The Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters is really good and what we should have had from the start. It still has a lot of moments that aren't paced perfectly and some jokes that fall flat or emotional moments that are over-explaining the themes, but most of it is fallout from keeping into open to young kids. The actor for Percy struggles to hold down the weight for his role and it suffers a bit.
But they are many great bits to counterbalance them out. In particular every actor nails their role here and gives over a huge amount of complexity through relatively little screen time. Annabeth, Clarisse, Dionysus convey large chunks of books worth of character through a facial expression or a shrug. Pierce Brosnan has been replaced by Uther Pendragon from Merlin and is much better in the role. Luke is actually more menacing here than he was in the story.
Most of all it feels like the film is trying to build a world and the people are living in it. The film makers are actually examining the material instead of aping Harry Potter. A lot is changed about, but clearly with intent and if the details are wrong, the spirit is right. Some of the subtler themes about the unfortunate and the wrongdoings of the Gods actually come through.
Some of the CGI, particular the shots used in the trailers doesn't hold up but large parts of this film are beautiful and the settings are rich and suitably epic. For the most part the action is pretty good too.
...then there's the fifteen minutes at the end. They were clearly unsure if they were going to get commissioned to make a 3rd film. So they tried to make the 2nd book and then right at the end resolve all 3 remaining books in a way ambiguous enough that the last 5 minutes of the film can set up a sequel if they so choose. The way canon and film structure and themes are warped and twisted to try and get this to happen is completely hilarious. Luckily it's been designed so that it's also completely irrelevant and the rest of the film doesn't even reference those 15 minutes again, you can literally cut it so they never happened. It makes it easy to separate the moment of madness from what is otherwise a worthy film and I'm glad that they did decided to set up a sequel in those last few moments.
Sea of Monsters (film):This is what it should have been
The Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters is really good and what we should have had from the start. It still has a lot of moments that aren't paced perfectly and some jokes that fall flat or emotional moments that are over-explaining the themes, but most of it is fallout from keeping into open to young kids. The actor for Percy struggles to hold down the weight for his role and it suffers a bit.
But they are many great bits to counterbalance them out. In particular every actor nails their role here and gives over a huge amount of complexity through relatively little screen time. Annabeth, Clarisse, Dionysus convey large chunks of books worth of character through a facial expression or a shrug. Pierce Brosnan has been replaced by Uther Pendragon from Merlin and is much better in the role. Luke is actually more menacing here than he was in the story.
Most of all it feels like the film is trying to build a world and the people are living in it. The film makers are actually examining the material instead of aping Harry Potter. A lot is changed about, but clearly with intent and if the details are wrong, the spirit is right. Some of the subtler themes about the unfortunate and the wrongdoings of the Gods actually come through.
Some of the CGI, particular the shots used in the trailers doesn't hold up but large parts of this film are beautiful and the settings are rich and suitably epic. For the most part the action is pretty good too.
...then there's the fifteen minutes at the end. They were clearly unsure if they were going to get commissioned to make a 3rd film. So they tried to make the 2nd book and then right at the end resolve all 3 remaining books in a way ambiguous enough that the last 5 minutes of the film can set up a sequel if they so choose. The way canon and film structure and themes are warped and twisted to try and get this to happen is completely hilarious. Luckily it's been designed so that it's also completely irrelevant and the rest of the film doesn't even reference those 15 minutes again, you can literally cut it so they never happened. It makes it easy to separate the moment of madness from what is otherwise a worthy film and I'm glad that they did decided to set up a sequel in those last few moments.
It also contains a Firefly joke. Nathan Fillion ftw!