Chris Columbus is a Hack.

Just saw Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (The Movie).  Read the Book about a month back.  Was the book perfect? By no means.  It had its problems, inconsistancies, and supported that upstart Dionysus as a legitimate member of the Olympian 12.  Still, it was the story that its author, Rick Riordin, intended to tell.  Which begs the question, "What story was Chris Columbus, director of the movie, trying to tell?"

Whatever the answer, it certainly wasn't the same as the Author.  So often, book adaptations take liberties with the source material, sometimes for pacing, sometimes because what works for the written word doesn't work on the screen, sometimes to make a more exciting product.  Still, I've never seen so many divergences from the source material in a movie based on a major piece of fiction.  And most of them seem arbitrary, pointless, or even counter to the the themes of the novel.

I'm all for making exciting movies, and I'm all for adaptations, and I do acknowledge that sometimes directors and adaptors can improve the source material.  Certainly, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the Movie is a better story than the Novel and Oh Brother is more fun than the Odyssey.  And my favorite Novel and favorite Movie are both Dune, even though the movie is wildly divergent from the book.  But still.

It ranges from little things such as Annabeth (the female lead) who in the book is a honey blond and in the movie is a brunette (something Hollywood could easily have attended to), to not so little things such as the moving of the Hydra Battle from book 2 to book 1.  Subplots and background elements (such as Annabeth's history with Luke and Ares hatred for Percy) are lost, probably for pacing, but their removal leaves most of the characters shallower than they need to be.  Annabeth is reduced from an interesting character to little more than the love interest.  Half a dozen characters are removed: Kronus, Dionysus, Clarisa (Daughter of Ares), Ares, Aphrodite, the Oracle, and Echidna.  Three Monsters are eliminated: The Chimera, Procrustes, and Cerberus.  Percy and Annabeth are aged from 12 to 16 or so.  The magical shield which in book three is a gift from Percy's brother is coopted as a gift from a fellow camper.  Greek swords are depicted as having crossbars.  The three magical pearls which were a gift to Percy from his Father (The sea god) are assigned to Persephone.  Even the plot recieves major hacking, with Hades made the bad guy (as opposed to another victim of the Lightning Thief as he was in the book.) and the roadtrip changed to more of a treasurehunt.

But most of all, the biggest change was the replacement of greek and roman themes with christian ones.  Hades is depicted as a beast of fire, served by hellhounds, living in a realm of fire and suffering called Hell.  This differs wildly from the book, which depicts the Underworld as a place of darkness, with suffering only taking place in "Punishment" and the rightous rewarded with joy in "Elysium"... as matches the greek vision.  Hell, a name taken from Norse Mythology, and the vision of burning fire, taken from Revelation, do not fit with the Chithonic Underworld.

So, although PJ&TLT is an enjoyable enough movie, I have to give it a 1 out of 5 for being a bastardized, christianized, sissified, lousy ass adaptation of a relatively good book.