Monday, February 22, 2010

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief Movie

So I went to see the Percy Jackson movie last weekend (after looking forward to it for almost a year). I thought it was pretty good, overall. The plot had changed quite a bit and a lot of stuff was taken out, but I liked most of the additions.

I really liked Grover in the movie. Even though he didn't match the Grover in the book, he still had a lot of funny lines and always kept the mood light. I thought that Logan Lerman was great as Percy too - he looks exactly like Percy and his acting was a little too angsty, but still good.

The only character who really annoyed me was Annabeth, which is sad since she's one of my favorite characters in the books. First of all, the actress didn't look much like how I imagined Annabeth; in fact, she looked a little like Fergie at some places. Plus, she was wayyy meaner than she was in the books - I could never imagine the book Annabeth purposely hurting anyone during Capture-the-Flag. The rest of the characters ranged from good to ok - Chiron was awesome and all the gods were meh.

The plot was different, but still interesting. I mean, it's only a two hour movie and they had to cram a lot of stuff in. The whole overarching plot of Kronos rising to power was cut out, but that's understandable.

The fight scenes were my only other problem. I don't know much about sword fighting, but what I saw of it in the movie looked really choreographed and cheesy and fake. Annabeth kept raising the sword above her head and kept managing to block other swords even without looking back - I thought that was pretty unrealistic.

But in the end, I thought that the movie was worth watching. Different from the book, but still entertaining.

5 comments:

Nonie said...

Alex does look a little like Fergie! Wow...well, her character did annoy me too, and she didn't do anything which was what bothered me the most. She was just...there.

Hehe...I liked the fight scenes. They were fun to watch, though I agree with you about them being a bit cheesy (especially the bits with Annabeth fighting the others). :P

I liked the movie, but I didn't like the dialogue. I thought they could've written it a lot better. If they do make SoM into a movie, I hope the dialogue will better...

Nice review, btw!

Judi said...

Annabeth is my all-time favorite character (after Percy) in that book series. Even though I did really like Nico too.

I still want to see the movie, but a lot of my friends have been saying it sucked or that it wasn't as good as the book. The only people who told me the movie was excellent were two of my friends who'd never read the books :\

Maya Ganesan said...

It was really great, but I think it drew way too many comparisons to HP. Rick Riordan keeps trying to deny that he ever modeled the PJ books after Harry Potter, but the movie isn't helping him - for example, when we got to see that faraway view of Olympus, it looked so much like an airborne Hogwarts. And the director of PJ was also the director of HP1.

I figure that maybe the reason why I loved PJ so much was because it was so similar to the HP movies, which are amazing. Oh well - I thought PJ had a lot of spirit and it was very current and fun, which sets it apart from HP. I really liked the movie nonetheless.

asdfjkl; said...

I agree with you, Priya! :)

Looking forward to the next movie (said to be released 2012, I'm hoping sooner) for sure.

Anonymous said...

They also forgot that percy was on annabeth's team of capture th flag!