsistencies I noticed were firstly, in the book, Percy has no idea who his father is. Yet upon his arrival at Camp Half Blood, he and everyone else knows he is son of Poseidon.

Secondly, Dionysus, the god of wine, played a simple but humorous role in the book, and he is nowhere to be seen in the movie.

Third, Annabeth, Percy’s new friend and daughter of Athena is supposed to be a tiny blonde with a mess of unruly curls and bright grey eyes, not the future Victoria’s Secret model who was cast.

In the book, the whole reason for the quest Percy and his two friends set out upon is because the Oracle of Delphi has given them a prophecy which will ultimately be fulfilled. The Oracle is a huge part of the book because of the repetition of the riddle they have been given. The movie shows nothing whatsoever about an Oracle. In fact, it never even hints at one…Percy just takes off!

Another god the trio meet on their trip is Ares, the god of war. A nasty fellow, but he returns in the end of the novel to battle with Percy, who wins. Not often a demigod defeats a full Olympian god. Slightly important in the scheme of things. In the book, the three do not obtain the pearls from certain spots on a map as the movie suggests. Upon arriving at the Pacific Ocean, Percy calls to his dad for his help and protection into their decent to the Underworld and receives the pearls via seahorses. The final and probably most irking of the inconsistencies between the novel and the movie was the final battle with Luke and Percy. That, my friends, never happened.

The movie ends with an almost kiss between Annabeth and Percy… but do not get your hopes up. That does not happen for another few books in the series.

All in all, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was a great book and a fairly decent movie. As with most fictional, mythical adventures, if Riordan had thickened the plot and created more memorable characters, Harry Potter would have been put on a shelf to lay in dust behind the shadow of Percy and his Greek myths. But it seems like no contemporary literary artist has come close to the famous wizard, and all current, imaginative, original teen action literature is invariably compared to the world of Mr. Potter. It will be an earth-shattering day in the literary world when something better than Harry is created.