No matter how hard a director tries, some books are better off staying books. When it comes to The Lighting Thief  by Rick Riordan, the film adaptation does a poor job of holding onto key pieces of the story.

After being kicked out of multiple schools, diagnosed with dyslexia, struggling with attention deficit disorder and having ‘hallucinations’ of terrifying creatures all by the age of twelve, Percy Jackson feels that he will never fit in with the world around him. That is, until he finds out he is the half-blood son of a Greek god. Once he discovers this, everything that made him out of place in the mortal world began to have an explanation. His hallucinations were not hallucinations at all, but Greek monsters that were being sent to destroy Percy as punishment for a crime he did not commit.

Zeus’ master lightning bolt has been stolen and all of the evidence points to Percy. No one will take his word that the bolt is not in his possession. To prove his innocence and stop a war between the gods, Percy and his friends, Grover and Annabeth, take a quest to find it and return the bolt before the summer solstice. If Percy and his friends fail, war will erupt between the gods and the fire will spread to the world of man.

When compared to the book itself, the film does not do the book justice. Many aspects of the characters and story were altered to adapt the book to a motion picture, aspects that could’ve been left alone and exactly like the book. One change was the fact that the actors who played Percy, Annabeth and Grover looked a lot older than twelve years old, which is their age in the first book in the series. Another irritating change is that in the film, Annabeth is depicted with dark brown, almost black hair though in the book, her hair is described by Percy as a golden blonde.

It’s understandable that some events that occurred in the story needed to be cut out for a smooth, reasonable run time for a film, but some key scenes that make the ending of the story somewhat resolved were cut, making it seem that the book itself had an abrupt ending. Now let’s be honest here, not everyone has read the book and then went to go see the movie, so knowing that that’s a factor for movie goers may give the story, in general, a bad rap.

In general, the Percy Jackson and the Olympians film didn’t hit all of the expectations that the book set, making it a lousy adaptation of the story.