Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

I have to admit, I am a pretty big Percy Jackson fan.  I loved (read: obsessed) over the books when I was younger and was so excited when the movies came out, especially with one of my current favorite actors, Logan Lerman, as the lead. Last year I was a little disappointed with the movie because it was so different from the book, but as a movie itself it was pretty good.  So I was really excited to see this next movie, especially because this book, Sea of Monsters, was my favorite in the series.

Now, let me just start off this review by putting this out there: I am not even going to go into comparing this to the book, because it would take the entire review to say what the movie left out in the plot and the characters and their development.

That aside, I am going to talk about movie itself and what I thought of it.

First off and most importantly, it was very poorly written and the direction was lacking.  The poor writing was clearly shown in the movie's development - the opening seemed excessively long and the adventure it had been leading up to seemed, well, uneventful, while the ending also was excessively long.  It felt as though the movie's purpose had just been to cram as much action as possible into a two-hour long slot, whether or not it would make that much sense in the overall arch of the story. This intent made it impossible for the interesting, clever mythology-based subplots that were in the last movie to be there at all.  This endless stream of action also did not help the already very flat characters.  There wasn't really time given to get to know the characters in the blur of action, and the lack of shape in the plot was also apparent in the characters, particularly Clarisse.  Leven Rambin did make the absolute best of what she was given as that character, but there really wasn't a lot that she could do.  The same is true for Lerman, who can really thrive as the lead in a movie, like he did so amazingly in Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Lightning Thief, had he had the time to actually be a character instead of just a fighting machine. Jake Abel's character, Luke, also could have been a very flat, average villainous character if it weren't for his great acting. Hats off to Abel and Rambin for being such a great actors under such poor directing, especially when Rambin herself seemed pretty miscast in the first place.

Apart from those issues, the movie itself was pretty fun to see.  The same goofy humor in the last movie was still somewhat there, and it was not bad if you want to take your little brothers and sisters to see.  (Besides, Logan Lerman isn't exactly hard to look at for a few hours.)  But if you are going in search of a really good new action movie like the Hunger Games or Harry Potter, this isn't the place to be.  Let's just sit and wait for Divergent with our fingers crossed instead.