Percy Jackson and the Wolfman of Shutter Island

As the title suggests, my first movie review posting actually covers three movies that I’ve recently seen.

*** Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
            This is one movie where my kids & I disagreed. I liked it quite a lot. I was entertained, and it fired my imagination. You’ve got your classic Good vs. Evil, Man vs. God, and Teenager vs. Adult confrontations; You’ve got your friendship, duty, loyalty, and self-sacrifice angles; Our heroes have to fight their way put of some situations, and think their way out of others; You even have hot women (Persephone, not Medusa!). What’s not to like? My kids have read the book; I haven’t. They like the book much better. I intend to read the book (soon), but I feel the same way I do about the Harry Potter movies, or the Lord of the Rings movies: You’ll never capture all of the nuances of a good book in a movie of finite length. You’ve got to treat them as completely independent works.
            For the record, we’ve seen the movie in the theaters twice. Maybe I’ll buy it on video, maybe I won’t. If I had “half stars” in my rating system, then this movie might have scored 3 and a half stars. But I don’t. So it didn’t.

** Wolfman
            Wolfman is not  a bad remake of a classic story. The special effects are first rate and the story is compelling, if disturbing. The problem I had with it is the level of gratuitous violence and extreme gore. I’m not squeamish at all – I used to be a New York AEMT and have worn my fair share of a variety of bodily fluids, most of which are intended to remain IN the body. I just think that the excessive mayhem is an unnecessary distraction in a movie that would be just fine without it. I felt the same way about Total Recall; the reality-within-reality angle was solid enough by itself that it didn’t need the elevated body count.

** Shutter Island
Like Wolfman, my rating for this is a little bit misleading. It’s actually an excellent movie, with great action, and a twisted story. The ending caught me totally off guard; I thought I had picked up on a twist with Leonardo DiCaprio’s “partner” and was totally fooled, as I’m sure was intended. While there’s a fair bit of violence, it isn’t gratuitous or especially gory.
Why the low rating? While pivotal to the story, the murder of children never never NEVER sits well with me. That doesn’t make it a bad movie; it just makes it one that I won’t see again. I must say that I especially liked the end of the movie, despite the twist, where Leonardo asks, “Is it better to die a good man, or to live as a monster?” I may not have gotten the quote quite right, but the meaning is correct. Certainly food for thought!