Movie Review: Percy Jackson – The Lightning Thief

15Feb10

Notable Stars: Logan Lerman, Brandon Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, Sean Bean, Rosario Dawson, Kevin McKidd

Running Time: 119 minutes

In the post-Harry Potter world, there are of course going to be comparisons between that story and every teen sci-fi/fantasy movie that’s released. And for Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, the comparisons poured in before the movie was released and kept pouring in.

… the obvious similarity of Percy Jackson to the Harry Potter movies inevitably makes it feel somewhat secondhand. – NY Times

Dutifully Potteresque it begins, and dutifully Potteresque it ends. – Globe and Mail

Has all the CGI sorcery of a Harry Potter pic, but none of the magic. – Entertainment Weekly

Percy Jackson, you are no Harry Potter. – Detroit News

The only problem: Percy Jackson is not like Harry Potter. Aside from having a boy and a girl help out the story’s teenage hero, the movies diverge, and quite quickly.

By the way, I’m a HUGE fan of the Potter series and I have read and really enjoy Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books.

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief is one of the funnier fantasy movies I’ve seen in a while. What it lacks in “magic,” it makes up for with humor, wit, and some well-placed lessons in Greek mythology.

The Lightning Thief is the tale of young Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman), a dyslexic, ADHD-affected New York teenager who finds out he’s a demigod — the son of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon. Once discovered, Percy gets whisked away to a training camp for demigods where he discovers that his ADHD is something that will help him in battle and his dyslexia will help him make sense out of Greek, literally.

Percy is joined by the beautiful Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), a daughter of Athena, and best friend Grover (Brandon Jackson), a satyr assigned as a protector to Poseidon’s offspring.

The trio go on a quest — like Perseus and Hercules, not Harry — to free Percy’s mother from the grips of Hades and to hopefully find out what the heck happened to Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt. Zeus (Sean Bean) suspects his brother Poseidon (Kevin McKidd) and son Percy because of a long rivalry between the two top gods. As a result, global war between the gods seems to be a sure thing.

Those gods and their petty fights.

Now, let me make something very clear: The Lightning Thief is a FUN movie, just like the novels are FUN books. The first in the series is fast-paced, full of humor, likable characters and exciting events, and contains modern re-imaginings of millenia-old myths. (So yes, I guess you can say Percy Jackson ripped off old stories–2,500-year-old ones.)

The movie is the same.

There will be complaints from the Percy Jackson literalists, who will be pissed that the characters in the movie are at least five years older than in the book, that Ares, the god of war, isn’t in the movie, and that there is just a very brief mention of Kronos, the Titan father of the gods.

But all of these sacrifices make for a better, free-flowing movie.

In The Lightning Thief, director Chris Columbus, who also directed the first two Potter films, matched the spirit of the Riordan’s book. His changes helped make The Lightning Thief a superior film than either of his literal takes on The Sorcerer’s Stone or The Chamber of Secrets, just without the superior source material.

While Columbus spends some time explaining Percy Jackson’s world, he uses most of the movie showing the mythological world. (What makes Riordan’s books so enjoyable is that they take place in the real world, not off magically hidden in the forest.)

Lerman, Daddario and Jackson are great in their roles as the main characters, but the older, more seasoned actors, like Pierce Brosnan as demigod trainer Chiron and Rosario Dawson as pissed-off goddess Persephone, are effective in their performances, while Uma Thurman as Medusa nearly stole the show.

My Take

In the end, Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief is a fun movie with some really good performances. Just enjoy the ride and try not to take it too seriously.

Rating: 4/5

Editorial

It’s getting pretty easy to predict where the T-Meter will land on RottenTomatoes.com before a movie comes out. Before even seeing the movie, I projected that The Lightning Thief would be at 50 percent. It’s currently at 49 percent.

It was a HUGE mistake to give the directorial job of the first Percy Jackson film to Chris Columbus because no matter how different the stories are, critics were going to pan it as a Harry Potter-ripoff. And then 20th Century Fox made an even more terrible error by advertising the movie as a new film by “The director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

But Columbus made several attempts to separate the two series. The biggest change was getting rip of a “cap of invisibility” that Athena had given her daughter Annabeth. The comparison between this and Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak would be a very easy target for critics licking their fingertips in anticipation of writing the cleverest insult to the film. Nevermind that the “cap of invisibility” was first mentioned more than 2,000 years ago.

The review industry needs to change. I’ve heard on multiple occasions that professional reviewers enjoy writing negative reviews more than positive ones. That is a shame. Their reviews are capable of priming audiences to hate movies that are not deserving of such wrathful dislike. They’ve created a media world in which being “intellectual” means not liking anything except those things that general audiences don’t like.

The Lightning Thief is a good movie. It’s not great, but it’s better than most sci-fi/fantasy tween movies that are released. Those who go in to see the film without any expectations will probably enjoy it for what it is, while those who anticipate a Harry Potter ripoff will see a Harry Potter ripoff.

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