Movie spoilers! Duh! Go to Ivy's post if you want a non-spoilery version. I need to rant, people. (If you just want to skip to my opinion, I'll write "Final opinion" and you can read the stuff below that without spoilers)
After 25 minutes of waiting around because Ivy was late, we went to have pizza. She's already told you that it took forever to cook, but she wasn't the one who went up and paid for it. It was far too expensive, and it wasn't that good pizza either. But it was fun to watch all the different ways everyone tried to choke down a slice of pizza in 2 minutes xD.
Getting to the movie… wait no I have to complain about how I got Slow Popcorn Lady and I didn't get into the movie theater in time to see the coming attractions. I was hoping to see a The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones trailer. Oh, well.
Anyways, movie starts. I remember it starts with a monologue from Percy about Thalia. That's different from the first movie, when it started with a great scene with Zeus & Poseidon, and you didn't see Percy until later. I'm not sure which one I like better.
Percy is apparently staying year-round at camp, something that is actually pretty important in the book. It kinda changes a bunch of things (namely, Tyson's entrance) but it's not that bad.
In the first big scene, there's this really cool thing that the campers are using for their competition. I don't know how to explain it, but it wasn't in the books and is actually pretty creative. What's not cool is that they immediately go for a cliché. Percy and Clarisse (who is much more awesome in the movie then the books, btw) are both looking like they're going to win, when some dumb camper gets himself into a stupid situation where he's hanging off the structure. Hence the cliché where Percy goes and helps the poor guy up and Clarisse (smirk and all) climbs to the top and wins. Cue sad music and tedious scenes of Percy feeling sorry for himself. Thankfully, Tyson chooses that exact time to come into camp and Percy gets a half-brother, startling him out of his self-pity.
The next day, well, I'll let Clarisse tell you: "Barrier action!!" (You have to picture Clarisse with a huge excited smile :P ) All the campers rush towards the barrier, but the barrier action isn't barrier action anymore as the Colchis (probably spelled that wrong) bulls bust through the barrier and attack the camp. So, the campers—wait for it, wait for it—the campers scream at the top of their lungs and run away. These people are TRAINED WARRIORS, but they're running like little children. Seriously? How did these guys cope before Thalia's Pine came along?
So fight scene with a fire-breathing bull. You probably think it would be awesome, right? WRONG. imo, worst scene in the movie. Completely ridiculous fighting. Clarisse and Annabeth, the camp's two best fighters, can't do anything to the bulls. Tyson gets BBQ'd while Clarisse looks on dumbly. Percy gets cornered by a bull. He then throws Riptide into the bull's mouth and (in slow motion!) it expands into a sword and hits just the right spot to make the bull explode. Um. Cheesy much? Cue appearance by Luke, who's only real purpose is to inform Percy there's a prophecy about him.
Percy talks to (a recast) Chiron who tells him to go to the Oracle. There's a nice touch where Chiron says the line from the books about how they'll talk if he's still sane when he comes back. The Oracle provides a chance for the movie to insert some mythology, which is pretty fun, but then it starts spewing a nonsensical mash-up of the Great Prophecy and the prophecy for Clarisse's quest, which is just confusing and not helping with the "sticking to the story" idea.
Meanwhile, Annabeth is apparently searching WikiMagicalObjects on her iPad to find something to help Thalia, and she comes up with the Golden Fleece. There are a few fun scenes where Dionysus dismisses the idea and then presents the whole camp with the idea, telling them that he thought of it.
For a while, the story goes along kind of close to the book. It manages to switch the order of a the scenes but still pulls off showing all of them. The hydra was already used in the first movie, but there's still a coffee shop (not called Monster Donuts, unfortunately) with those multi-handed creatures. Also, Grover is kidnapped by Luke's cronies in the middle of the movie instead of being lost in the beginning. There's a scene with the Gray Sisters which is really fun, Nathan Fillion has an AWESOME cameo as Hermes (there's even a reference to one of his old shows, Firefly) and Luke has a great one-liner on the Princess Andromeda. (Clip: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMwl0-YVlM&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7RMwl0-YVlM )
Differently from the book, they get swallowed up by the mouth in the water (I forgot what the name was). The mouth's stomach is surprisingly well-done when I was expecting horrible special effects. They meet Clarisse's boat of zombies, and in a scene that gave me extreme deja vú of a scene from The Chronices of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader they awesomely bust out of the stomach.
Circe's spa isn't in the movie; it's replaced with an abandoned amusement park where Polyphemus hangs out, called Circeland. Grover is there, dressed as a female Cyclops, which looks as hilarious as you thought it would look like when you were picturing it as you were reading the book. The trio, Tyson, & Clarisse fight Polyphemus in a really really good scene.
Of course, Luke & his cronies are right outside of the cave. They steal the Golden Fleece, push Tyson off a cliff (?) and capture the trio and Clarisse. This is where it starts to be different from the book. In the book, Blackjack is on the Princess Andromeda and the questers use him to escape. In the movie, Kronos's remains are right there and the Golden Fleece manages to bring him back. Okay, it's not that far from the book, as Luke planned to use the Fleece on Kronos anyway. But the stupid thing is that the Lord of the freakin' Titans is ridiculously easy to beat. Percy uses Riptide (which is apparently the "cursed blade" from the prophecy) to whack Kronos to pieces.
After Kronos recedes to his coffin, Annabeth rushes forward in happiness. She then acheives her sole purpose for being in this movie at all—getting stabbed in the back by a giant scorpion. Percy is busy hugging Tyson who's magically come back from the dead. After he finishes with that, he goes to her side, says a bunch of corny, cheesy stuff, and then puts the Golden Fleece on her to heal her. So, the daughter of Athena (the goddes of battle) almost gets killed because she forgot that there was a giant scorpion next to her... Can someone explain this logic to me??
Anyway, happy ending. Clarisse puts the Fleece on the roots of Thalia's Pine, and the barrier goes back to full strength.
The final scene is in the morning, not the middle of the night, so Percy is eating —asdfghjkl— CEREAL!!!! (That's an inside joke :P ) Anyway, Percy is eating his CEREAL when Grover yells and brings him to the pine, and Thalia appears, and she says "My name is Thalia. I'm the daughter of Zeus.", and fade to black.
Some thoughts:
• No "Seaweed Brain", huh? :(
• A lot of critics said that Logan Lerman did a good job acting but I kind of disagree. None of the main trio is that great of an actor. Chris Colombus said that he didn't want to cast twelve year-olds because it would be too hard to find good ones. Um, you couldn't even find good 25 year-olds!!! Actually, I thought the standout actor/ess (other than Nathan Fillion =P ) was Levin Rambin as Clarisse (who, in case you didn't notice, was also Glimmer in The Hunger Games).
• Luke had all the good one-liners in this movie.
• Annabeth, did like nothing. That was a disappointment.
Final opinion:
The movie was definitely better than The Lightning Thief. It was a lot better if you count that it had to make up for the mess that the first movie created. It stayed truer to the book, and the only hu-uge mistake was messing up the prophecy, but that's kinda better than having no prophecy!
Final score: 8.7 out of 10
Sorry, this was kinda longer than I expected. I'm going to do this again with books that I read, but I probably won't be as in depth as I just was. This was a special occasion.
– Nick
No comments:
Post a Comment