A Book-to-Movie Adaptation Gone Wrong
When I was younger and had finished reading a great book, I always dreamed of seeing it become a movie. This desire to see the words come to life comes from wanting to share the story I read with others and to “geek out” with them about it. I knew that sometimes not a lot of my peers read the same things I did, but hopefully I could entice them into seeing the movie.
Movies based on books are multimodal by themselves because they are utilizing a medium, different than the one the story was created in, to tell that story.
There have undoubtedly been great book-to-movie adaptations in the past (Harry Potter immediately comes to mind), but this is not about the good ones. This is about how one adaptation shows that the stories presented in each medium are not always one-to-one representations.
Of course, I’m talking about the Percy Jackson movies.
Yes, it was eight years ago, and yes, I’m still not quite over it.
The novels were some of my all-time favorites growing up (and having recently re-read them, they still are) and I remember being ecstatic when the first movie was announced. I could not wait to see how the adventure would play out on screen, but I don’t think I realized just how much they were going to change.
I didn’t expect everything to stay exactly the same, in fact, half the fun of book-to-movie adaptations is seeing what they changed, for better or worse. Those changes are part of the multimodality of these kinds of movies, because the audience gets to see what looks better on the big screen and what has more impact when the simple words on the page conjure the images.
Ultimately, I have taken these two movies as a lesson. To be slightly wary of how my favorite stories are adapted, and that you can’t always judge a movie on its book.
