A couple of weeks ago, my family attended an advance screening of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. Overall, we really enjoyed the movie. It was full of action, introduced colorful new characters and had an amazing ending that left us all anticipating the next movie in the series. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters opens in theaters today. If you haven’t seen the movie trailer yet, you can see it below:
As a mom of two sons, I’m a sap for stories highlighting brother relationships. In this movie, Percy finds out that he has a half-brother, Tyson, who is a Cyclops. Tyson is so sweet and excited to have Percy as a brother. While Percy isn’t too happy about the relationship at first, they bond as they go along on the journey together and fight to help one another survive. I really enjoyed that aspect of this movie.
My husband and sons enjoyed the action, fighting and monsters the most. However, my husband and oldest son both noted that the storyline strayed away from the book. (My son Michael has read all of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians books by Rick Riordan. Since he talked about them so much, my husband Reggie is reading through all of them now. I believe that he is up to book three now.) Although they both really liked the action that was included in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, they wanted to see more character development and more monsters.
Fortunately, I had a chance to participate in a group interview with Thor Freudenthal, the director of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, after we saw the movie and he addressed their concerns. (His response was more helpful than my, “It would be a gazillion hour movie if everything from the book was included!”) Below are three of the things that Thor Freudenthal said which helped to explain the differences between the book and the movie:
1. “Percy Jackson was even more challenging because the book is a sprawling, multi-hundred page epic. And in a two-hour movie, you can’t really do that. We had to sort of make really tough choices to keep the pace up and create a three act structure.”
2. “Since the story is about Camp Half-Blood becoming vulnerable, and the barrier of Camp Half-Blood being destroyed, that’s where we had to start our movie, rather than start it in school where the second book started and spend a whole lot of time there, which really wouldn’t have amounted too much in the movie. So, it’s fine in the book. But it doesn’t really help the general plotting of the story, which means we have to introduce characters differently and bring them to the table differently.”
3. “Now here’s another interesting thing about making a movie like this. Kronos is such a lingering threat throughout that we talk about him in the prophecy. Luke, the villain, talks about him. When you talk about a thing so much through your first and second act, you have to show it. If you talk forever about Kronos, and there’s no Kronos, it doesn’t really work as a one, two, three act. In a book, it’s fine because you’re closing a book and you’re looking forward to book three, and ultimately Kronos will appear… But for this movie, I felt that you needed a finale that delivers on the promise that the movie makes.”
In any event, you can’t please everyone completely, but I do believe that Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters will please grade school boys. It definitely pleased the three boys (my 6 and 9 year old sons along with their 10 year old friend) whom my husband and I took to the screening with us!
