Performances also help sell the mother-son relationship, as Scobell and Kull create a believable sense of love between their characters. (I know I’d do anything for my mom!) So when Sally heroically sacrifices herself at the end of episode 1, it hits hard, and Percy’s retaliation and victory over the Minotaur is awesomely satisfying, especially when the CG and action choreography look as good as they do. A hero taking on a quest for personal reasons only to realize it’s destiny later on might feel like old hat to more seasoned members of the audience, but for young readers (and now viewers), it grounds the story in something relatable. That’s a crude way of saying that at the emotional center of these first two episodes is a mother, Sally Jackson (Virginia Kull) who will do anything to protect her son, and a son who will do anything to get her back. Throughout both halves of this two-episode premiere, though, one thing is certain – Percy Jackson is a mama’s boy. Even as someone who read the books and watched the previous movie adaptation, it was hard not to miss certain small details. It’s almost hard to keep up with small details are revealed in every line of dialogue. Fidelity to the books can have its downsides: Episode 2 speed-runs the Camp Half-Blood chapters of Riordan’s first Percy novel, The Lightning Thief, in order to keep up with the series’ frenetic pacing. A lot of this preamble is handled with voiceover narration it’s an efficient method of getting viewers up to speed that lends itself well to the source material (which is written in the first person), but ultimately feels out of place – through the first four episodes, this is the only time we hear Scobell in v.o. The first two episodes waste no time introducing us to Percy, his life up until this point, and the life he’s about to be thrust into. It’s reminiscent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, whose first line of dialogue is “This will begin to make things right.” There, it was a little more on the nose, but the same message rings loud and clear throughout the first two episodes of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, to mostly successful results. Striking visuals coupled with a warning – the first lines of the book read verbatim by our main character, played by Walker Scobell – creates immediate intrigue for new audiences and shows long-time fans there’s no reason to be afraid of this second attempt at bringing Rick Riordan’s Greek mythology-inspired novels to the screen (except maybe finding out that you yourself are a demigod – or a Half-Blood, in Percy Jackson parlance. From the first frame, Disney’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians lets the audience know that this time around, accuracy to the books is paramount.
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