Reviewing Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters & The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

by tt stern-enzi

Just this past weekend, I caught the replay of NPR’s music review of Robin Thicke’s new album Blurred Lines with the majority of the critical attention focused on the title single and the ever-expanding controversy that Thicke has created for himself by preemptively suing the Marvin Gaye estate along with Parliament/Funkadelic over questions surrounding the similarities between the beats and vibes of his song and those of Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” and the Funkadelic track “Sexy Ways.” The copyright debate has been at the heart of rap & hip-hop from the start due to the heavy use of samples, which has always been a thorny issue in music. Hip-hop lifts actual elements from previously recorded material, but what about the judicious replaying of blues riffs that adorn the classics of rock and roll?

This somewhat philosophical argument has gotten remixed and reloaded in a fashion on the big screen these last few weeks of summer. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, from writer Rick Riordan’s bestselling series that modernizes Greek mythology for young readers, adopts the familiar sampling dynamic that dominates a subset of hip-hop culture. Riordan’s fantasies start with the foundations of the classic mythology – worlds in which the gods of Olympus have mixed and co-mingled with various humans and given rise to a race of demigods (half-human/half-godlings) who embark on perilous quests to save humanity from the wrath of the gods and their immortal enemies, while also struggling to connect with their divine parents.

It is the second part of this situation that would seem to set the stage for fascinating modern drama; children dealing with broken families, as a sociological bulwark, has taken over the psychology as no other aspect of the human condition. Unfortunately though, the movie adaptations of Riordan’s series thus far have largely ignored the fertile psychological grounds, instead fixating on the haphazard bastardization of the mythology and cheap CGI renderings of monsters, which appeals to the baser instincts of young audiences without inspiring them to leave the theater and go on their own journeys of discovery into the roots of the myths presented.

On the flip side, it should be noted that another fledgling teen fantasy series comes much closer. Based on Cassandra Clare’s bestselling young adult fantasy franchise The Mortal Instruments, the first adaptation, from director Harald Zwart (subtitled The City of Bones) traffics in the chaste romantics of the Twilight world of Stephanie Meyer and the ongoing quest for self-discovery that drives JK Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, but in this instance, the borrowing of the riffs feels more like the musical landscape created by a hip-hop group like The Roots who create their own beats and improvisational changes organically rather than relying on samples.

All of the standard young adult fantasy tropes are in place, but Clare’s world has a life and flavor all its own and the modern city that provides the setting never disappears from view. The New York of City of Bones gets remixed and reloaded with illusory gothic touches and extra-dimensional portals populated by vampires, werewolves, demons, angelic demon hunters, and pretty much everything else except zombies (drawing a quick laugh along the way), but it approximates a more modern re-imagining of the fantastic that surprisingly engages our sensibilities in ways that Sea of Monsters tries yet fails quite miserably to do.

It could simply be that Riordan’s chronicling of modern mythology aims to reach a younger audience and skews even younger than anticipated, while City of Bones has a truer sight line on its target, but, as the weekend box office results, highlight, that audience has wandered out of the fantastic forest in search of something more grounded in the rhythms of the real.