Um, excuse me? Waiter? That’s not the quest I ordered ...
No oracle-in-a-box (um ... uh ... attic). No nice mealtime food offerings. No “upstate” New York. Ares didn’t even have a speaking role in this film and he was one of the primary deities involved in the book. And the villain isn’t even the same person. It wouldn’t have bothered me, except that changing the villain completely changed the story to the point at which the movie was no longer believable. I was so distracted that I didn’t even realize that Annabeth looked like Xena, Warrior Princess, until the film had already ended.
I mean, changing a villain is a big deal. It requires shifting the entire rest of the story around to suit the needs of the new villain. The villain of The Lightning Thief was intended to become a Huge Problem later on, or at least that’s how I read it. It’d be like the movie adaptation of Harry Potter substituting Draco Malfoy’s dad for Lord Voldemort.
“It’s hot, he’s a weirdo ...”
My biggest issue with the film was the Receiver of Many, who honest-to-Gods looked almost exactly like the illicit love child of that
monster from “The Satan Pit” in Doctor Who and the balrog from Lord of the Rings:
The entrance to Hades, by the way, looks like something right out of a tourist trap in Salem, MA. Or possibly a haunted house in Niagara Falls, Canada. Take your pick. While I did enjoy that the film had placed the underworld’s entrance in a natural setting instead of the strange building in the book, the interior was a huge letdown.
The characterization of the Receiver of Many was painful, and I thought that Rick Riordan did a much better job. The movie completely mauled his relationship with Persephone, which was difficult to watch because I OTP Plouton/Persephone hard. Furthermore, Persephone is a slight nymphomaniac, and she’s underground when she really shouldn’t be. Of course, they had to maul the mythology because of that slight villain change I mentioned above.
Use the Force, Luke
To make matters worse, Poseidon communicates with Percy using Force telepathy at the points in the story when book-Percy just figured everything out for himself. While a nice way to show that Poseidon did care about his son, it reads way too much like Star Wars. I didn’t come to this movie for Star Wars. I came in the false belief that I would hear Plouton whine about how many new divisions he’s had to put in the underworld because human beings kill each other too much and breed like rabbits.
The Verdict
The Lightning Thief belongs right next to Queen of the Damned on my list of “movies that break under the weight of people with big red pens.” Mythology is flexible, and storytellers have tons of room for innovation within a story. However, the Greeks always fought the Trojans. Theseus always killed the Minotaur. The particulars don’t matter as much as the main stakeholders in a story or the vilification of a deity who isn’t really that bad.
While I know I usually give a breakdown of which aspects of something I find good, it was just too bad. I give it 1.5/5 — but only because the CGI was good.
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