Previous live-action adaptations like the “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” films were met with extreme popularity and love. However, not all adaptations are met with such appreciation.
Case in point: the 2010 film “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief”, which attempted to bring Rick Riordan’s beloved book series to life, and while fun for children, critics largely dismissed it. In the new TV series adaptation on Disney+, however,12-year-old Percy Jackson’s journey of finding out that he is a demigod and trying to navigate the new world he is thrown into originates from a novel full of thrilling action, great characters and an amazing plot. Overseen by Riordan this time, one would hope that “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” would be an improvement on the 2010 theatrical release.
Everything about the show seemed to go perfectly with the books…at first, anyway. The cast, which includes Walker Scobell (“The Adam Project”) as Percy Jackson, Leah Jeffries (“Beast”) as Annabeth Chase and Aryan Simhadri (“Cheaper by the Dozen”) as Grover Underwood look as if they jumped right out of the middle-grade novels and came to life.
“Percy Jackson and the Olympians fully succeeds at bringing Rick Riordan’s books to life, from the cast to its visual style,” CBR critic Ben Wasserman said.
The long-awaited first episode was released in December of last year, and it was promising, but viewers were quickly met with disappointment when it was announced that the entire season would only last eight episodes with an average of 45 minutes per episode. With such a short run time, it quickly becomes frustrating that every exciting plot point is reduced to nothing but long monologues and excessive dialogue. In addition, the “epic” fight scenes last a good two minutes and seem to be filmed in slow motion, or maybe that’s just because they are so uninteresting.
Another confounding detail is that while Percy and his friends are new to the world of Greek mythology and inexperienced like the average child, they always appear to know what to do. For example, when they first meet Medusa, the original suspense about who she is and what she wants is quickly taken away because the cast of characters is already aware of the threat she poses. The exciting scenes of fighting spiders at a killer amusement park or the fun night at the Lotus Hotel and Casino both ground to a halt too only to introduce another long, boring conversation.
Throughout the show, the writers decide too often to spoon-feed the audience information by telling rather than showing it.
“I believe that the series had so much potential but ultimately did not live up to expectations of the viewers,” Melat Mezgebe (11) said. “The actors were well cast but the story pacing and CGI w[ere] not impressive.”
Maybe the books’ enjoyers are stuck in the past. You could say that change is good, but to change something so much as to completely take away what made it great in the first place just isn’t enjoyable. The excitement has been completely removed from its source material when it comes to Disney+’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians”. Every day it seems a live-action adaptation of our favorite book or animated series is greenlit, and more times than not it ends in disappointment. This onslaught of translating fantasy stories to live-action TV and movies also proves that we are not that advanced with technology because CGI is always lacking and looks cheap. The poor script doesn’t do justice to the characters, and the unnecessary changes just end up making the whole affair seem like a parody rather than what Riordan’s best-selling series deserves: a multi-million-dollar production.
