Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters review

Sigh.

I don't often sit down to watch movies that I know are going to annoy me.  I really don't.  But I was bored.  So I did.

I was annoyed.

The Percy Jackson series of books by Rick Riordan is a clever, interesting, and often fairly nuanced story that features the gods of Olympus in the modern world (hey, they're immortal, so why wouldn't they be around?).  They behave in quite mythologically recognizable ways, right down to the rather common habit of sleeping around with mortal women and creating half-blood heroes.  Percy Jackson is one of these heroes, the son of Poseidon.  We meet him at twelve, and stay with him through his sixteenth birthday, which takes place in The Last Olympian, one of the best story wrap-ups I've seen in these lengthy series.  So many series drop the ball and get weird or go off on un-set-up tangents (I'm looking at you, Dark Tower and Harry Potter).  But Riordan hits the target dead on, bringing in all the things he's brought up, working it into an interesting and emotionally satisfying climax that not only fulfills the plot, but nails down the theme.

But that's neither here nor there, since I'm not reviewing the books.  I am reviewing the movies that someone put the name of the books on.

I'm not talking about some minor tinkering that would only annoy hardcore fen.  The first movie, The Lightning Thief, had an entirely different plot from the book... and started Percy as a high school senior.  Now, I admit, I only went up through undergrad levels of developmental psych, but I'm pretty sure that a senior in high school is not going to behave in the same manner as a twelve year old, even if the plot calls for it.  In the process of this contrived new plot with same name (but totally different) characters, they also managed to forget to build in the things needed for the rest of the movies.  I remember thinking, "Well, at least they can't do any more damage."

Remind me not to tempt fate.

They managed to not only screw up the book canon, but to somehow or other mangle the internal movie canon further by trying to retcon things they needed into it.

Oh, and they also managed to soft-pedal things so much so that the book -- which was aimed at a younger audience (presumably, they made the characters teenagers to attract the older kids) -- was edgier than the movie they made from it.

I can't blame the actors.  I won't say the "young actors," because, though they are all playing teenagers, they are clearly twenty-something adults.  They do what they can with some utterly wretched dialogue.  (Definition of screenwriting FAIL: The dialogue would have been better if it had just been copy-pasted from the book.)  And hey,  nothing wrong with moving Anthony Head into the role of a hero's mentor, or Stanley Tucci as the god of wine (who manages to crack the one actually funny joke in the movie).  Nathan Fillion manages to get across at least some of the concern that Hermes is supposed to show for his son Luke, even though the movie inexplicably skips the fact that HE SENT PERCY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So I blame absolutely nothing on the actors.  The wretchedness of this adaptation is squarely on the heads of the behind-the-scenes people.  The casting director.  The producers.  And whoever may have cobbled together that "script."

Whenever people want to defend unfaithful adaptations, they love to say, "It's not about getting the exact text on screen, it's about capturing the spirit of the book!"  Fine.  I'll give you that.  Obviously, adaptations can't have everything.  Though, oddly, I find that the spirit is often caught better if the end product somewhat resembles the beginning product.

Sea of Monsters doesn't even make an attempt to capture the "spirit."  In fact, like Lightning Thief, it manages to entirely miss the point.  A major theme in SoM was the characters learning about their fatal flaws.  Annabeth faces her hubris, Percy, his impulsiveness, Clarisse, her pride.  Luke has already failed once against his wrath. A major theme in the movie is learning that they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggonit, people like them.  No, really, I'm serious.  They INVERTED THE THEME.  There was a major undercurrent in the book as well about what  heroes mean.  Chiron tells Percy that, as children of earth and heaven, heroes join the hopes of man to the realm of the immortals.  The movie?  Again, not so much.  The producers seem deeply uncomfortable with the philosophical underpinning of the stories.  The prophecy that drives much of the series is given, but then for some reason, a series based on Greek mythology decides that the important thing is to ignore the prophecy.  This is a thing that happened in this movie.  Because it's so totally in tune with the classical worldview espoused by the books. [/sarcasm mode]

And shall we talk dumbed down?  Again, recall that the movie is aiming for an older age group.  The book has a whole sequence -- which occurs before any explanation is given -- where Annabeth uses Odysseus's tactics against Polyphemus, telling him that "nobody" is back to torment him again.  Percy is able to sneak out under a sheep.  The references to the Odyssey are fast and furious.  At one point, in the lair of Circe, Percy is turned into a guinea pig.  The movie has Clarisse, daughter of Ares, mention that a boulder might by the one Polyphemus used to block off the entrance, and then it's dropped.  Really, it is.  I'm not making this up.  They're going through the flipping sea of monsters, dealing with Charybdis, fighting Polyphemus, and they managed to do it without a single wink and nod to the master.  The movie people assume the audience is much dumber than Rick Riordan assumes.

As a librarian, I can tell you... Riordan is closer to the mark.  Kids who read these books turn around and snap up mythology like crazy, and then get even more of what's going on.

And then, there are just the inexplicable things.  Why is there an amusement park on Polyphemus's island, name-checking Circe?  It has nothing to do with the Circe episode in the book, which is skipped entirely, or with the Circe mythology.  It's just there.  Doing a big fat nothing.  It doesn't even make for especially interesting visuals.  There's the decision to have Posiedon, Hades, and Zeus all have escaped Kronos's cannibalistic spree, and Poseidon killed him with the blade he gave Percy, none of which makes sense in the story, or in mythology.  And, by the way, Scylla and Charybdis, in this movie, are not anywhere near each other.  Do they really think viewers don't even know that much mythology?  Plus, better visual!  And what's with needing a satyr to sniff out the Golden Fleece?  Where on earth does that come from, and how in the world does it make sense?  This is where reading the book would have been helpful to the screenwriters, since it has a much more sensible explanation of why Grover is on that island.

I do not understand the choices made by the people who bought this property.  All of the books are pretty good movie length, the material lends itself to quotable quotes and funny scenes, there's plenty of action, and plenty of chances for good heartwarming moments and Dumbledore-explains-it-all moments.  They could have picked actors like the Potter franchise did and let them grow up with the characters.

Instead... this.

:grinds teeth:

Boredom and an insomnia lead to bad movie-watching decisions.  That's the only theme I got out of this evening's viewing.