what's wrong with percy jackson

It seems I have been posting a lot of movie reviews of late...maybe because I'm back to putting the political part of my brain into my writing (particularly my TV pilot about war reporters, which I'm really excited about) which is where it clearly belongs. I swear I do have several "serious" posts in the works, but for now, you are going to hear about Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and why it sucked.

The full title of the film is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Rarely are you in a good place when your movie title contains both an ampersand and a colon. Percy Jackson is Hollywood's latest effort to find the next pre-awareness*-loaded young adult fantasy franchise megahit, as the decade of Harry Potter ticks rapidly to an end. The film is based on a series of books about a young boy who discovers the ancient Greek gods are real (and live above the Empire State Building, natch) and his mysterious deadbeat dad is actually Poseidon.

If this is starting to sound a bit familiar to you, you're not alone. A quick Google search will reveal there are plenty of similarities between Percy (short for Perseus, get it?) and a certain boy wizard. Troubled pre-teen boy named Harry/Percy with an abusive aunt and uncle/stepfather discovers he is actually a wizard/demigod, is whisked off to a magical school/upstate New York summer camp, and with his two best friends (one girl, one boy), goes on lots of adventures involving magic/Greek mythology. (In the books Percy begins his quest at age twelve; in the film he's been updated to about sixteen, unfortunately without the trade-off of better acting.)

To qualify as anything better than a glorified fanfic, Percy Jackson would have to bring something genuinely fresh to the crowded YA fantasy arena. I confess I have not read any of the books. But if there was anything fresh to be found in them, it has certainly been sucked out of this toothless, Disneyfied, paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. The film could have been salvaged from condemnation as a vapid Harry Potter rip-off by at least one of the following: a decent script, decent acting or decent directing. Unfortunately, epic fail on all counts.

After watching the bonus features on the first two Harry Potter Ultimate Edition DVDs, I have a little more respect for Chris Columbus as a director who is actually competent, if not particularly imaginative. Hence I must conclude that here he was just being lazy. Veteran actors deliver terrible performances. It's impossible to tell whether any of the young actors are any good, since they're all weighed down with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a childless forty-year-old who watched a few episodes of Hannah Montana. And as if the film didn't need any more strikes against it, it suffers from several of the crassest cases of product placement (and politician placement--listen for a lame Obama shoutout early in the film) in recent history.

But there are also deeper structural problems at work here. Percy's mom bites the dust early in the film, to which Percy has...no reaction at all. Come on! He never knew his dad, and his mom just got killed by a minotaur! (One review I read mentioned that the film never uses the word "dead" to refer to what happened to her, just "gone.") When it's revealed soon after that Percy's mom is not, in fact, dead, but a prisoner of Hades in the Underworld, Percy goes on a quest to save her. This video-gamey adventure plot could work just fine if the film had spent even one scene establishing any kind of genuine, loving relationship between Percy and his mother, but it does not. This leaves us with zero emotional connection to our hero and his goal. That's Screenwriting 101, folks! Even watching a guy fight a CGI hydra is boring when you don't care about what he's fighting for.

(For contrast, watch how masterfully the Harry/Sirius relationship is set up, cemented and then destroyed in just three scenes in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Good writing, good directing, good acting.)

The filmmakers also have to contend with the unfortunate reality that Greek gods do not make very sympathetic characters. They were, after all, the ancient Greeks' way of explaining a world that often seemed capricious and cruel. They fight with each other over trivial things and leave humans in the middle of it. They send mortals on pointless, impossible, obstacle-course quests for their own amusement. They fuck humans when they feel like it (often under circumstances of, let's just say, questionable consent, but you can bet that's been excised from the story) and leave the world littered with their abandoned children. In a time when single-parent families aren't the unmentionable disgraces they were once perceived to be, one can't help thinking that the demigods aren't really missing out on that much not being part of a nuclear family with these jerks.

We might not care so much about this if Percy himself was a compelling character. But he's a cardboard cutout of a teenager with all the emotional depth and complexity of a bit part from High School Musical 3. As a protagonist, Percy is utterly lacking in any of the qualities that make Harry both a likable hero and a believable teenager. Harry's stubbornness, his rage, his impulsiveness, his perpetual resentment of unearned authority, the intensity of the emotional landscape he and his classmates inhabit--these are all the things that make Harry Potter feel engaging and real.

One of JK Rowling's greatest gifts is that she understands children and teens on their own terms and takes their heightened and volatile emotional world just as seriously as they do. Maybe some of you out there had peaceful, serene, Ministry-approved childhoods, but for many of us, childhood was an intense, scary, confusing and sometimes traumatic time. Rowling takes that teenage feeling that the whole world is out to get you and projects it onto a universe where the whole world really is out to get you, and it works gangbusters.

I keep coming back to something Mel Brooks said when he spoke on campus last semester. (Yes, he was hilarious.) He talked about how good comedy is like bouncing a ball--to make something funny, you need to have something hard, serious, to bounce it against. I think good fantasy is like that too--you need to have a solid foundation of real stakes and real emotions to build it on. The best fantasy franchises to come out in recent years, series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, have, at their heart, real struggles, real danger, real fear, and real, flawed, human characters we can identify with and root for. Anyone who wants to learn from Harry Potter's success should take this lesson to heart, instead of merely casting around for available fantasy elements that are still in the public domain.

*Pre-awareness: a Hollywood term for the opposite of original content. An already-existing brand that can be turned into a movie. This can be a remake, a book, a TV show, a video game, a comic book, a toy, even a board game. Seriously. Google "Monopoly movie."