Movie Review: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Way Below Harry Potter

At first I thought the Percy Jackson movie series would rival the Harry Potter movie series. Both have are based on novel series. Percy Jackson's director also directed the first two Harry Potter movies.

Both are on already established genres - Harry Potter on wizards and witches, and Percy Jackson on gods and goddesses of the Greek mythology. And both centers on half-bloods as protagonists.

But where Harry Potter has succeeded is where Percy Jackson fall short. Percy Jackson did not offer any amazing new things about the Greek mythology the way Harry Potter opened our eyes to wizardry.

While Harry Potter keeps on tickling my imagination on the wizards' way of life, how they learn magic, how they play Quidditch, how they made potions and how they made the mudbloods believe they don't exist, Percy Jackson bores me with the same things we already know about the gods of Olympus.

Warning, the following paragraphs may contain some spoilers.

The movie is about Percy Jackson's (Logan Lerman) adventure together with Grover (Brandon Jackson), half-goat half-human, and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena, facing creatures in mythology like satyrs, centaurs, and monsters like the Minotaur, Medusa (Uma Thurman), and the five-headed dragon Hydra.

What's so boring about this is that we've already read about these monsters and we already know they will be defeated, which makes scenes easily predictable. I can already tell Percy would try cutting the Hydra's heads and then it would grow more heads.

If I'm not mistaken, Medusa is already dead in the books. Well, she's still alive and kicking in the movie only to be beheaded by Percy.

The Half-Blood Copy Cat

Anyone who have seen the Harry Potter movies would say the writer of Percy Jackson got most of his ideas from JK Rowling. Number one, Percy Jackson is a half-blood just like Harry Potter. Number two, they have a training camp called Half Blood Camp just like Hogwarts, with Pierce Brosnan playing a role like that of Dumbledore.

Why do they have a training camp for half-mortal half-gods anyway? Hercules didn't need training, did he?

I don't see them learning interesting things like potions and magics. It's looks like a military training camp to me.

They are training demigods because they will be the future generation of gods? It would make sense if Zeus, Poseidon and Hades will die soon. But they are immortal, remember?

The Omnipotent Lead Character

Among those in training in the Half-Blood camp, only Percy Jackson was able to discover his powers - controlling water. It is as if the other gods has no power they can bestow to their sons and daughters.

And when he has learned his powers, you'll say he is not a demigod but a full-pledge god. With a bottle of water in his hand, he can do antything.

Back to Hercules, the son of Zeus. Did Hercules inherited the power over the weather? Or did any of Zeus' bloodlines inherited any of that power? Then why did Percy Jackson inherited the power over water?

And what's wrong with the gods of Olympus? They just quarrel like five-year-olds and only care about waging war against each other. I know that's the way they are wired in the books but in this movie they do it just sitting in their thrones. Where's the fun in that?

But oh...

The only thing that amazed me in this movie is that they pictured the gods as giants. I guess that's new. I always thought the gods are just like our size.

In Summary...

Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief doesn't bring anything new to the table. It just messes with the Greek mythology which makes it very hard to believe. Maybe the Greek mythology is too old to create a movie on. Or maybe this movie just lacks creativity.

I haven't read the Percy Jackson books but I am hoping they are better than this Percy Jackson movie (like the Harry Potter books are better than the Harry Potter movies).

And if they are continuing on producing the rest of the books in the series, let's see how they would bring this boring topic into like. I will still be waiting for the second movie to check out if there would be new things.

This first movie sucks. It's like how a ten-year-old boy would brag about the mythology stories to his playmates, with himself in the center of it all.