MoviesMoviesThe second season of the ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ Disney+ series will adapt the same book that spelled disaster for the film series 12 years ago. Luckily, doing a better job won’t be a tough task.
We’ve all been guilty of initially judging movies too harshly. In the era of crafting the perfect Letterboxd review and obsessively refreshing Rotten Tomatoes scores, it can be hard to truly appreciate good cinema. It also doesn’t help that top-level executives would rather you scroll through a never-ending waterfall of content than venture out to your local theater.
So in the spirit of revisiting something with fresh eyes, I decided to rewatch Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, the second movie in the Logan Lerman-verse that likely could have seen Rick Riordan’s series filling the massive hole that Harry Potter left when its film adaptations concluded in 2011. Sea of Monsters wasn’t a total disaster at the box office (though it was a significant decline from the first movie), but a combination of bad reviews, poor fan reaction, and the actors getting too old to still pass as teenagers would ultimately sink the series. And further film adaptations were shelved before even making it halfway through the book series—each movie was set to follow one of the five books in the series, but things got a little mangled, as we’ll explore later. Thankfully, the television version of Percy Jackson and the Olympians has fared far better, and with the second season—which premiered this week—also adapting Sea of Monsters, we thought it’d be a perfect time to revisit the forgotten oddity that director Thor Freudenthal and writer Marc Guggenheim gave us 12 years ago.
Is this movie wildly flavorless and mostly unfunny? Yes. Does it take wild liberties with the book in order to cram some additional CGI set pieces into the film? Also yes. But for now, let’s reach out to the water, close our eyes, concentrate really hard, and hope this is all over soon.
The Opening Sequence
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: If you’ve read the books, you’re probably not going to like this movie. I can see why Riordan decided it was probably better to not continue the franchise. (Aging the characters up in the first place was so egregious that it should get its own section, but let’s stay on topic and talk about the plot and its inconsistencies.)
The first change from the novel is that Percy now lives at Camp Half-Blood full-time instead of just in the summer, which robs us of the book’s opening set piece where Percy meets his half-cyclops brother Tyson while playing dodgeball against cannibals. You’re telling me you’d rather watch the Capture the Flag competition that looks like a weird combination of a tough mudder and a Gladiator II reenactment? By the time we got to the Fall Out Boy needle drop, I was very close to exiting out of Disney+ and making better life decisions.
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat
Alas, I plowed on and was confronted with even more baffling changes. Grover isn’t captured by Polyphemus, but rather taken by Luke and his goons in Washington, D.C., which cuts out the psychic connection that the satyr and Percy have in the books. This leads us to the Princess Andromeda, which resembles a small luxury yacht rather than a massive cruise ship. A vessel that’s intended to carry several demigod defectors and Kronos’s coffin looks more like a ship that would be embarrassed to see itself on Below Deck. Worst of all is Percy reaching out to the water like a Jedi trying to summon the Force and creating a big-ass wave that … does not look good. Bonus points for letting Luke, a son of Hermes with no water powers, also ride the wave and giving us this shot. 10/10, no notes Mr. Freudenthal
Belly of the Beast
Please join me in the Charybdis Science Corner for a second. Our heroes have been eaten by the infamous sea monster and run into Clarisse: demigod daughter of Ares; foil to Percy; and current captain of the CSS Birmingham, a former Confederate ship, along with its undead crew. What are a group of demigods and zombies—excuse me, “dead soldiers who have given their lives in tribute to Ares”—to do but shoot their way out of the monster’s stomach?
Now I know what you’re thinking: Wait, aren’t they underwater? Like, presumably several hundred feet underwater? They sure are! But they’re in something like a submarine, right? Well, since the U.S. didn’t really start using submarines until the early 20th century and likely would not have needed them for a domestic war, it’s safe to say this Confederate ship is not a sub. So the plan is to put everyone below deck except the son of the sea god and Clarisse and then to shoot their way into the ocean and just magically float to the surface? That’s what they went with, yeah. Is Percy—the son of the literal god of the sea—helpful during any part of this? He tells Clarisse, very helpfully, to “GO!” while they make their escape and then just kind of cowers in the corner while the ship makes its way to the surface. Is any of that in the book? You know the answer to that question already.
More on ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’
More on ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’
We’re Going to Circeland
This franchise really loves an abandoned amusement park. Among all the small changes that turned the fan base against this movie, its greatest sin might have been creating an abomination that should have been sentenced to Tartarus.
After the “kids” escape Polyphemus’s lair with the golden fleece, they are ambushed by Luke and his goons, who want to use the fleece’s power to bring Kronos back to life. In the books, you don’t see Kronos rise and take a human host until the fourth installment, but Freudenthal might have seen the writing on the wall about this series’ future and decided to go for broke.
What that means in this context is portraying Kronos as a giant devilish monster that kind of looks like if Mephisto and the skeleton from Zac Brown Band’s concert at the Sphere did the fusion dance. This movie is absolutely full of CGI nonsense, but this truly takes the cake. Did anyone ask for this? (I guess Luke did, but he gets eaten shortly after his master’s rebirth, so his opinion can be safely ignored.)
While Kronos’s various parts fly around the screen like a scene from Twisters, we are treated to Lerman climbing on one of those floating parts and stabbing Kronos in the heart, sending him back to his coffin. Nothing to see here, just one of the strongest beings in the known world being undone by a teenager with a cursed blade (that isn’t even the real cursed blade) in three minutes of screentime. When it’s that easy, I guess there’s no reason to keep the franchise going, huh?
The Wardrobe Department
Finally, just a quick little aside here. Why do they have Luke and his demigod traitors dressed like they’re bad guys in Charmed? Are you telling me that I’m supposed to be afraid of this guy?
I’d also like to subtract points for this era of fashion in general. Look what they have my protagonists wearing, dawg. No one outside of Jennifer Lawrence wants to return to the fashion of 2013. I will, however, add points back for the fun little shirts and wig that they put Stanley Tucci in.
Admittedly, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters could have been much worse—hell, there’s an argument for making it worse so it could enter the rarified air that makes something like Sony’s superhero movies so fun to hate-watch. But a film with bad CGI, some bizarre dialogue—except from you, Nathan Fillion, you’re perfect—and a weird obsession with trying to make nectar seem like coffee isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. In the end, all of its shortcomings ended up turning off potential new fans while also alienating the loyal audience that the books had cultivated, and that was enough for Riordan to “[write] off Hollywood for a long, long time.” The streaming series, thankfully, has avoided these problems and is already off to a great start. Here’s hoping that we never see a large, poorly rendered Kronos invade our television screens anytime soon.
Kellen Becoats
Kellen Becoats is a fact checker based in Brooklyn, New York. When he isn’t complaining about the Bulls’ incompetence, he can be found (loudly) advocating for women’s sports.