We watched Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief — er, rather, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief — on DVD while at Jim and Ginger’s a few weeks ago. And this evening I just finished the book it was based on, The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan.*
Huh.
Upon watching the movie, my impression was … well, okay. Nothing objectionable or particularly bad, but nothing all that good, either. I wasn’t quite sure what the fuss was about. It felt a bit like an adaptation, no real there there, but …
The book is not spectacular. This is no Lord of the Rings. This isn’t even Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. But the book has about ten times the personal voice, and five times the plottiness, of the movie. Looking at the creative decisions made in the adaptation to the screen, I can only shake my head — not just plot cuts for time (inevitable, even against a relatively short YYA novel), but a general sanding off of the plot, rearrangements solely for time that make the whole thing just a lot more blah.
Harry Potter hasn’t always been served well in adaptation to screen — every reader has the plot line, the character, the event that got ruthlessly cropped. Here the cropping isn’t quite as ruthless (though some significant characters and very significant subplots do get lopped away), but what’s left is not a lot of interesting episodes that hang together a bit tenuously, but a lot of compromised scenes that hang together but that’s about all.
There were also some not-insignificant changes in the last quarter of the movie that were very clearly designed for Big! Excitement! on the screen (and others that, frankly, robbed the film of a lot of excitement). And the end of the film ends up much more neatly, and therefore much less interestingly, than in the book.
Plus, the SFX just aren’t that great.
I have no idea whether this will be the beginning of a film franchise, though I have serious doubts. The book is definitely worth reading. The jury is still out whether I want to see the movie again any time soon. If you’ve only seen the latter, don’t judge the book by that cover.
*By the way, it’s pronounced with “Rye-or-dan,” rather than the authentic Irish “Rear-dan.” There was some amusement about that during his SDCC panel.
Riordan claimed during the SDCC (and I have no reason to doubt him) that he has not seen the movie. I suspect that was a wise idea.
The movie was atrocious, but at the same time had a summer-y blockbuster-y feel where they hoped that explosions would handwave away the problems.
I enjoyed the book despite the extreme heavy-handedness with foreshadowing and wink-wining when a mythological element was revealed. This was particularly heavy handed during the first half of the book. Towards the end Percy had a stronger voice and RR seemed more comfortable with the writing. Basically he needs an editor that knows not to talk down to kids.
I don’t know that I would call it atrocious, but it was certainly mediocre.
I’m still trying to decide on the voice in the books (now halfway through the second), whether it is a talking-down-to, or simply trying to hit the early middle school crowd in terms of assumed sophistication. There’s certainly a dearth of nuance, a simplicity in setting — it’s probably not fair to compare it to Rowling, but it feels geared down 3-4 grades, intentionally, from the Harry Potter series.