Oh My Gods! A Review of Percy Jackson & The Olympians: the Lightning Thief

When I was in high school I took Latin. It wasn’t popular – our class was in a tiny stunted classroom that only fit about ten students comfortably. I’ll credit my teacher, Ms. Reed, with her imaginative and entertaining instruction, for inspiring in me a love for the language and the culture of the ancient Romans. It was in that little classroom that I and the other students learned about the gods, their dominance over humans and nature, their interbreeding and soap operatic dramas, their fantastical powers and shapes.

Over the years much of that knowledge has faded, but I can still figure out the meaning of a word by its Latin root, and what little I remember of the gods helps out in discussions with Kyle about planets and space. So I was eager to watch Percy Jackson & the Olympians: the Lightning Thief, sent to me by Fox Home Home Entertainment for review. I though it would be fun to watch it with Kyle, that he would enjoy the battles and special effects and learning more about the gods and their bad-ass powers, much cooler than those of a laser blaster, in my opinion. The story seems tame enough: a bummed-out high school kid discovers that he’s the son of a god. It’s very Harry Potter.

But.
Perhaps Kyle is too young, and I am too old. This movie seems aimed directly at the tween crowd, and since there are no tweens in the House, I’m afraid the allure of this movie was not evident to us. The acting, despite a cast of luminaries like Pierce Brosnan and Uma Thurman (who chewed on her scenery in her role as Medusa and bordered on lechery, if you ask me), was second-rate, but this fact might not bother a 10-year-old the way it bothered me. And the slow pickup of the film at the beginning would probably be fine for a 10-year-old but was much too much for my 5-year-old to sit through.

Alas, neither of us made it to the end of the film so we never found out who the Lightning Thief was. But don’t tell me here in the comments. You might ruin it for one of my readers.