Listen, if you’re ever given a choice, do not ever watch the Percy Jackson movie. No one wants to watch a movie based on a book that’s completely wrong and inaccurate in every way imaginable.
Sure, the book is spectacular. And yes, on its own, the movie is good. However, if you’re comparing the book to the movie, nearly every Percy Jackson fan will rant about how inaccurate it was to the book.
Let’s take it back to when the movie first released in February of 2010. The overall rating is 2.6 out of 5 stars, and for good reason. Now, because it’s a book to a movie, not everything is going to be incorporated. That’s just the reality of adaptions. However, the producers and screenwriters took things too far when they cut out half the important characters and changed the entire plot.
“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is a book series written by Rick Riordan for a middle grade audience. Readers traditionally begin reading the books when they are in 5th or 6th grade, and I was no exception. The first-person POV was funny, sarcastic and filled with entertaining scenes and humor to keep you on your toes. If done correctly, the movie would have been centered around a young twelve-year-old Percy Jackson who becomes involved in the lives of Greek gods and monsters when he is accused of stealing Zeus’s master bolt. This accusation sets Percy off on a perilous journey with friends Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood. Instead, they had Percy and his friends aged up to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, putting them in their junior year of high school. Why would they do that?!
While the movie did incorporate Percy’s best friends, they completely ruined their personalities.
Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena, is an intelligent girl who has never been outside the famous Camp Half-Blood. When she first meets Percy, she immediately hates him and he has to earn her friendship. In the movie, the chemistry between them hits off at once and it’s clear the two are meant to be in love. Riordan wrote “The Lightning Thief” with the intent of having Percy and Annabeth form a strong friendship and have them slowly transition into something more throughout the series, but the movie completely cut that out, rewriting it so that their love was the focus of the movie.
The plot was rewritten, and important main characters and events were completely disregarded, such as Ares, the god of war. Ares and Percy run into each other on his quest, and while Ares “helps” the kids on their mission, he also ends up proving to be an enemy. Percy’s hatred of Ares continues on throughout the series, following into the sister series, “The Heroes of Olympus.” Their fight is a major plot point in the book, and it’s nowhere in sight, like with Clarisse La Rue, one of Ares’ daughters. She and Percy were enemies from day one, and their rivalry was a central focus for Percy’s determination to succeed on his quest and to get his mom back. Clarisse is a pivotal character for the PJO books, and the movie completely disregards her.
As if they hadn’t screwed up already, the producers got rid of Grover’s entire personality. Riordan intended for Grover to be a shy, self-conscious boy who doesn’t know the first thing about girls and whose main focus is helping Percy succeed on his quest. The movie painted Grover as a ladies’ man, disregarding his shyness and completely forgetting about his cautious attitude and his intelligence.
Dear readers, you can see here the movie skewered the books and completely ruined PJO for everyone. Riordan himself would later comment on the movie to Twitter in 2020, saying it was his “life’s work going through a meat grinder” and he wished the producers had listened to his suggestions when he told them the movie sucked.
Needless to say, the Percy Jackson movie was a waste of time, energy and resources. The actors involved are not to blame, for they weren’t the ones writing the script and calling the scenes. Luckily, Percy got his redemption when Riordan launched a show version on Disney Plus. I’m relieved, and I’m sure many other readers out there are, too.
