Percy Jackson and the Sea of
Monsters is like if some low
budget hack job from the days of Bruno Mattei were given $90 million
and told to make Harry Potter
2.5. Virtually nothing about the film is remotely original, nor does
it take any steps to hide that fact, the fact that the Percy
Jackson series is itself a
series of adaptations of the books with the same name
notwithstanding. The result is less a film than a formula for
instant film success.
The
film begins telling the story of three teens who – stop me if
you've heard this before – travel to a secret magical school, the
only place where they can be truly safe and learn to use the powers
they were born with. They are part of a hidden, magical world which
exists alongside our own but is completely invisible unless you know
the right way to look. While there, Percy finds out that he is the
chosen one, who is responsible for facing an evil half-blood and
either saving or dooming the world. From there the trio of heroes
call on a form of teleportation that is a cross between the
supernatural and the mundane, driven by an eccentric and featuring a
living prop. We've just managed to adopt the Harry/Hermione/Ron team
and the naming scheme from The Philosopher’s Stone (and
all of its sequels), the prophecy from Order of the
Phoenix, and the Night Bus from
Prisoner of Azkaban.
Later in the film, Harry Potter
fans will discover that Percy has found his own Neville Longbottom.
Besides the multitude of Harry Potter
references, the prophecies in this film are done in the same style as
Disney's Hercules, and
I actually found myself saying out loud at one monster “In its
belly you
will find a new definition of pain and suffering as
you are slowly
digested over a thousand years.” Seeing as how this is based on a
book series about introducing Greek mythology to new children, it
might be overkill for me to mention that the only reason I saw this
film was that it was a modern remake of Jason and
the Argonauts...except
only the MacGuffin itself was actually that.
Despite
being a piecemeal film cobbled together from bits of other stories,
Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters
does more right than I could have possibly guessed. Particularly of
note is the sense of scale. Rather than starting small and
progressing to physically larger spells the way the Harry
Potter series does, the
capabilities of these demi-gods are all of a much larger scale.
Their abilities range from summoning war-zombies from the Civil War
and powerful aquatic beasts to summoning powerful waves to
potentially capsize a yacht. Watching Percy Jackson working to
control massive waves of water has a mythic feel that I would
associate with what a superhero movie should be like – and one that
most superhero movies doesn't have. The fact that this exists
specifically to emulate Greek mythology only makes it better – it
says that this project knew what it wanted, despite not having any
original ideas of its own.
That
said, I'd be remiss if I left you thinking this film was perfect.
The “three heroes”trope is stuck to so hard that the film
switches out the third wheel not once, not twice, but three
times. It gets to the
point that whenever a new adventurer joins the party, you can assume
that something is going to to happen to somebody else in the group.
For all that the character group hearkens back to the trio that made
Harry Potter
so accessible, Percy Jackson
cut out one of the key elements of that formula: Hermione. Yes,
there's a girl, but she's not so much a nerd as...a girl. In and of
itself, including a girl who knows how to use a javelin and lends
support to the main character is not a particularly noteworthy
decision. Annabeth isn't a particularly good character any more than
she is a particularly bad character. This goes for almost everybody
in the film – Percy, Clarisse, Tyson – but doubly here, as she is
in some ways taking the place of the character who was the most
ground-breaking in Harry Potter:
the knowledge-obsessed nerd who learned to tone it down while
learning of magic and friendship. This isn't to say that the exact
same trope should be copied from franchise to franchise, but given
the choice between a complex, flawed, driven, intelligent character
and a character with no particular interesting qualities other than a
bias that she has a reason for and learns to see past at the end, I'd
go with a Hermione clone. It worked for My Little
Pony, didn't it?
I
said that “most” of the characters fall into this bland,
semi-interesting category. The one exception to this is Grover. I
could not stand this character. What is it with fictional universes
that need to combine all of the minorities into as few characters as
possible so everybody else can be your standard white male? I was
able to easily look past the “white, female and ginger” grouping
in Harry Potter,
if partially because I had never heard the word “ginger” used in
any way to describe a red-headed individual prior to reading the
Harry Potter
books, but that tendency has stepped up to extreme in modern days.
Gay superheroes are often minorities or ethnic in some way
(Spider-man, Bunker), and while I don't believe most
writers are intentionally writing them to say that “gay people
don't look like us”, it still embodies a disturbing trend to keep
as many characters “default” (straight white male) as possible
while still including an acceptable amount of tokens. In Percy
Jackson, the token
tends to shift from black satyr, to Cyclops, to militaristic
aggressive woman...let's not read to much into that last one and
treat it like the lazy, accidental symbolism it is, shall we?
Rather, let's look at the cowardly half-black man, half-goat comic
relief, and see where the real problem lies: lazy stereotypes
substituting for writing. Was Grover this bad in novel form? I'd
like to give Rick Riordan more credit for this, but that is only
because of my clinging to my last hopes that a shred of human decency
exists in the world than actually knowing anything about what the
novels are like.
Another
comment that I'm not sure whether to consider a flaw or not is the
fact that this film is clearly self-aware. Anthony Head plays Rupert
Giles, except as a centaur. Nathan Fillion plays a half-serious,
half-comic relief character, who gives a monologue about how “the
best show ever” was canceled. I enjoyed these things, but I had to
groan at the same time.
With
all of these elements, I would be hard-pressed to call Percy
Jackson and the Sea of Monsters
a good film, but I can certainly call it an enjoyable one. It has an
epic scale and borrows a lot of the ideas that made Harry
Potter fun. The
characters show some growth, which warms you up to them, and the
writers manage to restrain themselves from making the competitive
rival into a complete unbearable bitch a la
the anime version of Gary Oak. It's fun to sit back with a bowl of
popcorn and point out things that came from other movies, but
probably not worth shelling out $12 for a ticket and $15 for popcorn
and soda.
