Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Movies about books are never good enough; or, Seeing "The Sea of Monsters"

Yeah, it's been a while since I've been able to post anything - I'm glad for all of you who have stuck by me! :) Between a new day job and running my travel agency, life has gotten quite a bit more hectic this year.

But that definitely doesn't mean I've stopped reading! I still fit it in whenever I can. I might not quite hit my reading goal this year, but I've still stumbled upon some real gems that are headed toward a place in my top 7 list at the end of the year.

Anyway, so I'm one of those readers who totally goes to see movies based off books, knowing full well they will probably never live up to my expectations (I've stumbled upon only two that I really didn't mind - the Lord of the Rings series, and The Host). Yet I still want to go see them, mostly to tear them apart and decide what I liked and didn't like.

As book nerds know, recently the VERY long awaited second Percy Jackson book was made into a movie and released - and since the first movie was so utterly horrible that I didn't think they'd ever bother to complete the series, I bravely attended the movie theater on release day to see how they managed to pull off a second movie.

The good news is that they made up for some of the incredibly crucial errors and skipped characters from the first movie, like talking a little bit about Thalia and introducing (though totally butchering) Clarisse. But sadly, this movie still fell far, far... FAR... short of the book! They still skipped over some important plotlines (like Grover's search for Pan), and completely made up a bunch of stuff that apparently makes for a good movie but has nothing to do with the actual story. They also made up for the fact that it's been years since the first movie and now the characters are all quite a bit older by suddenly changing the prophecy to allow Percy to make it to 20 years old... TWENTY... to complete the prophecy!

I suppose if I hadn't read the books, maybe I would have liked this movie. But as a book nerd, I have to say that I still spent more time disliking all of the inaccuracies and fake stuff than enjoying the movie.

Oh well. Now it's off to prepare myself for the butchering of the next Hunger Games movie... ;)

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