Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief. Where to begin here. Percy Jackson's true fatal flaw is it's failure to create lasting teenage heroes. The market is of course dominated by Harry Potter for the last gazillion years and it's hard to imagine what might knock the king off of it's pedestal. Both the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson films are based off of books, naturally. Everybody knows who J.K Rowling... And I'm afraid I haven't met anyone who could name the author of Percy Jackson.

Percy Jackson starts as your "average" teenage boy. In the first shot, he is sitting motionlessly in a swimming pool, looking ponderously at the watery world around him: water happens to be the only place he can think. He is struggling with the life of your "average" teenage boy; evil teachers, homework, a less-than-perfect home life and girls. But everything changes when he gets his letter from Hogwarts.
Er, I mean, everything changes when he's told he's the son of the Olympian God of the sea; Poseidon. When he's accused of stealing the head God Zeus's thunderbolt for no reason at all and his world is turned upside down, it's up to him to rescue his mother from the Underworld and unite the Gods before a Olympian civil war breaks out and the world is destroyed. On the way, he is accompained by his Satyr Guardian and the half-blood daughter of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. A trio of teenage heroes, sound familar?

Harry, Hermione and Ron. Wait..

There's a certain extreme level of suspension of disbelief required here. The Olympian Gods are hardly an active pantheon in today's society, how do they feel about being on the backburner? They're about as popular as the Jedi religion. And if the Greek mythos in this film is real, why not Roman mythology? Or Norse? Or Egyptian? And I personally don't see Olympian Gods chilling around in togas in an invisible Olympus on the top of the empire state building, call me a revolutionary but I'd expect Gods to evolve as society does.

I'm a big fan of Greek mythology so the fun part, and only fun part, of this film for me was looking out for the mythologies that inspired parts of the film. Keep your eyes peeled for a minotaur, a hydra and a Uma Thurmun Medusa. Unfortunately, this film is filled with stars with increasingly awful scripts. Say hello to Uma Thurmun, Rosario Dawson and Sean Bean being crippled by horrific one liners.

It's a pointless film, based on a series of books that seem to have a lot more potential than this film gives them credit for. The first book actually has a reason for Percy to be accused of grand theft lightning bolt as opposed to throwing Percy into these situations with no more reason than to start the film's already unrealistic events. And don't get me wrong, reality doesn't always have a place in fantasy, but there has to be a magic there that makes viewers think 'I wish this would happened to me.'

Oh shi-!

A senseless film filled with bad acting from the stars, a corny script and a lack of real ambition. Combining modern society with a dead belief is an awful match for film because there's no real drive to make it work, it seems far more effective in the pages of a book and a reader's imagination. Don't let the flashy product placement and rampant (but admittedly cool) CGI distract you from what otherwise is a film ripe with unlikeable and unrelatable teenage protagonists. Where wanting to be the heroes of the story is the focal point of teenage fiction, this film falls completely short. I was rooting for Medusa.

Final Verdict: **. 2 Stars. One for "entertainment" value and i use that word lightly, the second for seeing Pierce Brosnan trot around as Chiron, famous mythological Centaur. You'll have to see it to believe it.

BAFTA 'Best Film' retro posters.

see all five here.

Award season is hotting up and these posters take the cake for being retro and awesome. Made by artist Tavis Coburn, at the source you can see all five nominations. They are, of course: Avatar, Up in the Air, Hurt Locker, An Education and Precious. See all five at the SOURCE. I'm personally hoping the artist will create more of these for a wider range of films, wouldn't mind hanging a few of these on my wall.