By the smoke monster, this movie was awful. I mean, I'd heard bad reviews, but the trailer showed me epic-looking monster battles, and that was what I went for! Un~fortunately, those epic battles are not so much epic as they are poorly directed and boring as all hell.

Warning: Here be spoilers.

So the movie begins with baby Perseus coming up from the ocean out of a casket with his (dead?) mother holding him, found by a fisherman. After checking up on Wikipedia, that basically follows his actual myth, so good for them. Aaaaand, that's about where the legitimacy of their mythmaking ends. First of all, they fall into the modern fault of calling the god Hades "evil and betrayed into ruling the underworld". This is WRONG. Anybody who knows mythology knows that KING of the underworld wasn't a half-bad job, and Hades didn't hate Zeus for getting the heavens himself. This immediately blows the whole plot into oblivion, as that entails Hades wanting to overthrow Zeus and manipulating humans to do so for him. Oh, and that little contrivance of gods needing human prayers to survive doesn't help.

So the scenes hop around about three or four times in the first five minutes, with the film contradicting itself easily in that short time, where Perseus' human father tells him he found him during a storm (it was clearly sunny when the casket was opened). They witness humans knocking over a massive statue of Zeus as a sign of defiance to the gods--and then watch them all get eaten by incubi sent up from the underworld. Oh, and then Hades kills Perseus' family. Perseus is clearly upset, but it's hard to sympathize when we've known his father for five minutes, haven't heard a word out of his mother and all his sister did was shriek incredibly annoyingly. Also, Perseus' character is a brick, so get used to not caring about him whatsoever.

He gets picked up by some militant fellows and brought into a town called Argos (Wikicheck says a real harbor city, make that two points for the research team) and carried up in the group to watch the soldiers mingle in a celebration for their "amazing" deed with the king. The queen comments on her own daughter being more beautiful than any goddess, and (lo and behold, a twist! /sarcasm) Hades pops in to set her straight. He unleashes a death vortex, sweeping the soldiers off their feet to their doom (Perseus is conveniently protected by Plot Armor) and then kills the queen. Oh, and then he mentions that he'll be sending out the Kraken in ten days, unless they sacrifice the princess, Andromeda. The plot mentions something about Hades originally creating the Kraken, but a quick Wiki says nothing about that being canon mythology (I may be wrong on this particular point).

Percy gets tossed in a prison cell, where a girl who for the life of me I can't remember her name (quick search calls her "Io") comes and gives him his life story, claiming he's the bastard son of Zeus and a queen (3 points for the research team), whose king then damned her to be executed and then tossed into the sea in a casket. During the flashback in one of the more ridiculous points of the movie, the king gets struck by lightning, which inexplicably turns him into an orc.

Back to Percy, he decides to go recruit all the soldiers remaining to kill the kraken. Somehow he gets out of his cell (this is NEVER explained) and garners a small troop (also never explained) of soldiers, only a few of whom are ever named, to help him. Yes, that's right, give your allegiance to this random stray! Oh, they also found out he's a demigod.

They all step outside and in come the two most developed characters in the entire movie, which is saying something, considering they have about ten minutes of screentime. Two mercenaries (I don't think they had names) volunteer to join the troop. I assume they're mercenaries, but never is it mentioned WHY they joined, be it for pay or honor or boredom or what. I think they were supposed to be comic relief, but in this movie where you can spot a joke coming fifty meters away and simply come away from it disappointed, it's easier just to try and take them seriously.

Next they all go wandering through the forest and come across Orc-king, who is now working for Hades! Hades wants him to kill Percy to take away the threat, you see, and Orc-king agrees since he hates Zeus too. Being an orc and having Hades give him a pat on the shoulder (as well as some unexplained magicbreathinfusion) gives the king ~INCREDIBLE COSMIC POWERS~, which include the ability to tear two soldiers who originally seemed like they were main-secondary characters to shreds before they had three lines. The first fight scene ensues, and Percy gets his forearm bitten! Then Orc-king gets his hand chopped off and they go to chase him as he flees.

Orc-king's hand turns into a scorpion, and his blood makes scorpions pop out of the desert. For some reason. So, here's that big fight against three giant scorpions the trailer showed! Exciting, right!? ABSOLUTELY NOT. The direction is AWFUL. The camera jumps around from battle to battle (the troop split up into several groups, each fighting a different scorpion), making it near-impossible to actually register how many scorpions there are, who's fighting what, and so on. It doesn't help that all of the soldiers look EXACTLY. THE. SAME. In short, the three scorpions get killed after trashing some random soldiers, with a (very) little help from Io who pops in. And then three more giant scorpions appear, bigger this time! From behind appears a group of Djinn--who I will admit, are pretty cool. Desert-dwelling sorcerers whose skin looks like charcoal and have glowing blue eyes, along with blue-fire magic powers.

So. Right about now, Percy's bite from His Orcliness decides to move up to his elbow, and turn into deadly poison. Percy goes to lie down in a tent, and that evening the Djinn comes to perform some magic on him, of ~course~ getting misunderstood and attacked. He defends himself, and talks some sort of language that sounds kind of like "Oaorg guragl agag laghjag agagh", which Io speaks fluently. The Djinn (who, surprise, goes unnamed as far as I remember) decides to help the humans fight the gods, and Percy walks out of the tent with his bite wound rewinding and healing.

Let's fast-forward a bit. Percy meets Zeus who talks to him about using his demigod powers to his advantage, asking for him to reconsider blah blah. Percy goes to meet witches to find out how to kill the kraken, there's a fight, they tell him to go get Medusa's head. They go to the River Styx and toss a gold coin in the water to draw out the ferryman, whose name (Charon) they actually get right. (4 points) Percy and Io have a pointless sexual tension moment in the rotted, probably smelly and infected underbelly of the boat, and then she fully reveals herself as a Mary Sue by telling everybody she can't enter Medusa's lair and thus can't fight her. (For those who don't know what a Mary Sue is, it's a character who's liked by everybody even though she shouldn't be, and for some reason cannot defend herself even though she CLEARLY demonstrates fighting abilities. Among several other criteria.) A note about the ferryman: apparently he's no longer a guy with an oar, but a skeleton creature growing out of the rotted wood of the ship. Charming. Also stupid.

At Medusa's lair: they go inside and find Medusa to be a snake-creature as well as having the head of snakes (as far as I know, Medusa was NOT in the possession of a twisted body, just her hair). Medusa proceeds to kill EVERYBODY EXCEPT PERSEUS (and Io who waited outside). Congratulations. You have just killed the entire supporting cast, leaving us with a brick and a Mary Sue. Any connections we had to the characters just went -POOF-, and the rest of the interest in the plot is void.

Percy cuts off Medusa's head, wraps it in a bag, and goes outside to find His Orcliness in the process of killing Mary Sue. Orc-king dies, Io dies, and then Percy finds a Pegasus and goes to fly off to Argos, since the eclipse is NOW. So goodie. We now don't even have her to keep us company. Oh, how's this for continuity: when we see Percy flying across the mountaintops on the Pegasus, charging for the city, the sun is in full view, even though it's been established twenty seconds ago that the eclipse is HAPPENING. Way to go, editors.

At the city, people have brought the princess to be offered to the kraken, she being okay with this as it will save the city. The kraken pops out of the sea and wrecks half the city, clearly being uncontrollable. Percy flies in from above, but has his bagged head stolen by some incubi, and we get a pointless aerial chase sequence. Really, the only purpose for it is to show off the graphics, because all that happens is some more innocent cityfolk get crushed. The kraken doesn't even draw closer to the princess.

So Percy gets back the head, tosses it in front of the kraken just as it's about to swipe the princess, and it turns into stone, collapsing, killing some people. Oh, you thought there was going to be an actual epic battle with the giant turtlebeast? Ha. Immediately afterward, Hades pops up, and Percy just tosses his sword at him after getting it infused with a sudden lightning bolt. Rather than killing Hades, however, it simply sends him back to the underworld. This is ridiculous. This movie apparently forgot that the gods of old -can actually be killed-, and rather easily if you're actually able to deliver the blow. Stab to the heart? DEAD.

So the kraken statue then collapses onto the structure holding the princess, forcing Percy to leap to the sea to save her, and they wash up on a shore. One thing happens between that and the chase that bugs me: Percy jumps from his pegasus from about a hundred feet up, into the building from which Andromeda is being sacrificed, crashing into a bonfire for a few seconds, and rolling out UNHARMED. COMPLETELY FINE. Demigod or not, he had to be hurting. He jumped into a pit of FIRE! The inconsistencies in his capacity for injury are really awful (considering how he's been on the ropes in almost all of his actual fights).

So Percy goes back to that old statue of Zeus, where the god himself comes and thanks him for his deeds, bringing up that bullcrap about needing human love to survive and blah blah, and then, in classic Mary Sue fashion, he RESURRECTS IO. Not Percy's recently-deceased and dearly-loved family! Not all the soldiers who died helping him! Nope. Just the useless girl who he maybe had a fleeting sexual interest in.

And then it ends.

This movie was awful. Terrible characters with personalities ranging from cardboard to brick to DEAD, a horrible disregard for proper mythology, and monster fights that were just BORING. There is no reason that three giant scorpions, Medusa, and a kraken should be boring, but they were. Perseus was one of the lamest main characters I've ever seen, and any secondary characters were too underdeveloped and died too quickly to gain any respect. The CGI wasn't even that good, at some points.

Final rating: 5/10, and two of those points are just for the Djinn and two mercenaries, the only solace I took out of this whole thing. Go give your neighborhood blue-eyed, charcoal-skinned sorcerer of the desert sands a hug today!

Front paged. Glad I skipped this one.

I'd say it's one of those movies you save for a rental to bash with your friends at home. xD

I was disappointed about that also...Still like the original one...It felt way to short...

Wasn't bad... for a movie my mom paid for to take me and my 12-year-old stepbrother too.

Now if I had spent my OWN money, that would be a different story.