“The Lightning Thief” has been compared to “Harry Potter” in several newspaper reviews. One even told Harry Potter to move over, because a fantastic new fantasy series was moving in. Well, the “Harry Potter” franchise has got nothing to worry about. “Lightning Thief,” to put it bluntly, was perfect. That is, perfectly awful. The movie made no sense at all, everything happened too quickly, and the main characters were terrible actors. It wasn’t faithful to the book in any aspect, and they left out too many important pieces of information to make a sequel. But we’ll see another one anyway, come 2012. “Lightning Thief” brings nothing new to the fantasy genre, and it puts the best-selling books to shame.
Only eight year-olds and younger could really appreciate this film, and even they couldn’t if they’d ever read Rick Riordan’s best-selling “Percy Jackson” books. The director, Chris Columbus, made the movie as though he’d just read a summary of the book on cliffsnotes.com. There wasn’t a single action sequence or plot device that didn’t in some way contradict the way it was written in the novel. They took out almost all of the good scenes from the book and stuck in exceedingly stupid ones that didn’t need to be there. The way the film progressed through the mess of a story was totally chaotic, and left its audiences with tons of questions that were never resolved in the end.
I still question the filmmakers’ casting choices. Logan Lerman was cast to play Percy Jackson. This would be okay under any other circumstances, but the problem is that he did a god-awful (no pun intended) acting job! When he discovers that his mother is dead, he just stands there with kind of an awkward smile on his face. As for Ron and Hermione -oops, I mean Grover and Annabeth- they were a little better, but not by much. At least the satyr provided plenty of comic relief. As for Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman, they played their parts well. But the other cameos were wasted on roles that allowed absolutely none of their acting talent to seep through. As for the inevitable sequel, I have just one thing to say. “Boycott.”
“The Lightning Thief” was definitely the worst movie of ‘09. It messed with the story so much that the book’s version and the film’s version didn’t seem to have any relation at all. Also, the main actors in the film were terrible. They rarely showed emotion of any kind, and when they did, it was just expressions of confusion. Overall, this movie is just pure Hollywood trash, and is not worth seeing at all. It only deserves 1 out of 10 stars.
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