Tuesday, August 13, 2013
The sequel to 2010’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was a long time coming. The Sea of Monsters is an action-packed adventure that is fun for the whole family, that is, if your entire family is twelve years old. Yeah, it’s a kids movie, like the first one was, but it’s still fun to see the characters return to the big screen, along with a few new additions. Read on to find out more about the movie while I break it down.
First, let me address the fact that this movie almost shouldn’t have happened. I mean, I really wasn’t expecting it to. The studio really dragged their feet to green light the sequel, but I can understand if they had trouble lining up people to work on it. Chris Columbus dropped the franchise after directing the first movie, which kind of annoys me. Is it too much to ask for a little follow-through? He seems to like to start franchises and then hand them off to other people to continue, and yes, I’m talking about the Harry Potter films as well, the first movies of which he directed.
Getting back to the interesting delay between movies, it’s no secret that when it comes to movie series with adolescent stars, you have to move fast, before the kids turn into adults. In my opinion, if they really wanted to make this movie, they should’ve started filming the day after the premiere of the first movie. Why they waited so long, I’ll never know. You see, the Harry Potter timeline got me very accustomed to a particular timeline: every HP book and movie took place over a year, so seven books meant seven years, and each book was guaranteed to start and end during the summer. The Percy Jackson series is not the same. In this series, book one takes place in the summer, book two in the fall, book three in the winter, etc. In other words, they have even less time than the HP movies, because Percy Jackson and his friends are only meant to age a half-year over the first three movies. They managed to get around the problem in a clever way. You see there’s a prophecy (isn’t there always?) about Percy which says that he will do something by his sixteenth birthday. The book says sixteen, but in the movie, they changed the age to twenty. Twenty! In other words, they left themselves plenty of room to make more movies in the future without worrying about how old the actors look. Okay, enough of my complaining.
So how was the movie? In general movie terms, it was okay, nothing special really. In fact, I rate it pretty much the same as I did the first movie. They changed things around, beefed up the plot, made it more actiony, everything you’d expect Hollywood to do. Be that as it may, there were a surprising number of elements from the book that were included in the movie. Such elements include Tyson, Mr. D, Thalia, Clarisse, the Spirit of Delphi, the Grey Ladies, Hermes and his Caduceus, the hippocampus, and the civil war boat. I don’t expect you to know what the significance of these things are if you haven’t read the book, but suffice it to say that seeing these things on the screen after reading about them made the movie much more enjoyable than it would otherwise have been.
So, how were the actors? They were all right. Pierce Brosnan failed to return as Chiron the centaur, but Anthony Head filled his horseshoes easily enough. Other notable performances came in the form of Stanley Tucci as Dionysus and Nathan Fillion as Hermes. Both of them were quite funny. Then there’s Logan Lerman. This kid is a great actor, he really has talent, and even though Percy Jackson isn’t necessarily a character of great range, he hits his mark perfectly every time. By the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, I recommend checking out his amazing performance in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And despite the huge break between films, he still looks young enough to be a teenager, though he is actually 21 years old.
A word on Annabeth. There’s no explaining her change in appearance between movies, except that they decided to actually make her look like she’s described in the books instead of what they went with in the first movie. Her character also changed slightly between films. She used to be really good at swordplay, a very aggressive fighter, but in movie two, she took on a much more traditional female lead persona. It seemed like in the action scenes she mostly just ran away while Percy lured the bad guys away from her. Speaking of action scenes, is anyone else sick of fake deaths by main characters? I mean, they’re a main character, and it’s only the second movie, and it’s a kids movie, so you know they’re not actually dead. This movie managed to do that not once, but twice with different characters.
Soundtrack was meh. Cinematography was meh. Some of the set pieces were fairly impressive, including the climbing tower, the big house attic, and the cave of Polyphemus.
Predictably, my favorite part was the appearance of Thalia Grace. You may remember from my post about the Percy Jackson book series that Thalia is my favorite demigod, and her storyline in this movie was, I think, the best part of it. It really gave the plot some depth, some meaning.
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So overall, okay movie, nothing special. Really it’s only worth seeing if you read the book, or if you really enjoyed the first movie. Then again, we’re not all twelve years old. No word yet on if book 3 will be adapted for the screen, but like I said, they left themselves room to continue the series, so it’s a strong possibility.
Story: 4/10
Acting: 4/10
Mise-en-scène: 5/10
Cinematography: 3/10
Soundtrack: 1/10
Score: 3.4/10
