The Book and The Movie of
Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.” –Here is a line spoken by Percy Jackson, the main character of the series. Percy Jackson & the Olympians is a fantasy pentalogy. The first episode of the series-“The Lightning Thief”- describes the story that Percy Jackson, who was biracial of human and God, was framed as the thief who stole the lightning of Zeus. Percy went on a journey to prove his innocence and also met other Half-Gods like him. At the time when the movie version came out, faithful novel readers were surprised and looking forward to its new interpretation. Although the evaluation of the movie was too tragic to look at, it has plenty of differences to the novel. The differences in the plots, the characters, and the scenes in the movie and novel Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

First of all, a lot of plots from the novel are omitted or even changed, which is the most obvious difference between movie and novel. The plot in the book was set up step by step and brought the readers to experience the adventure and challenges with Percy Jackson. However, the main part of the movie described how Percy went on a journey with Annabeth and Grover, his partners from Camp Half-Blood, the place where all the Half-God trained.

Movie Poster of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Theif

They went through the whole U.S. searching for three pearls, which allowed them to escape from the Underworld. In fact, this part of the story only takes two pages from the novel. In addition, the scar of Luke, who caused the slander of Percy, has different origins in the movie and the novel. In the movie, Luke did not have a scar in the beginning, and it was later left by Percy with a sword. However, in the novel, the scar had already existed and was caused by a dragon attack. As a result, the movie merely includes a small part of the original story and the plots inside are not totally following the original novel.

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Secondly, the background and image of the characters in the movie are also different from the original novel. In the book, Percy was twelve years old, and so was Annabeth, but the two main characters in the movie were both sixteen. The image of other characters in the movie also showed differences. Take the main female character for example, Annabeth was original with curly blonde hair and with gray eyes, but she turned into iron-straight brown hair and blue eyes inside the movie. To sum up, the casting of characters did not completely correspond to the original novel and resulted in differences in the setting of the characters.

Annabeth in the movie

Lastly, mistakes pop up when it comes to the scenes of the movie. In the movie, Camp Half-Blood was shown with an exact entrance. In fact, the entrance to the Camp was the place where the boundary stretched, which means that there was no actual entrance in the novel. Besides, the same inaccuracy occurred to the position of the Camp. From the novel, it was located in a broad field. However, the Camp in the movie was in a dense forest instead. In brief, the scenes of the movie have many non-conformities to the original novel.

The entrance of Camp Half-Blood
in the movie

Since the plots, the characters, and the scenes are different from the book, the movie receives plenty of blame. Condensing a hundreds-of-page novel into a two-hour movie is not a simple task. Even though there are many dissimilarities between the movie and the original novel, the movie is not that worse for watching. However, the novel is more recommended if you want to experience the charm of Percy and the excitement of the adventures with Percy Jackson.