Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)
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Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters Movie Review
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is a 2013 fantasy film directed by Thor Freudenthal and starring Logan Lerman. It is such a mediocre adaptation.
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“What are you doing Jackson?
Don’t walk on my roof!“
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Young demigod Percy Jackson sets off on a quest to find the Golden Fleece. His half-brother Tyson and friends Annabeth and Grover join hands with him to help him find it. The titular book is so good and it was an improvement over the first entry. But the movies fared very differently. The first one was quite solid despite its numerous flaws while this one is simply bad and there is no getting around that.
There were so many things that went wrong here, which led to not only terrible reviews but bad box office numbers, which further resulted in the termination of this movie franchise. And nobody really can complain that it’s gone having in mind that they were going in such a bad direction. The worst offender is that ending where they put stuff that would happen in the later books and not only that, but they rushed it and it all felt miscalculated and just wrong. Basically they introduce a titan and Percy kills him way too quickly.
Another terrible thing here was the overreliance on action sequence and VFX. The film is so frenetic and so chaotic that it resembled a freaking Transformers movie at times. The book was wonderfully adventurous, but this adaptation was anything but that. It is too modern and frankly too dumb in its approach and execution. The special effects are rather weak in some instances with Tyson looking particularly atrocious, but it fared better with some other creatures and light shows.
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Speaking of Tyson, they really destroyed his character and the relationship that he has with Percy. That was the deepest and most endearing part of the novel, but here it was reduced to only a couple of muted sequences. Douglas Smith wasn’t bad or anything like that, but he simply did not fit the author’s vision of the character.
Logan Lerman is serviceable here, but Percy is rather bland as a character in these movies. His arc isn’t as strong as in the books and he just isn’t fun at all. Alexandra Daddario is pretty good as Annabeth, but the movie needed more of her. The same goes for Grover. Clarisse is actually a lot of fun and is almost as amusing as in the books, but the adult characters were all uninteresting with the exception of Nathan Fillion’s Hermes, who was a blast.
If there is one thing that Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters does right, it has to be the humor. It’s almost as good as it was in the source material and the new lines for the film were also rather solid and some even cracked me up. This irreverent, almost campy tone to the proceedings almost made the film bearable, but just almost. The dialogue is quite bad when serious while the overall plot as it was presented here was very weak. It needed a better director, stronger VFX team and people who knew what made the book series good in the first place, which surely wasn’t the action.
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Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is a very mediocre adaptation of a very good book. The second book was better than the original, but the opposite was the case with the two movies. While the irreverent, almost campy tone worked, most of the characters were badly handled, the story felt mediocre when told with so much action and the film relied too heavily on VFX, which themselves were rather poor. It’s a bland, messy sequel that deservedly led to the death of this franchise.
My Rating – 2.5
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