Literally Just Me Going Off, Part One

literallyjustmegoingofffeatured
literallyjustmegoingofffeatured

Author: Amelia Zeve

Photo: IMDB

When thinking about the content the world wants and needs, a monthly series from a Seattle University film major screaming into the void of the internet about the media that pissed her off doesn’t even make the list of the things the worlds needs right now. The world needs writers and thinkers who propel deep, meaningful thoughts into the world, surfacing the best elements of human nature with words that dramatically sculpt our view of the arts community.

But? Here we are anyways, with me, abusing my SU film degree and starting a monthly column where I plan to just rant about media that went wrong over the years (whether it was a badly done movie, a confusing TV show, another mishandled queer storyline, or even just general feeling of annoyance from a favorite book turned movie turned to s**t).

Part of my growing up process was realizing that I’m not the person who’s going to take films and analyze them deeply, who’s gonna watch Wreck It Ralph and walk away with an allegory to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. SO, instead of being fake deep and propelling my most well-composed thoughts into the relative darkness of the millions of blogs that already exist… I’m gonna do what I know instead, and rant about the things in the media that annoyed me. So (with love in my heart and no disrespect to any of these creators, because I know how hard it is to create media!!), join me as I (playfully… mostly) tear a random assortment of media to bits.

Hot (but mostly lukewarm) takes ahead.

Part One of Amelia Zeve’s 2018-2019 Column Series.

Many a night I wake up in a cold sweat, sheets kicked off and tangled around my legs, the moon hanging low in the sky and glaring at me like a reminder of everything that could have been. I pace the halls, unable to sleep, dark bags under my eyes holding the weight of the pain that the memories bring me. My roommates see me, they whisper. Sometimes, they’ll approach me, shooting each other worried looks as they gingerly put a hand on my back. “You’re dreaming about him again,” they say, eyes darting with fear in the half light, unable to help me through my pain. When I turn around and they see the pain reflected in the shadows of my face, they know before I even say it. “I was dreaming about him again. The man who stalks my dreams, what should have been one of the best moments of my life, turned into to one of the worst.” My voice is a low murmur when I can finally push the words out. “I was dreaming of him again… Percy Jackson.

Ok, maybe I’m being just a tad dramatic. But still. Don’t even TALK to me about the Percy Jackson movie franchise.

Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) swings at Medusa (Uma Thurman). Was Uma Thurman really in this? Or did we all just hallucinate the fact that she was? Photo: IMDB

All my friends, all my family, EVERYONE, knows that it’s a sore subject for me. You might think I’m exaggerating, or that it’s not realistic to think of a college student up late, losing sleep over the sheer betrayal of her favorite childhood book series… think again. The Percy Jackson movie franchise (if you can even call it that) was that bad.

Let’s rewind to my childhood, back before I knew what disappointment felt like (thanks to Chris Columbus, director of Percy Jackson And The Olympians: The Lightning Thief for making that feeling happen. You win as the second worst Chris Columbus in history.)

But, seriously, in order to unpack the pain associated with the Percy Jackson movie franchise, we really need to take it back. Take it back to when I cried on my tenth, eleventh (and maybe even my twelfth and thirteenth) birthdays when a satyr didn’t arrive to escort me to Camp Half Blood. My younger sister and I were so deeply invested in Percy Jackson that we made our own Camp Half Blood shirts, beaded our own necklaces, and ran wild in the Oregon forests with homemade bows and arrows and sticks sheathed as swords, looking for the entrance to the Labyrinth or a Greek monster of some sort.

Me (on the right) and my sister (on the left), circa 2010 – with Greta in her homemade Camp Half Blood shirt (and me wearing a shirt with a quail on it and holding an egg… why?)

We were so invested that one time, when my sister was probably ten or eleven, she came up to my mom one day and declared that she had ‘done the research’ and discovered that our mom wasn’t our actual mom, and that she was a true daughter of Athena. My mom nodded, horrified, and promptly started taking our family to synagogue on that following Sunday – the first time we actively participated in it since we were much younger – in hopes that my sister would start worshipping something, anything, other than the Greek gods. It may seem dramatic, but, honestly, it just shows the brevity of the passion my sister and I shared for the Percy Jackson book series.

So, imagine our joy when we heard that a movie was being created of our favorite book series – and a whole franchise, at that. My sister and I counted down the days until February 10th, 2012, the release date. The trailer looked pretty cool; goosebumps-inducing visuals, Logan Lerman as an obviously dreamy Percy… what wasn’t to love?

And so, on its release date, my whole family (nervous mom included) went to see the new Percy Jackson, expectations riding high, eager to find out: did dream team of Chris Columbus as director (director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, undeniably the fifth-best Harry Potter movie) and Craig Titley (writer of the live-action Scooby Doo movie and a film entitled “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on The Moon?”) deliver the movie we were all excited for?!

Absolutely. F******. Not.

Let me start by saying that the movie itself was a fun movie to watch, and my mom and my dad, who never read the books (or tried to live them like my sister and I did), loved it. They thought it was exciting and had a great story, and I don’t disagree with that. However, the issue with the story wasn’t the content of it – it was the fact that you could barely argue that it fit the same plot as the Percy Jackson books. It was like somebody got screenwriter Craig Titley (who, saying it again for emphasis, ONLY WROTE A FEW FILMS AND ONE OF WHICH WAS “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon?” AND THE OTHER WAS THE LIVE ACTION SCOOBY DOO!!!) high out of his mind, put him in a sensory deprivation chamber, and murmured the VAGUE plot of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief into his ear, and then left him there for a week. It felt like he crawled out of there, blinking into the sunlight, and then struggled to recount what he’d heard of the basic plot of Percy Jackson into a sad excuse for a script.

I would say he gets an award for trying, but, honestly? I don’t even think Titley gets that much on the way he screwed over the Percy Jackson storyline. There were so many differences from the book that they don’t even seem parallel. One of the only recurring motifs in Percy Jackson was Annabeth Chase’s stormy gray eyes and bright, curly blonde hair.  However, in the movies, they said ‘screw it’ and decided to cast Alexandra Daddario (who really did her best, given the circumstances of the movie) an almost inverted image of what Annabeth was supposed to look like in the movie – straight brown hair and CLEAR blue eyes. (Let’s also ignore the fact that a completely different actor, Alisha Newton—another brunette!!—played Annabeth in the second movie, while the rest of the cast remained unchanged. Why?! Actually… let’s just not even talk about the second Percy Jackson movie at all, which tried to clean up the mess the first one made but was so commercially successful that they couldn’t even warrant another movie.)

Annabeth in the books vs Annabeth in the movies. Who authorized this??? Photo: PercyJacksonMovies.com

Additionally, Annabeth in the books was a wisecracking, smart-but-cool 12-year-old who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Percy as a romantic option and focused more on the task at hand than on boys (Also, note: 12. Percy & his pals were supposed to be awkward teenage heroes, but in the movies they were stereotypically Cool 16-year-olds. WHY!!) Annabeth was a relatable hero for my entire elementary school class, someone we all looked up to, a hero we all had to denounce after the movie premiered and Annabeth’s entire plotline as anything other than someone to add a complicated romantic *spark* to Percy’s life was gone. It was so sad to watch a female character who was a role model to so many women in my life, myself included, be reduced down to Percy’s manic pixie dream girl, and a weak side character who’s forced to awkwardly cough up lines like “I have strong feelings for you, Percy… I just don’t know if they’re positive or negative yet.” RIP.

The movie changed everything from major plot arcs to character storylines and dumbed down what was an intricate and well-crafted plot into utter garbage, and I’m mad about it. But, it’s not just me – even author of the series, Rick Riordan, hates the movies and refuses to see them so it doesn’t change his perspective on his own characters. He even wrote a very comical open letter to a teacher who was talking about how she was screening the movie in class on Twitter, to which he responded “No. Stop. Please. No class deserves such a punishment. I mourn the loss of perfectly good classroom time.” Another memorable quip from his letter:

Now a plea: Please, for the love of multiple intelligences, DON’T show those “Percy Jackson” movies (ironic quotes intentional) in your classroom for a compare-contrast lesson or, gods forbid, a “reward” at the end of your unit. No group of students deserves to be subjected to that sort of mind-numbing punishment. The movies’ educational value is exactly zero. A better use of classroom time would be… well, pretty much anything, including staring at the second hand of the clock for fifty minutes or having a locker clean-out day.

Percy Jackson, if done well, could have been a franchise in the likes of Harry Potter (an international success of a film series that has spawned multiple book, movie and live theater productions because of it) or The Hunger Games (which is, in my opinion, the best book-to-movie adaptation that exists – Suzanne Collins as a screenwriter is a genius). But, it wasn’t (thanks for nOTHING, Craig Titley/21st Century Fox/Chris Columbus/every single person in pre- and post-production who contributed to the atrocity that was this film).

And so, maybe one day, I’ll be able to let go of the pain that the broken Percy Jackson franchise has left me, but… knowing me? Probably not.

https://youtu.be/X7AOeSz7y4g

AMELIA ZEVE | Petty, petty, petty, that’s Aries in me – Taylar Elizza Beth | KXSU Arts Reporter

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*

Tags: