Allegra Steck

At the heart of this novel was family, both blood and chosen, and by slashing off core characters and reducing others to cameos and caricatures, it left very little foundation save the palpable chemistry and obvious dedication of Taylor and Nick to bring Alex and Henry to life. But we didn’t love just Alex and Henry, we also loved June, and Raf, and Liam, and Cash and Leo and the manic chaos of Nora and Pez (NOT Percy) so this movie may never feel whole to many of us. It felt rushed and frenetic and yet still incomplete. Two words- Percy. Jackson. Did no one in the entertainment world remember the backlash that happened when they took a massively popular book with a rabidly dedicated fanbase and tinkered it into a completely different product? Shame on Amazon for completely underestimating not only the viewing audience of this genre, but also how deeply fans are affected when you let them down so hard. This is by no means a reflection on Matthew Lopez or Casey McQuiston, but a first-time director and a writer with their first novel obviously do not have the professional capital to demand that this *should* have been developed as a mini-series, the blame for this lands squarely on whoever in Amazon Project Development completely missed the ball on this. As I watched it, all I could think was, “oh, how great this COULD have been…” As much as I wanted to give this 1 star, I cannot because there are some parts that do not deserve that. Casting gets 5 stars, Taylor and Nick WERE our beloved boys. Sarah Shahi made Zahra’s race change forgivable. Uma is Uma. Cinematography was also really beautiful. Intimacy coordinator made the bedroom scenes really lovely. Amazon gets one star, for fan-baiting in showing the Cornetto scene in trailers but cutting it from the film, and also Screenwriting by including integral scenes like the Turkey Escapade and the LA karaoke night but diluting and altering them so drastically they were virtually irrelevant. Disney finally read the writing on the wall and wisely decided to re-do PJO the right way, finally. The opportunity was there to make this work as much of a cultural milestone on film as it was in print, our American Heartstopper or Sex Education, but instead we got a cute little movie. It appears Amazon doesn’t have the foresight or commitment that Netflix or Disney do, and it shows.