Olympic Failure:
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Lightning Thief, is a movie that starts off with an interesting premise, but quickly degenerates into a boring mess of modernized versions of various unclearly linked Greek myths.
The story begins with our hero, Percy Jackson, who lives with his kind mother and abusive step father. He is struggling in school because of what he believes to be dyslexia, but it is actually his innate ability to read ancient Greek. This seems like a lame power, and it pretty much is. Although this power does come in somewhat useful a couple times his most useful power is probably his ability to heal by absorbing water. He has these powers because he is a demigod, specifically a son of Poseidon. The movie details that it is rare for a demigod to be born to any of the three brothers, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. However if you look at Greek mythology it was believed that none of these gods had any problems sleeping with mortals so this comes off as confusing.
Actually, this movie’s biggest flaw is that it struggles in the area in which it should shine. I felt it should have stuck true to the feel of the hero mythology without going out of it’s way to throw in references to anything and everything from various hero myths. For example, although it is clear that Percy is meant to be identified with the hero Perseus, he ends up fighting a minataur, which in mythology was fought by Theseus. Other elements taken not from the myth of Perseus include; meeting Chiron the centaur, fighting a hydra, encountering lotus eaters, fighting a fury, and traveling into the underworld.
Also I found it strange how the characters in the movie knew vastly less about Greek mythology than I did. It took them ages to figure out what kind of monsters they were fighting. Percy was especially hopeless as he made the classic error of trying to kill the hydra by chopping it’s heads off. This incident made him look like a fool. All the events that referenced specific myths seemed forced, and the movie also committed the cardinal error most movies encounter when trying to portray Hades. Hades just comes off like Satan in this film, which completely undermines any respect I might have had for it trying to use Greek mythology in a new way. Both Hades and the Underworld in the movie look more like Satan and Hell than really ought to be tolerated by anybody with a decent background in Greek mythology. Overall though the movie had a good beginning, which was well paced, introduced all the important elements of the story, and captured my interest at the start, in the end it failed to produce little more than a shoddy, mangled, tedious re-hashing of myths I already know so well I could recite them better than the characters.
This movie ultimately fails because it falls into a straight re-telling of specific myths without adding anything truly novel to them, while at the same time straying so far from the core of Greek mythology that it becomes a painful exercise in finding inconsistencies for fans of Greek myth, and will confuse those not familiar with the source material.
