All Greek to Me

So that's why I'm having such a hard time appreciating today's movies -- my brain is hardwired for ancient Greek. Okay, it is not but after the many times I have read Bulfinch's Mythology as a kid and watched the original Clash of the Titans as an adult, one would think it would be.

In any event, since I am a hardcore mythology buff I was really looking forward toward seeing Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and I am glad that I recently got the chance to see it. But I must confess I had mixed emotions about the movie. On one hand, enough of the action sequences worked that I feel silly pretending that I had a bad time watching the movie. But the setup for those action sequences -- ay, Dios! The filmmakers made it seem so obvious that they were only marking time till the next action sequence that I wondered why they bothered.

Director Chris Columbus -- the director of this movie -- apparently wanted to make another Harry Potter movie -- which explained why so much of this movie plays like a thinly veiled Harry Potter movie. Now I understand that Harry Potter movies are hot right now but not everyone who goes to the movies nowadays wants to see a Harry Potter movie. Even if they are Harry Potter fans. Or at least they do not want to as often as Chris Columbus seems to think they do.

Even if they did, it is hard to endorse a movie that used a bright and funny actress like Catherine Kenner so badly that I cringed every time I saw her onscreen. I get that the movie was not about her character -- but so what? The James Bond movies are not really about Q, the Indiana Jones movies are not really about Indy's mentor Marcus and the Harry Potter movies are not really about Hermione but all these supporting characters still get better treatment than Ms. Kenner's character does in this movie -- and she is playing the hero's mother. (I guess I already know what movie I am not renting for my mother this Mother's Day.)

But seriously, the one good point in the movie's favor is that it made me want to read the Rick Riordan novel that inspired it. After all, the movie does have some clever ideas in spite of itself -- it even manages to come up with a good way to work in a Lady Gaga song, which I did not think was possible -- and I suspect most of them came directly from the book.

Indeed, given the movie's premise -- a boy discovers that he is the son of an Olympian God and has to go on a quest to recover a fabulous talisman (the lightning of the title) to help rescue his mother -- I am surprised that the filmmakers had such trouble. Do not all kids think their parents are gods at some point in their lives? Do not all children like to think they are special? Do not a lot of modern children have issues with missing parents who may as well be mythological deities as far as the children are concerned? And do not most children who grow up have to learn to fight back against real-life monsters? Such monsters may not be as obvious as the Medusa or the Minotaur but they can still be formidable. For example, the mythological beings in Hollywood who keep making abysmal movies seem all too powerful nowadays. Where is the likes of Perseus or Hercules now that we need them?