Personally, I kind of enjoyed the first Percy Jackson movie. The tone pretty much reminiscent the eighties/nineties blockbuster, and then the likes of the big stars and the adventurous feel. Admittedly, it's still uninspired in the way it tells its story. The books, I bet, are obviously better, despite of not reading them yet. Now they continued the story in the big screen with Sea of Monsters. It's now in a whole new direction, the biggest difference is it added a lot of CGI and elevates the scale which may forget the uninspired vision of the first one, but those wonderful visuals hardly improves anything at all. The storytelling still relies on over explaining every detail the audience should know. There isn't much new about this sequel except its colors, but even all that are not enough to get this series any better.
The sequel easily forgets a lot of the first film's flavor and tries to make a new one. The film is now more interested in presenting the extraordinary elements of this fantastical world, inviting us to something bigger than what we could imagine, since this is what fantasy movies usually need. But further more, it suffers in storytelling. It is once again has the characters explaining stuff throughout their adventure, even the lessons they have to learn are suddenly burst out in the third act. I think that is what they normally do, which forgets to actually develop them. The overall journey is not really that compelling. It's just going one spectacular looking place to another, giving away facts to the heroes then proceed. It feels too easy for these demigods to walk along even at the most seemingly difficult situations.
Well, at least they tend to make the aesthetics look a bit better. They can still be generic, but in an eye candy way. These special effects really did a great job covering the laziness of depicting the plot, it's not much of a merit, but it's a sneaky trick the filmmakers have made. Also in the action scenes, it makes the audience think that a certain sequence is thrilling, which is actually not. The monsters are just large and scary, but there isn't enough suspense provided. The best thing I could say in this other than the visuals are the performances. The acting remains, but they are one of the charms left to keep this from being boring.
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is best at glossing things up. The effects made the film look adventurous although it's actually unexciting, and the stars' enthusiasm sort of helped these characters having some personalities than only yelling out information of the plot. In that case, the film can be mildly entertaining, but also forgettable. It's hard to say it's a completely bad film since it had some solid moments. It's a typical modern blockbuster where you will have to praise its technical achievements, performances, and nothing else. The only improvement we might've seen here is the visuals, though I hope everyone would realize that real magic is more than large scale and flashier CGI.
