Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters Review
Lina Benich ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Editor
If trying were succeeding, then Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters would be a hit. The movie is full of humor and heart, trying (perhaps a little too hard) to make the series the great franchise phenomenon of The Hunger Games or Harry Potter. The movie stars Logan Lerman and Alexandra Daddario, with a host of other co-stars, who collectively try to make this one better than the last. In 2010 the first of the book series’ adaptations, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, seriously underwhelmed fans and critics alike. Now three years later, Sea of Monsters is attempting to rethink the way they approach Rick Riordan’s young adult series, with mixed results.
That is the gist of the plot, but the first problem about this movie to arise is the story itself. It’s too bogged down with extraneous characters and subplots to keep everything straight. There’s a side note about prophecies and Annabeth’s dislike of Cyclops among other things, that give the characters more to work through but also pulls the audience in a hundred different directions at once. Often I felt I needed to see the movie three more times to understand all the different nuances and stories colliding.
This isn’t to say it wasn’t a good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The action sequences were fascinating (well worth the extra money for 3D, let me tell you), and the sweeping aerial shots blew me away.
Like Head and Tucci, Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Castle, and Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing) has a fantastic guest role as the messenger god Hermes. In Riordan’s spirit of reinventing Greek Mythology, the teens find him running a UPS Store. After the drama of the previous scene, Fillion brings his signature humor and swagger to the role, even sticking a Firefly reference, looking into camera as he does. That kind of self-aware or self-deprecating humor was prominent in the movie, and familiar to fans of the book who love Book-Percy’s sardonic sense of humor.
In the end, that’s precisely what Sea of Monsters achieved: a humorous homage to Riordan’s books. It’s an adaptation that takes you away on a grand adventure with the promise of many, many jokes. It is by no means a direct adaptation, and by no means a deep adaptation that pulls on your heartstrings, but it was humorous, action-packed fun.
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