The Gaming Den

How faithful of an adaptation is the movie of the book? I just watched the movie, and if they're anything alike, the books should just be called What If Rick Riordan's Retarded Kid Had Superpowers.

Psychic Robot wrote:How faithful of an adaptation is the movie of the book? I just watched the movie, and if they're anything alike, the books should just be called What If Rick Riordan's Retarded Kid Had Superpowers.

I have neither read the books nor seen the movie, but I understand the books are good enough that if they hadn't fucked up the movie so bad, it probably would have be an extremely profitable franchise. From what I gather, people who like the books hate the movie with a passion.

I didn't see the movie, but I did enjoy the book a fair amount.

So the levels of Mary Sue in the books are acceptably low?

Yeah, the books aren't bad. I've read them all. Hell, I found them good enough to own.

Okay, here's the deal in the books:

All the demigods inherit something of their parents' domains. This really is where the movie pissed me off--all the people are the camp acted identical. The book's reflects the Greek Pantheon some--a wildly different bunch of people who argue a lot, but more or less live with each other. It also really lost a lot of the identity there.

The reason the children of Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon are...worrisome, is their fathers have quite a lot of power going, and some of it goes down to their kids.

So, while Percy has a good variety of teh Superpowers relating to water, the movie handles them considerably less well than the books. He's also a lot more entertaining in the books. The guy in the movie is a lot more of straight man, where in the books...well, none of Percy's crew has their head on completely straight.

Also, the plot was really butchered. I have no idea how they're going to fit Kronos in, since he should have been introduced pretty close to the start.

It helps the books don't take themselves seriously. I mean, here's the official art for Poseidon in Percy Jackson:

http://www.rickriordan.com/wp-content/u ... seidon.gif

He really does show up, in the text, in clothes like that. And in Bermuda shorts and sandals. His throne looks like a deep-sea fisherman's swivel chair.

Hades complains about how the population explosion has forced him to keep expanding the Underworld (which, by the way, isn't portrayed as straight Hell. it makes a point to describe the three different areas).

Ares tends to go around looking like a biker because he gets a kick out of it.

The movie took a lot of the goofing around out of the books, and therefore, a lot of fun/redeeming value.

I read the series and enjoyed it.

The little kid insult pet names the gods/demi-gods have for one another grated on my literary nerve.

Hades gets called "Corpse Breath".
The son of Poseidon gets called "Seaweed Brain".

Really annoyed the shit out of me, but it was overcomeable because the series as a whole were pretty good stories.

Game On,
fbmf

AND ANOTHER THING

The way they handled Annabeth in the movie pissed me off.

In the books, sure, she's the daughter of the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy. She does a lot of the plans

(Pretty sure that's a nod to a Greek myth where Poseidon and Athena cooperated; Athena made the chariot but there was no creature suitable to pull it, so Poseidon made the horse for her. It's a recurring theme: Annabeth does the planning/thinking, and Percy supplies the muscle to help it move along. Neither would get it done without the other). There's a lot of quiet nods to the myths that aren't explicitly spelled out until you think about them a minute.

but Athena's also the goddess of handicrafts. Annabeth likes monuments and architecture and making things. She's made it clear she wants to be an architect. When they have to do one of their cross-country trips, she asks they make pit stops to check out stuff like the St. Louis Arch.

Okay, sounds like the movie just sort of shat on everything then. I was really quite annoyed when the demigoddess of wisdom and battle got her ass kicked by the hydra while Percy Sue basically soloed it.

It's like the Golden Compass all over again!