Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
Director: Thor Freudenthal
Writer: Marc Guggenheim
Based on: Rick Riordan‘s novel
Sequel to: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Cast: Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario, Brandon T. Jackson, Douglas Smith, Leven Rambin, Jake Abel, Anthony Stewart Head, Stanley Tucci, Nathan Fillion, Yvette Nicole Brown, Robert Knepper, Grey Damon, Ron Perlman, Octavia Spencer, Craig Robinson

Plot:
After his success with Zeus’ lightning bolt Percy (Logan Lerman) has yet to have another big success, much to his chagrin and Clarisse’ (Leven Rambin) enjoyment. But then things get quickly out of whack: Percy’s half-brother Tyson (Douglas Smith), a cyclops, shows up. Camp Half-Blood is attacked by the not-dead-after-all Luke (Jake Abel) and its magical barrier starts failing. It’s Clarisse who gets tasked with finding the Golden Fleece to save the camp, but fueled by a prophecy Percy, Tyson, Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario) and Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) go on the same quest.

Sea of Monsters, much like the first film, was pretty nice the most time, but also ultimately not great or awesome. There is nothing really wrong with it and it did have a great supporting cast, but I didn’t connect with it all that much.

I thought that I hadn’t read the second book in the series. And I’m certain that I didn’t finish it but I must have started reading it because the beginning of the movie felt so utterly familiar to me. It made for a bit of a weird start into the film for me.

But I actually quite liked the beginning. That at first we got a perspective different from Percy’s and that then Percy is in such a different place than he was at the end of the first film – I thought that was a nice way to be able to utilize the same dynamic of the underdog achieving greatness, even though Percy was the hero before.

But what was more entertaining for me was to see the supporting cast. Not only did I not know that Nathan Fillion was in the film, which surprised me very pleasantly (and it also seems to be some kind of law that Nathan Fillion has to make a Firefly reference in everything he does. It’s probably in his contract), I had also forgotten about Stanley Tucci (finally Mr D. made an appearance!) and Anthony Stewart Head (who was the way better Chiron, imo). And to top things off, they gave us Yvette Nicole Brown, Octavia Spencer and Ron Perlman? Awesome!

And there were some really nice special effects – the steampunk bull, the hippocampus and Kronos all looked absolutely perfect.

While pretty much all the things (except Tyson and the conflicts surrounding Tyson) worked really well, it just never became actually really good. It always hovered around good enough. There just seemed to be missing some final ingredient.

Summarizing: nice enough.